In the 1990s, Deion Sanders was an extremely popular two-sport athlete that excelled playing both professional football and baseball. During a recent appearance on the "Club Shay Shay" podcast with Shannon Sharpe, Sanders admitted that playing Major League Baseball was more difficult than playing in the NFL.
"That ball does some things to you," Sanders said when asked which sport was harder to play at a professional level. "Any sport that you can fail seven out of 10 times and become great and make $2-300 million in it, that's a hard sport."
Sanders added that it would've been easy to stop playing baseball and simply focus on football, a sport that he also excelled at. But he wanted to continue to play baseball to challenge himself.
"I love challenges and I could not master it. And it frustrated me because I hate to lose and I hate I'm not mastering something that I know, if I just had more time I could," Sanders added.
On Sept. 5, 1992, Sanders became the first professional athlete to score a touchdown in an NFL game and hit a home run in a Major League Baseball game.
Sanders ended up playing nine MLB seasons, along with 14 in the NFL. During his time in baseball, he played for the New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves, Cincinnati Reds (two stints) and San Francisco Giants before retiring from the sport in 2001. During his MLB career, Sanders posted a .263 batting average to go along with 39 home runs, 168 RBIs and 186 stolen bases.
Sanders is set to embark on his latest challenge in the college football coaching ranks. He was hired as the new head coach at the University of Colorado earlier this month after tallying a 27-6 record at Jackson State over the past three seasons.
