The Loop
NBA player who was drafted as a pitcher by the Baltimore Orioles threw a 50 Cent-esque first pitch at the Brewers game
Dylan Buell
Like Kyler Murray, former Notre Dame two-sport star Pat Connaughton had a difficult decision coming out of college, though his two options were baseball and basketball rather than baseball and football. In each of their cases, many would argue baseball is the home-run decision (wink wink). It's the easiest on the body of those three sports and there is plenty of guaranteed money to be made, especially for Connaughton, who was a stud pitcher for the Fighting Irish. If you can go five innings and only give up a couple of runs in today's MLB, you might just make $10 million a year.
Both Murray and Connaughton opted to choose the other career path, and while there's no way of knowing if Murray made the right call yet, it looks like Connaughton did make the right call in choosing the NBA. Why? Check out first pitch at the Milwuakee Brewers game on Wednesday, which wasn't quite 50 Cent levels of bad, but it's up there:
If you can believe it, Connaughton was taken in the fourth round of the 2014 MLB Draft by the Baltimore Orioles, a franchise that continues to show it has no idea what it's doing.
We kid, we kid. Obviously, Connaughton was quite rusty, but the form and velocity are still there. The control, however, is not. He damn near killed that lady in the back. Major props to her for not flinching an inch. Connaughton was a great sport about it in his full interview afterwards:
Too excited, didn't properly warm-up, been a while since he's thrown off a mound, Bucks GM told him to take it easy, etc., etc. Not excuses, just facts. He is kind of preoccupied with the NBA Playoffs at the moment, so it's understandable. Connaughton could be an NBA bench player for life (and a damn good one at that), and we're still confident in saying he made the right decision.