Meet the guy who helped talk Tom Brady out of a career in baseball

The first time F.P. Santangelo met Tom Brady, he wasn’t Tom Brady, Super Bowl MVP. He was Tom Brady, teenager standing at an athletic crossroads.

Twenty-four years ago, the Expos took Brady in the 18th round of the 1995 MLB draft out of Junipero Serra High, and the former Expos utilityman had been tapped to serve as Brady’s chaperone for an afternoon at Candlestick. Draft picks didn’t usually get the call to hang out with major leaguers, but Montreal was trying to woo him away from football, and the thinking was taking BP on the field might be the sort of thing to sway Brady.

Brady was a legit baseball prospect — Expos scout John Hughes told me a few years ago Brady was an “above-average player with a good bat who could hit for power. Coupled with his makeup, those types of guys aren’t easy to find. That made him a nice prospect.” Here’s some video of Brady as a high-school ballplayer — he’s wearing No. 21.



Santangelo, who is now the TV analyst for the Washington Nationals, recalls Brady making an impression as a ballplayer. But when he found out Brady was ticketed to play quarterback at Michigan, things changed pretty dramatically.

“We had just found out he enrolled in Michigan for the spring session, and we started talking to him,” said Santangelo, who was born in Michigan and has a family with deep roots in everything maize and blue. “Well, once we found out he was going to be the University of Michigan quarterback, all bets were off. One of the guys was saying, ‘Dude, these are the Expos. Go play quarterback at Michigan.’ He was low-keying it — ‘I’m fourth- or fifth-string right now.’

“Most major leaguers are frustrated high school football players, so we had a legit quarterback who was going to go to Michigan in front of us, everybody started talking to him. I remember Chris Widger and Mike Lansing telling him to get the hell out of here and go play football. ‘Are you kidding me? Go play football. You don’t want to have to ride the buses in the minor leagues.’"

According to Santangelo, there were others who told Brady he should look elsewhere because of the state of the franchise.

“There were some people who were frustrated with the direction of the organization at the time who were saying, ‘Come on, man. This organization isn’t for you. Go to Michigan, play quarterback, go be a star.’ ”

In the end, Brady went to Michigan, and you know the rest of the story. The quarterback has frequently joked about his baseball background, wondering what might have been. Meanwhile, Hughes and Santangelo are footnotes to a history-making decision that impacted a pair of sports.

“I remember thinking after his second Super Bowl win that if I pushed him and he ended up in baseball, I could have ruined this guy's great football career and changed the history of the NFL forever,” Hughes said with a laugh.

“Funny thing was, I don’t really remember any of this until, like, his second Super Bowl,” Santangelo said. “Hughes called me up and said, ‘Remember that kid who was going to go to Michigan and play quarterback? That was Brady!’

“You know what? I’ve never met Brady since then. I mean, I met the 18-year-old kid. But for the story to sort of come full circle, I’d like to see him again. To meet the greatest QB of all time now after I met him as an 18, 19-year-old kid? That’d be fun.”