Long before Shedeur Sanders was a Big 12 Offensive Player of the Year or a fifth-round pick learning the Browns’ quarterback room, he was a kid standing in the outfield during Little League games, bored out of his mind. Given who raised him, that’s not exactly a surprise. Deion Sanders was a two-sport pro himself, and both of his sons grew up playing baseball right alongside football.
Shedeur actually stuck with it long enough to have a real answer for why he quit, and he laid it out during an appearance on Maxx Crosby’s show, “Deflected.” The story starts with his younger brother Shilo on the mound, getting hit around, and Shedeur losing patience out in the field.
“Shilo was pitching. I’m telling my, they smacking this ball. Mind you, I gotta play in the outfield right now. I start leaning on the gate,” Shedeur said. “He start yelling at me, my dad. He was like, ‘Hey, don’t you ever disrespect this game, the game of baseball. Do you not know what this has done?'”
That’s about as Deion a reaction as it gets, treating a kid leaning on a fence like he’d insulted the sport itself. Shedeur wasn’t backing down from it either, at least not in the moment.
“I’m like, ‘Do you not see how they hitting this ball, bro? You feel me? Like, do you not see this? Like, I know you feel some type of way. This is Shilo, this is his brother, this is your son. They sitting here abusing this ball.’ And then, like, from then on, I think that was my last year. The love of the game just left from me,” Shedeur added.
It’s a small story, but it tells you plenty about how that household operated. Even a Little League outfield came with real standards attached, and disengaging for a few innings wasn’t something Deion was going to let slide, son or not.
Baseball’s loss turned out to be football’s gain. Shedeur torched the Big 12 for 4,134 yards and 37 touchdowns in his final season at Colorado, and even after losing the Browns’ starting job to Deshaun Watson this preseason, he’s shown enough as a passer to make it clear he picked the right sport. Whatever frustration got him pulled off a fence fifteen years ago, it’s hard to argue he didn’t put it somewhere useful.