In his prime, Deion Sanders was a prolific multi-sport athlete who tried to master both football and baseball at the same time. And, while he would go on to make the NFL Hall of Fame, his baseball career was just solid, but nothing special by itself.
It turns out, Sanders’s difficulty playing the sports matched the numbers. On the Club Shay Shay podcast with Shannon Sharpe, Sanders said that football was the “easiest” sport he played, which included basketball and track and field, while he found baseball to be the hardest.
“That ball does some things to you,” he said about the sport. “Any sport where you can fail 7 out of 10 times and become great, and make $2-300 million, that’s a hard sport.”
However, Sanders said the difficulty of the sport is what kept him coming back. The former outfielder said he couldn’t stop trying to perfect baseball.
“I love challenges, and I could not master it,” he said. “It frustrated me because I hate to lose and I hate not mastering something that I know if I just had more time I could.”
In his MLB career, Sanders played for nine seasons and slashed .263/.319/.392 with 39 home runs and 186 stolen bases. Considering Sanders never played a full season in the league due to his football commitment, it’s impressive that he played this well in what was his second sport.
