Kuzul

The man who drafted Mike Trout had his sights set on Tim Tebow, too.

True story.

Tebow, who says he will conduct a workout for all 30 Major League Baseball clubs later this month, was a year removed from becoming the first sophomore in history to win the Heisman Trophy while playing quarterback at the University of Florida.

Eddie Bane, now a special assignment scout for the Boston Red Sox, was the scouting director of the Los Angeles Angels.

“Tom Kotchman is probably the best area scout in the country, and probably more than any area scout, he can always get information on anybody available,” Bane says of the preparation leading up to the 2009 MLB draft. “He wanted to get information on Tebow, and he couldn’t get it.

“They hid that phone number better than any phone number has ever been hidden. Probably, it was Urban Meyer (Florida’s coach at the time). You couldn’t get any info on Tim Tebow. As hard as we tried, and a couple of other teams did, too, we couldn’t get the info. You can’t draft anybody unless you have info.”

What Bane is speaking of is the information needed to fill out the draft cards that clubs file with MLB before every draft. Height. Weight. Contact information.

“You can always get a phone number and then find something, at least talk to somebody about a kid,” says Bane, who starred at Arizona State University then played three seasons for the Minnesota Twins in the 1970s before launching his scouting career. “Usually, almost always, you can talk to the young man. And you couldn’t get it with Tebow. He was too big a deal in Florida.

“We laughed about it. We understood.”

What piqued the Angels’ interest in Tebow at the time was, of all things, a scouting mission that led Kotchman to an unexpected meeting with Tebow.

“I happened be at a game at the University of Florida, the baseball team, and he was throwing out the opening pitch,” Kotchman, who now manages Boston’s rookie-level Gulf Coast League team in Fort Myers, Florida, says. “Most people throwing the first pitch come up to the plate a little, but he stood 60 feet, six inches away, on the mound, and he happened to throw a wild pitch.

“He threw it hard, but he told the catcher to go get the ball, he wasn’t going to be satisfied with that. Then he threw a bullet right down the middle of the plate.

“And you saw a couple of things: A 6’4”, physical guy. You saw attributes from the football field, a competitor; he wasn’t satisfied with his first pitch. He made an adjustment and throws a perfect strike with some velocity.”

Under Bane, the Angels drafted Trout (2009); All-Stars Jered Weaver and Mark Trumbo (2004); Peter Bourjos (2005); and Tyler Skaggs, Patrick Corbin, Garrett Richards and Randall Grichuk (also 2009). Many in the industry regard that ’09 draft as the best in at least the past 25 years.

For that, you’d think Bane would have been rewarded with, say, a lifetime contract. Or a Corvette. Or maybe, at least, a fruit basket.

Instead, he was fired in 2010 as a fractured and dysfunctional organization raged on under owner Arte Moreno.

Kotchman still vividly remembers watching Tebow throw that ceremonial opening pitch. Or, rather, two pitches. It was enough to stoke the imagination.

“Maybe I should have put a radar gun on him,” Kotchman jokes. “You see him do that, and then to draft a guy you’ve got to get all of his legal information. I just never received the information card back.

“Who knows? I would bet the house that Eddie Bane would have drafted him had we gotten that information card back.”

In fact, Bane and the Angels eventually did draft a different quarterback: Jake Locker, from the University of Washington, in the 10th round in 2009. They signed him for $300,000.

“We were battling with [then-Washington head coach Steve] Sarkisian with what we could do, when he would be available for us,” Bane recalls. “We would ask Jake, ‘Do you want to fly down to Tempe [Arizona, the Angels’ spring base] so you can work out with our guys?’ But if he had a meeting with his offensive line, he wasn’t available. He was hard to get. I had known Steve Sarkisian from some other stuff.”

The reason Bane and many other clubs take a flier on quarterbacks is simple: Generally speaking, they’re athletic, smart and have good arms.

“It’s something where you wouldn’t draft him until Round 30 or 40 or 50, it could have been your last pick,” Kotchman says. “But there was definite interest in drafting Tebow to see where it would lead.

“You don’t know. Let’s say he hurt his leg in football. Throwing and pitching, you can correlate a little to a catcher converting to become a pitcher. Troy Percival was a catcher for me in Boise, Idaho, in 1991 and obviously went on to have a great career as a closer.”

Under that strategy, the Angels drafted University of Louisville quarterback Browning Nagle, who would go on to play for the New York Jets, Atlanta Falcons and Indianapolis Colts, in the 51st round of the 1991 draft. Nagle had played high school baseball at Pinellas Park High School in Largo, Florida, Kotchman’s area when he was scouting for the Angels at the time, but did not play baseball at Louisville.

The list of bridge-building opportunities from MLB clubs to quarterbacks is star-studded. Most recently, Russell Wilson of the Seattle Seahawks, who did not play baseball in college, has spent time in the past few spring trainings with the Texas Rangers.

When current Diamondbacks scout Bill “Chief” Gayton was with Colorado, the Rockies took Michael Vick as an outfielder in the 30th round in 2000.

“He hadn’t played baseball since junior high, I don’t think he ever played in high school, but he was an athlete,” Gayton says, chuckling as he recalls a legendary story involving a visit to Vick’s house by Danny Montgomery, currently a special assistant to Colorado general manager Jeff Bridich but formerly the Rockies’ East Coast cross-checker (a high-ranking scout acting as the central clearinghouse through which all of the area scouts’ information flows).

Montgomery, it seems, was at Vick’s house when a contingent of West Virginia football coaches came visiting, and as they entered through the front door, Montgomery was scrambled out the back door. The Rockies were afraid that if West Virginia discovered they were trying to woo Vick to play baseball, the Mountaineers would work hard to box them out. Regardless, Vick never signed.

Gayton also was with the New York Yankees in 1995 when they drafted Daunte Culpepper in the 26th round. Though Culpepper went on to have an 11-year NFL career with the Minnesota Vikings, Miami Dolphins, Oakland Raiders and Detroit Lions, he never played a day of baseball—despite the Yankees’ efforts.

Culpepper was from Ocala, Florida, a place where late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner kept some of his horses.

“I was in the room that draft day,” Gayton says. “They wrote his name really small on the draft board, because they knew George Steinbrenner always looked over the board. He came in that day, looked and said, ‘Who’s this?’”

Bill Livesey, the highly respected talent evaluator who oversaw the Yankees’ 1992 draft in which the club picked Derek Jeter, answered: “Mr. Steinbrenner, sir, that’s Daunte Culpepper, the football player out of Ocala. He’s going to be a difficult sign….”

Sometimes, it’s all in the approach. Challenged like that, instead of asking his baseball people what they possibly could have been thinking by drafting a football player, Steinbrenner stayed calm.

“It never hurts to take guys late,” Gayton says.

But, in Tebow’s case, this late?

More than a decade after he last played baseball, during his junior year at Allen D. Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Florida, in 2005 (watch him homer below, courtesy of Chris Fischer of Tampa Bay’s WTSP)? He didn’t even play as a senior because, by then, he was already at Florida, prepping for his college football career.

And as far as that information card the Angels or anybody else needed, remember, there weren’t a lot of early details regarding Tebow because he was home-schooled before college.

Jaymie Bane, Eddie’s son, was one scout who saw him play baseball in high school.

“The athleticism stuck out,” remembers Jaymie, who was an area scout for the Chicago White Sox at the time and currently scouts for the Red Sox. “He looked like he was 6’9” in the outfield compared to the other kids. He looked like a much older kid playing with younger guys.”

Now, if Tebow does follow through with his workout later this month and finds a team to sign him, he literally will be a much older kid playing with younger guys in some minor league outpost.

“There are so many teams tanking right now, you never know,” one veteran scout says. “Somebody might take [a] chance.”

“This may sound like a publicity stunt, but nothing could be further from the truth,” Brodie Van Wagenen, co-head of the baseball division at CAA Sports, said in a statement Tuesday. “I have seen Tim’s workouts, and people inside and outside the industry—scouts, executives, players and fans—will be impressed by his talent.”

Van Wagenen continued: “Tim’s tool set is real…He knows the challenges that lie ahead of him given his age and experience, but he is determined to achieve his goal of playing in the major leagues.”

Former slugger Gary Sheffield also weighed in Tuesday, supporting at least part of the tool-set idea:

“As much grief as he’s gotten, this guy is an unreal athlete,” Jaymie Bane says. “And he’s huge. We talk about [Miami’s] Giancarlo Stanton being a physical presence, you put him in [an NFL locker room], he’s the size of a kicker. You put Tebow in a baseball uniform, it is a little different.”

“For me, if he was pitching it would be an easier transition for him than trying to become a position player,” Kotchman says. “Not that I’ve ever bet, but I would not bet against Tim Tebow on anything. I’ve never met him, but as a person who watches sports and has scouted, you see that competitive stuff. Plus, there’s nothing phony about him. He’s a guy you want on your side.

“If he did get a minor league contract with somebody, what an example for young players to be around. Not only as an athlete and competitor, but more importantly as a role model. When you’re in the spotlight that he was in, be it at Florida or in pro football, has anyone ever come up with anything on this guy negative? I’ve never heard it. What better example could you want?”

So we’ll see where this all leads. Seven years after the Angels seriously considered drafting him, Tebow is a free agent looking to make a career change.

All these years later, Eddie Bane laughs.

“They wanted to protect their guy,” he says of the Gators. “I don’t blame them. He was a superstar college football player and they wanted to make sure nobody was going to take him away.

“They didn’t want anything to happen to Tim Tebow. He was superhuman. Still is, from everything I’ve read about him.”

As for Kotchman, as he manages the Red Sox kids in the state once electrified by Tebow, he wonders whatever happened to that old information card that he worked so hard to deliver.

“I’d be curious if he ever got it,” Kotchman says. “If he would have filled it out and I’d have gotten it back, Eddie Bane would have drafted him.

“That’s one person, whether we signed him or not, you’re proud to put your name next to.”

Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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