Tim Tebow could be playing for the Anaheim Angels of Anaheim right now instead of possibly holding a clipboard for Tom Brady on the New England Patriots' sidelines (if the controversial lefty quarterback even makes the final cuts).
The Halos' revelation comes courtesy of Tom Kotchman, the former Angels scout, minor league coach and father of onetime Angel first baseman Casey Kotchman.
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Tom Kotchman is a colorful fellow you may recall from another eye-opening revelation about Angels baseball concerning the “Rally Penis”:
The Rally Penis Puts the “Ball” in Angels Baseball
Kotchman is now a Florida-area scout for the Boston Red Sox, and he was showing off some draftees at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg Tuesday when he explained how Tebow, who won the Heisman Trophy at the University of Florida in 2007, got away.
“We wanted to draft him, but he never sent back his information card,” says Kotchman (via WEEI, a Boston sports talk radio station). “Either it never got to him, or … It's Tim Tebow. Who knows if it got to him, and if it did we just never got it back. Otherwise were were going to take him.”
As a junior playing left field for Nease High School in Ponte Vedra, Fla., Tebow hit .494 with four home runs while leading his team to the final four of the state playoffs. He didn't play baseball as a senior, instead enrolling at Florida during the spring to jump-start his football career.
“He had a strong arm and had a lot of power,” observed Stephen Hargett, who has worked with Kotchman as a scout with the Angels and now the Red Sox. “If he would have been there his senior year he definitely would have had a good chance to be drafted. He had leverage to his swing. He had some natural loft. He had some good power. He was a good athlete. He had had enough arm for that position. He was a left-handed hitter with strength and some size.”
Standing 6-foot-4 and weighing 200 pounds, Tebow definitely passed “the body test” when compared to the average junior or senior in high school standing 5-foot-10 and weighing 160 pounds,” according to Hargett.
“It was just easy for him,” the scout recalled of Tebow. “You thought, if this guy dedicated everything to baseball like he did to football how good could he be?”
And given Tebow's on-field acknowledgements to the DH in the sky, would there be a more fitting Angel?
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.