Buccaneers' WR Emeka Egbuka's baseball career draws attention thanks to Mariners' old post

Billy Heyen

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Buccaneers' WR Emeka Egbuka's baseball career draws attention thanks to Mariners' old post image

Emeka Egbuka is a star rookie wide receiver for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

But once upon a time, he dreamed of playing for the Seattle Mariners.

Egbuka's baseball career has come into the spotlight this weekend because an old post on X (formerly Twitter) by the Mariners is going viral.

This is that post:

Egbuka won that national title in the 7-and-8 division.

"Wearing a Mariners ball cap, a determined Emeka Egbuka pounded the strike zone target that stood 45 feet away," wrote ESPN's Jenna Laine earlier this season. "Then, on his third try in the hitting competition, he smashed a baseball nearly 200 feet -- the farthest an athlete can hit in the competition, emerging as the national winner in the 7-and-8-year-old age group."

When Egbuka threw out the first pitch at the Mariners game, he also got a picture with Felix Hernandez.

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Egbuka hit.316 as a varsity freshman in 2018 at Steilacoom High School.

But by his junior spring, 2020, COVID-19 hit.

He didn't get a season, and after a strong senior year, he enrolled early at Ohio State and never played baseball again.

"There was COVID, there was a bunch of things that went into it to where baseball just made its way out of my life," Egbuka told ESPN's Laine. "But I feel like God has me here for a specific reason, a specific purpose. So I'm definitely grateful to everything the game of football has given me, too."

Egbuka does credit his catching ability to baseball.

"I believe one strength that I've always had that I've [taken] a lot of pride in was ball tracking and catching the ball," Egbuka told ESPN. "I think there's never been a ball in the air that I felt like was a difficult catch or that I couldn't track. I have an extensive baseball background, so I think that's helped me out a lot -- playing center field and stuff like that."

Maybe someday Egbuka can pick up a bat and glove again and show everyone just what he can do.

For now, he'll stick with playmaking on the gridiron, not the diamond.

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Contributing Writer