Trace Russell Wilson's baseball road, Orioles to Yankees
Two drafts, two minor league towns, a Rule 5 pick and one spring training at-bat in pinstripes. Here is the whole baseball career, and the pitcher who ended it.
On March 2, 2018, in the bottom of the fifth inning of a spring training game, the Yankees sent a pinch-hitter up in place of Aaron Judge. It was Russell Wilson, then the Seahawks quarterback. The pitcher was a young Braves lefty named Max Fried. Wilson struck out swinging on a 93 mph fastball, and that was the last at-bat of his professional baseball life. I have read a lot of retirement coverage since June 2026, and almost none of it mentions that this detour was real, paid, and nearly a career.
The route, stop by stop
- 2007, Baltimore Orioles. Drafted in the 41st round out of Collegiate School in Richmond, Virginia. He went to NC State instead.
- 2010, Colorado Rockies. Drafted in the fourth round and signed. He played second base for the short-season Tri-City Dust Devils that summer.
- 2011, Asheville Tourists. Class A ball. Across the two seasons he hit .229 in 93 games, with five home runs and 19 stolen bases.
- January 2012. He told the Rockies he would pursue the NFL and would not report to spring training. Seattle drafted him that April.
- December 12, 2013. The Texas Rangers took him in the Triple-A phase of the Rule 5 draft. He attended their camp in Surprise, Arizona, in 2014 and 2015.
- February 7, 2018. The Rangers traded him to the Yankees, which led to the Fried at-bat less than a month later.
The Rockies were not wrong about the athlete
The best account of the Colorado years is a 2022 MLB.com piece by Thomas Harding, written when Wilson was traded to the Denver Broncos. It opens with a scene I cannot improve on: Wilson once met a Rockies official to practice double-play pivots in a parking building in Charlotte, North Carolina.
The same story carries the best accidental joke in his whole biography. In the 2010 draft, the Rockies' first pick was Kyle Parker, then Clemson's starting quarterback. Bill Schmidt, who ran their drafts, told MLB.com that at the time "we were told that Kyle Parker was a better football prospect." Wilson, meanwhile, had been told that a quarterback his height would probably have to go to Canada to keep playing.
He went to Seattle. Parker reached the majors with the Rockies in 2014 and 2015. Both scouting reports were half right.
Could he have made it?
Nobody knows, and the people closest to it say so. Schmidt's verdict was generous and careful at once: Wilson "was at-bats away," and "he needed 1,500 at-bats to find out." He never got close to that number, because he was also playing college football. A .229 average in the low minors, earned part-time, tells you almost nothing about his ceiling.
My honest read is that football got the better end of this. Baseball, though, kept him around anyway. According to MLB.com, the Rangers dressed him for spring training games and had him speak to the club about his successes. Yankees general manager Brian Cashman said the club saw "a unique opportunity for us to learn from an extraordinary athlete."
The pinstripes, and the pitcher
Wilson grew up a Yankees fan. After the strikeout he talked less about the result than the walk to the plate, telling reporters, "I used to go crazy for Derek Jeter when he walked up to the plate." It is hard to be sad about a strikeout described like that.
The footnote we like best arrived years later. In December 2024, Max Fried signed an eight-year, $218 million contract with the Yankees, a record guarantee for a left-handed pitcher. The man who sent Wilson back to the dugout in 2018 ended up wearing the same uniform. And Wilson did get one more big New York moment after all: his only Super Bowl win came at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, a short drive from the Bronx.
Sources
Every factual claim above traces to one of these. Links open in a new tab.
