Former Montreal Expos 18th Round Draft Pick Tom Brady Is Headed To His Eighth Super Bowl

Here’s a crazy thought — what if Tom Brady decided to play baseball instead of football? I’m sure most of you know, but there’s always a few people here and there who had no idea that Brady was actually taken in the 18th round of the 1995 MLB Draft by the Montreal Expos.

And it’s not really a Danny Ainge type situation where Brady was clearly better at one sport than the other at the time of being drafted. Fun fact: Celtics GM and two-time NBA champion Danny Ainge is the youngest player in Blue Jays history to hit a home run. Did you know Ainge played for the Blue Jays? Did you know he played in the MLB at all? I know, right? Wild stuff.

But it’s still crazy to think that at one point, going the MLB route was a very real possibility for hands down the greatest quarterback who ever lived, who also just booked his eighth trip to the Super Bowl last night at the age of 40. Sure, Brady was taken higher in the NFL Draft than he was in the MLB Draft — a sixth rounder for football versus an 18th rounder for baseball — but there’s more to it than that.

First, Brady was taken out of high school in the MLB Draft and out of college in the NFL Draft. That’s a huuuuge difference. And the only reason why he went so late in the MLB draft was because everybody knew that he was going to play football at Michigan. Regardless of that being the universal belief, the Expos still offered Brady second round money to entice him to choose baseball over football.

Of course, he didn’t and the rest is history and all that, but looking back on that crossroads in his life when baseball was a legitimate option, it begs the question of how legitimate of an option was it? According to the GM who scouted him as a high school player and drafted him as a catcher, it was pretty damn legitimate.

“I think he could have been one of the greatest catchers ever,” says Malone, who holds the remarkable distinction of drafting Brady five years before Bill Belichick. “I know that’s quite a statement, but the projections were based on the fact we had a left-hand-hitting catcher, with arm strength and who was athletic. … But his first love was football.”

“He was a very athletic young man. A big kid who had a great face, a major league face. Yes, we looked at the face,” Malone says. “He had an athletic, strong body, but there was room for development. As a scout, one of the first things you look at is just the body—the type of body, the athleticism and what kind of face does he have. I know that sounds a little strange.”

Couple things here — I think we can all agree that Brady has a “major league face” now, but back then? Not so much. Sorry, Tom. And second, that’s Kevin Malone the former baseball general manager, not Kevin Malone from The Office.

Malone was Derek Jeter before Derek Jeter was Derek Jeter, at least from a baseball executive perspective. It was his duty to take that 1994 Expos team that everyone says would’ve won the World Series that year had it not been for a season-ending strike that led to the World Series being cancelled.

The Expos had the best record in the majors when that season was cut short. No World Series was ever played, the team was promptly gutted for payroll reasons, and they never came remotely close to that kind of success ever again. As a result, the Expos were plucked from Montreal, plopped down in DC and renamed the Washington Nationals. Malone stepped down the year after the team’s fire sale, and it’s quite possible that he was even more hated at his next stop as the Dodgers GM than as the Expos GM, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anywho, talent evaluators saw something in Brady as a baseball player, enough so to put him on the same level as a second round draft pick. Stating the obvious, plenty of second rounders have gone on to become great players in Major League Baseball, but I guess it’s fair to say that Brady might have made the right choice. It’s worked out somewhat.

And even though Brady didn’t sign, he still holds the distinction of being one of the last active players to have been selected by the Montreal Expos. You’ve got Brandon Phillips, Ian Desmond, and…wait for it…Thomas Edward Patrick Brady Jr., the greatest quarterback in NFL history. But now I’m curious — had Brady chosen baseball over football, might he have saved the entire Expos franchise? Well, it’s hard to say.