Tim Tebow the baseball player has largely been laughed off by critics, some scouts and the general sporting public. Most believe it just some kind of publicity stunt for the former Heisman Trophy winner.
Don’t count one of the best players in Major League Baseball amongst those disbelievers though. You see, National League MVP Daniel Murphy has been training alongside Tebow this offseason and he has a very different take on his switch to baseball.
In fact, Murphy asserts that Tebow’s baseball career is far from a joke:
“This isn’t like a joke, this isn’t a publicity stunt. This is serious,” Murphy said in an interview with Marty Smith of ESPN.com. “They’re giving (Tebow) a job, and when they give you a job it’s at-bats that someone else is not getting.”
Still, what about Tebow’s prospects as a future MLB player? Apparently Murphy has a simple answer to that question as well and it involves Tebow and the word power.
“Power pays,” Murphy said. “Power arms, power bats pays. You’re never out of a ball game when you have power. That’s why it’s so unique so when somebody gets on base on a walk, a base hit and then somebody goes deep now that’s three, Three pointer right there, so power allows you to stay in the game for a long time and it’s so unique to find.”
Murphy apparently saw Tebow’s raw power on full display in offseason workouts. That alleged power wasn’t on display in the Arizona Fall League, which was the first real baseball action we saw Tebow compete in. He had no home runs and only three doubles according to a CBS Sports report.
To be fair, being thrown in to the AFL is about as brutal a way to start a professional baseball career as possible, especially for someone who hasn’t played a competitive game in 12 years. The CBS sports report also points out that Tebow did get better at the plate as the AFL stint went on.
In his last 11 games, Tebow was 9-for-32, good for a .281 average. He also drew eight walks in that time, so the on-base percentage was an excellent .425. That’s a small sample size, but he definitely closed on a high note.
With a workout partner like Murphy in the mix and his improvement over the final few weeks of the AFL, Tebow could head in to this spring with a much bigger chance of being something in baseball.
It certainly would be a slap in the face to all of those people who laughed at and buried Tebow for following this path. We’ll see how his first full season of minor league baseball goes, but it appears that signs are encouraging instead of laughable early on.
