Never Forget That My Coworker Deion Sanders Was An Awesome Baseball Player AND Rapper

Last night, it was officially announced that Deion Sanders is joining Barstool:

Pretty fucking amazing. I started dicking around on Barstool in July of 2012 and it's crazy to think about how far and wide the empire is expanded to since then. Back then it was basically 15ish people and now the company is 250+ from what I understand and a media conglomerate super power that ain't going nowhere that has A list athletes joining the mix. It will never ever not be crazy and admittedly a little overwhelming to me considering I was slinging freight full time and coaching/recruiting/promoting baseball players a few short years ago.

And yes, I say "coworkers" in jest as I fully acknowledge my actual rank on the company's totem pole.

~anyways~

Here's a little ditty that's neither about Jack nor about Dianne: back when I was young, I would sit and watch episodes of SportsCenter on repeat during the summer months. Legit would wake up and watch 10 episodes straight to the point where I knew what Stu Scott or Linda Cohn would call a highlight verbatim after a few episodes. A lot of you did the same thing. 

There is one highlight that will never leave my brain. I remember Deion Sanders hitting a triple when he was on the Reds and never in my life have I seen someone run so fast. He hit the ball to the left/center gap and it seemed as if he were standing on 3rd base in an instant. Like he teleported there or something. It is my earliest memory of an athlete making my jaw drop and the memory is burned into my brain to this day. 

This isn't the exact highlight, couldn't find it, but here's another triple he for reference. This is similar to what I was talking about in the paragraph above:

No WAY should that have been a 3 bagger. It wouldn't have been for Billy Hamilton, Luis Robert, Ronald Acuña or anyone else. But Primetime cruised into third and didn't even need to slide. Just pure, unadulterated athleticism. The dude was such a freak of nature athletically that he could basically walk into MLB and not just hold his own, but actually play the game at a very respectable level.

Baseball is not really a sport where pure athleticism matters that much. Sure, it's a great bonus and you don't see a lot of "bad" athletes excel at the game, but pure athleticism isn't completely necessary to be a top player in the game. Take Paul Konerko for instance; that dude didn't have one single explosive athletic quality about him. He was slow. He didn't have some rifle for an arm. He didn't possess otherworldly bat speed. He could hardly move more than a foot or two laterally

But he was awesome. He relied on brains, brains and more brains and did it to a tune of almost 439 career dingers and a place in the Hall of Really Good. 

Primetime was the opposite though and that's not to say he wasn't some cerebral player. It's more to say that he could focus on football the majority of his waking hours and then step onto a baseball field and use his god gifted tools to be a pretty damn good baseball player in spite of most of his focus being on his HoF NFL career. I mean the dude almost appeared in an NFL game and an MLB game in the SAME DAY. There is a small handful of people in history who could have done that, and Primetime was one of them. Just crazy town. 

These numbers are pretty damn good, all of that considered:

The hardest skill to hone in all 4 professional sports is hitting a baseball. A hitter has about 3 tenths of a second to recognize a pitch type, swing at it, put a barrel on it and hit it to where a fielder ain't. The adage is old and cliche, but if a hitter fails 70% of the time he's at the dish, he's an all star. 

To be as good as Primetime was at a game that is so exceedingly difficult will never not amaze me. 

Here's his highlight real, if it tickles your fancy: 

Oh yeah and people forget he was the best rapper of all time too. Not saying just saying: