His children's enthusiasm for soccer got him to switch from his longtime love of baseball, which he played at the university level.
Fast forward to this spring, when the 2010 NL MVP felt so good that he played for Canada in the World Baseball Classic.
Thorpe was retroactively stripped of his amateur status and his medals when it was discovered, well after the official deadline for filing a challenge, that he had played minor-league professional baseball for two summers before the Olympics.
He was stripped of those medals though for violating the Olympic rules on amateurism when it was revealed he played two years of semi-pro baseball.
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He had perfect attendance, played on the school's baseball team and won an academic scholarship to Ohio State University.
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He never saw action, but, unlike so many of the 470 major leaguers drafted during the war, who played on armed-services baseball teams, he had serious administrative positions, which he performed ably.
"Because it is May, no matter where we happened to be, whether it was first place or last place, up 20 games or down 20 games, there's a lot of baseball left to be played, " he said.
Todd Hargrove of Rockwall, Texas, had hoped his son, Colton, would play baseball the same sport he'd played as a teenager.
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During much of his NFL career, he also was an outfielder with four Major League Baseball teams and played in a World Series with the Atlanta Braves.
But he played a pivotal role for the Dominican Republic team that won the World Baseball Classic this spring.
The other excuse that baseball writers will have for exempting Biggio is equally ridiculous: he just played at the wrong time, the steroid era.
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Leyland said he expects Miguel Cabrera, Omar Infante and Anibal Sanchez, who all played for Venezuela in the World Baseball Classic, to show up at camp Tuesday.
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