KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — They were the sons of big league ballplayers, the lazy summer days of their youth spent listening to stories about baseball. Their dads were both journeyman pitchers — maybe faced each other a time or two — who bounced from team to team as they tried to carve out long and productive careers, even as their kids grew up in east Texas, just a couple of hours apart.
Yet at some point, the paths of Patrick Mahomes and Bobby Witt Jr. diverged. One stepped off the infield and onto the football field, his first love giving way to his lifelong passion, and the other continued a remarkable trajectory toward baseball stardom.
Years later, their paths are crossing again. Mahomes is now the record-setting quarterback of the Chiefs, the leader of an unbeaten team chasing an unprecedented third consecutive Super Bowl title. And he is a part owner of the Royals, who are in their first AL Division Series in a decade thanks largely to an MVP-caliber season from Witt, their star shortstop.
They face the Yankees in the best-of-five series beginning Saturday night in New York. “We talk quite a bit,” Mahomes told a small group of reporters this week. “I've texted him kind of throughout the season, and we've talked about slumps, and getting into the playoffs and everything like that.
So I stay in touch, because even though we play different sports — I mean, we're very similar in age as well. Younger than me, but similar in age. We grew up in the same type of ar.