Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes appears to be taking notes from America’s favorite pastime this offseason.
On Wednesday at Chiefs minicamp, a video of Mahomes winding up like a baseball pitcher and throwing a football à la knuckleball went viral, with many fans commenting on the star quarterback’s pitching form. Shortly after, Mahomes posted about the video and named a surprising source of inspiration for his baseball warmup antics: San Diego Padres’ Matt Waldron.
Mahomes wrote on X, “I’m trying to learn the knuckleball the Waldron dude from the padres throws”
I’m trying to learn the knuckleball the Waldron dude from the padres throws 😂😂😂 https://t.co/W7GeJv37yR
Waldron has accumulated a 3.76 ERA in 13 starts for the Padres and, as MLB’s Brent Maguire pointed out, is the only true knuckleballer in the MLB right now, throwing the pitch at a 37.6% clip.
Waldron, a Chiefs fan and Nebraska native, recently caught wind of Mahomes’s comments and felt honored.
“It's kind of crazy. Like I'm living in a different universe,” Waldron said.
Mahomes’s roots in baseball already run deep as his father, Pat Mahomes, was a reliever for the Minnesota Twins in 1992 and went on to pitch for five more teams in his 11-season MLB career. Mahomes never played baseball professionally but did play shortstop for his Tyler, Texas team in the 2010 Junior League World Series.
KRISTEN WONG
Kristen Wong is a Staff Writer on the Breaking & Trending News Team at Sports Illustrated. She has been a sports journalist since 2020. Before joining SI, Kristen covered four NFL teams as an associate editor with the FanSided NFL Network and worked as a staff writer for the brand’s flagship site. She has written about soccer, the NFL, NBA, and MLB since 2020, and outside of work, has dreams of running her own sporty dive bar.
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