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The Atlanta Braves are reportedly considering signing former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow to a minor league contract after meeting with him following his workout for MLB teams earlier this week.

Pedro Gomez of ESPN reported Saturday that sources confirmed the Braves have “definite interest” in the outfielder, who last played organized baseball in 2005. Tebow put his baseball skills on display for 27 of the league’s 30 teams Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Josh Peter of USA Today said there were mixed reviews after the session, with one American League scout saying: “It was a complete waste of time. It was like watching an actor trying to portray a baseball player. He tried. He tried. That’s the best I can say. He is crazy strong, and could run well in one direction, but that’s it. He only had one good throw of all his throws.”

Another scout, this one from the National League, provided a more favorable assessment: “Better than I expected, to be honest. … That’s a big dude, for as fast as he can run. The power was impressive, but I wish he could have translated it maybe a little better [against live pitching].”

According to Jon Morosi of the MLB Network, Tebow had one hit in six plate appearances against former MLB reliever Chad Smith in the workout.

The 6’3″, 260-pounder has always had a unique blend of size, power and athletic ability, but it didn’t translate to consistent on-field success in the NFL. Now he’s 29 and trying to make the transition to baseball at a time when most players are already enjoying their peak seasons.

Even the most optimistic outlook would suggest he needs at least one full season in the minor leagues to adjust to live pitching. It’s unlikely he’ll ever make a significant impact in the majors, even if he’s signed.

That said, the Braves would be a nice landing spot. They already own one of the league’s top five farm systems, according to Bleacher Report’s Joel Reuter. It also helps that Atlanta has a big following throughout the Southeast, where the Florida Gators QB rose to superstardom.

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LOS ANGELES — Where this Tim Tebow Fantasy Camp ends is not in the major leagues. Not in Yankee Stadium, or Fenway Park, or heck, whatever they’re calling the ballpark in Oakland these days.

But judging from a sunny Tuesday showcase workout at the University of Southern California, he’s going to be swinging away for quite some time.

Why is he picking up a baseball bat for the first time in more than a decade at the wizened old age of 29?

“Because I love it,” he said after working out for two hours in front of representatives of 28 major league clubs. “Since I was four or five years old, the two things I’ve loved the most are, one, playing quarterback with 10 guys looking at you and depending on you to win a ballgame and, second, hitting a baseball.”

What you can see, easily, is this: an organization taking a flier on Tebow, sending him to Class A or even Double-A, because he’s an athlete, and he’s way strong, and he will be a positive role model to young prospects. And, if that minor league team happens to play in SEC territory, can you imagine the ticket sales? Cha-ching!

“I think he put a lot of work into it,” one veteran scout said after watching a well-practiced Tebow run a 60-yard dash, throw from right field, take fly balls in center field and hit for some 40 minutes. “But he doesn’t do anything easy.

“He doesn’t run easy. He doesn’t throw easy. He doesn’t hit easy. His bat is strong, but he had trouble making adjustments.

“I can see someone giving him a chance to go to spring training and maybe Double-A, but then you’re taking at-bats away from some 23-year-old kid.”

Tebow hasn’t played competitive baseball since his junior year of high school. Remember when folks thought Alex Rodriguez would find it impossible to produce in 2015 after sitting out one full season because of his suspension for performance-enhancing drugs? That was elementary compared to this.

The last time Tebow swung a bat in a baseball game, George W. Bush was president of the United States. It was 2005.

Which is probably why, in some ways, he exceeded expectations in front of the 46 scouts (some organizations sent multiple representatives) at Rod Dedeaux Field. The Chicago Cubs and Oakland Athletics were the only two clubs to pass.

“I can tell you this: He’s way further advanced than I thought he’d be at this stage,” one veteran (and previously skeptical) scout said. “Obviously, he’s crude. No question the biggest thing is his bat.”

Another said: “He shows power. He shows all the tools. He can run. He can throw. He has raw arm strength. It’s just not transferred to baseball.”

Tebow started his day with a 60-yard dash, clocked somewhere between 6.6 and 6.8 seconds, depending on which scout’s stopwatch you believed. On the MLB scouting scale that runs 20 to 80, it was a solid 60.

Though, as one scout noted about the sprint, which ran from center field toward the left field line, “The field is crowned, and they were smart; they had him run downhill.”

Next he took balls in right field, and for a guy who spent so much time at quarterback, he was not a natural with the throws. There were only a few ropes and several loopy throws. Fielding one bouncer in right, Tebow awkwardly took three shuffle steps before firing a throw to third base.

“He throws like a quarterback,” one of the scouts said. “You throw a football different than you throw a baseball. As a quarterback, you don’t spread your feet, and you throw the ball up. In baseball, you throw the ball down. Throwing to third, he should have had a longer stride.

“His arm strength is probably below average. Then again, a lot of guys playing in the big leagues throw below average.”

Which pretty much brings us to why both Tebow and the scouts were here: hitting. Tebow is enormous—6’3”, 255 pounds and sculpted, which was eye-poppingly accentuated by the spandex workout clothes he was wearing. The biography sheet distributed by his agent noted his low, 7.3 percent body fat.

He took several rounds of batting practice, crushing several baseballs well over the fence and into the trees over the Dedeaux Field scoreboard in right field. There was the big-time power that makes scouts salivate.

Then he took live batting practice against a couple of former big league pitchers, David Aardsma and Chad Smith. Here, he had no idea what was coming—fastball? slider? changeup?—and here was where he struggled. Batting left-handed, he swung late on several fastballs, fouling them away down the third-base line. And he swung way early on several changeups, sometimes fooled enough that he finished his swing with one arm.

Best-case scenario, he’s a project. A very big project. But former major league catcher Chad Moeller, who has been working as Tebow’s private tutor since May, spoke of how far his pupil already has come in three months. The biggest challenge, Moeller said, is pulling the bat out of the workaholic Tebow’s hands.

“Taking away his football mindset of more, more, more,” Moeller said. “At a certain point, you stop getting benefit.”

That statement speaks volumes: What’s going on, quite literally, is Tebow is trying to make up for lost time.

In many ways, he is still a neophyte baseball player trapped in a football player’s body. He acknowledges his knee-jerk reaction to work harder and more often than everybody else, and he held up his callus-covered batting-practice hands as proof.

His goal, he said, isn’t simply to make the big leagues but “to have a career in the big leagues.”

To that end, his agent, Brodie Van Wagenen, said representatives for five clubs stayed after the workout to meet with Tebow and get a feel for him personally. What they no doubt saw was a friendly, earnest guy who is drop-dead serious about making this baseball thing work.

Van Wagenen said his ideal scenario would be for Tebow to agree to a contract and start playing with an organization’s instructional-league team by late September. That way, he could quickly begin to assimilate into baseball, continue the process of refining his skills that started this summer and then perhaps play winter ball before heading to spring training. One source, in fact, told B/R that Tebow already has a slot this winter playing in Venezuela.

As for Tebow, he’s just working it one day at a time. And Tuesday, he copped to a ton of nerves.

“At the NFL combine, you’ve got your body of work for four years,” he said, not to mention dozens and dozens of other players performing for the critics. “Here, you haven’t seen me play baseball since I was 17 years old.

“There was a lot of pressure, a lot of nerves.”

Still, he said, it was easy to put aside the fact his baseball future was at stake Tuesday because baseball “is something I love and am passionate about, but it’s not my identity. When you have that mindset, it helps you to be free.”

His identity lately, since the Philadelphia Eagles sent him packing during training camp last summer, has been as a college football analyst for ESPN and the SEC Network and as a contributor to ABC’s Good Morning America. Besides, as he noted, he’ll be taking a pay cut to follow this baseball dream.

But while his motives seem pure, the game itself decides who stays and who goes. There will be a team that will sign him. Always, in these cases, there is someone. Some think that team will be the Atlanta Braves, given the combination of their rebuilding program (Tebow can be a positive role model), need for sluggers (see the trade for Matt Kemp) and location of many of their minor league affiliates right near the epicenter of the SEC.

Whoever it is, Tebow’s bat will dictate the rest from there. It’s all about whether he can hit as a corner outfielder. If he can’t, the Denver Broncos, New York Jets, New England Patriots and Eagles will not be the only professional clubs to say, “See ya.”

At this point, the most impressive thing in his game is his stamina (stronger men would have wilted before he was finished hitting after 40 minutes Tuesday) and his attitude.

“I want to be someone who pursues what I believe in, what I’m passionate about,” Tebow said. “People who ask what if you fail, guess what? I don’t have to live with any regrets.”

As far as life philosophies go, it’s difficult to argue with that.

And as far as hardball realities go, it’s also difficult to argue with the scout who told me, “The percentages obviously are against him making the major leagues. But he is Tim Tebow, and if he makes it, it would not surprise me.

“But it’s going to be a hell of a sacrifice for him for the next two years if he’s going to make it.”

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

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

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.

Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com