Why this early Patrick Mahomes memory sticks with him — and lingers with MLB greats
The boy showed up to the park with a cap and a baseball glove. He was 4, maybe 5 years old, but he’d already developed a reputation back home in Texas.
The kid from Tyler, they called him.
A Fall Classic trip sent him to New York’s Shea Stadium, home of the Mets, who — in this particular year, 2000 — happened to live up to their old moniker: Amazin’.
They drew big crowds, adulation from adults and kids alike, but the 4- or 5-year-old with a blue Mets jersey and a tight haircut didn’t come for autographs.
He came to play.
He stepped onto the field during batting practice, sweet-talking his way into shagging fly balls with the big-leaguers. And after he caught a few, the big-leaguers began to mumble to one another.
Whose kid is that?
Mike Hampton, the Mets’ ace left-hander, knew the answer, so he approached the boy’s father.
“How do you get him to do that?”
A quick reply: “How do I get him to stop?”
That story grew in lore among that team over the years. And then one day several years later, former Mets outfielder Benny Agbayani flipped on the TV to watch a college football game.
“That’s the kid!” Agbayani said. “That was the kid on the field in 2000.”
‘Can he play?’
Inside a third-floor ballroom of a downtown hotel here in New Orleans, a crowd of media jockeyed for position in front of a high-rise stage reserved for a three-time Super Bowl MVP.
He’s back again, Patrick Mahomes, the 29-year-old star of potentially the first dynasty of its kind in NFL history.
And the star of media days, too.
He sat there for an hour, questions arriving in rapid succession, until one of them inquired about his first championship experience back in February 2020.
Well, actually.
Hold up.
The story of Patrick Mahomes’ first championship experience is not from 2020 with the Kansas City Chiefs. It originated two decades earlier, in the late fall of 2000.
He was a toddler.
The boy with the glove. And the bat. And the arm.
It’s more than a cute tale — more than a sign of what was to come. The memory has stuck with Mahomes 25 years later, and recently in an interview with The Star he offered it as a root of the tree that sprouted a three-time (for now) Super Bowl champion.
Mahomes’ father, Pat Sr., pitched 49 games for the Mets in 2000, and, well, he took every opportunity to bring a sports-crazed kid along for the ride.
They barely gave him any opportunity. Mahomes was just 4 years old that summer — he turned 5 in September, a month before the World Series — and he was initially slightly on the smaller side for his age.
While the Mets had a family-friendly culture, some were concerned about a preschool kid roaming the outfield with baseballs flying in the air, one after another. Which sounds reasonable, yeah?
When Pat Sr. made the case, the decision pivoted on the response to one question:
Can he play?
“They were worried about him getting hurt — the ball hitting him while he was out there,” Pat Sr. said. “What I told them was, ‘If it hits him, he won’t do it again.’”
And then a sentence his head coach still uses today: “He doesn’t make the same mistake twice.”
In his first T-ball practice earlier that summer, Mahomes scooped up a ground ball from shortstop and fired a baseball so hard to first base that it broke the first baseman’s glasses. The coaches responded to Mahomes — and only Mahomes — with a special instruction. He needed to roll the ball from shortstop to first.
The kid could play.
Although he was left off the playoff roster, Pat Sr. brought along his 5-year-old to the most anticipated World Series matchup of the decade.
Mets. Yankees. The Subway Series, they dubbed it.
Before Game 3, the Mets’ first home game of the series, they gave Mahomes a full uniform — pants, jersey top, even a hat completed with the World Series logo. He’d earned it.
There’s a prominent picture from that day — Mahomes and Hampton jogging stride for stride, the kid’s eyes fixated on tracking a fly ball during the team’s batting practice. They were 330-340 deep in the gap, Hampton recalled.
“I was just covering him in case one ball went up and somebody hit a line drive right after. He was capable on his own,” Hampton said. “As a professional athlete, you can see when a kid carries himself out there. You could tell Little Patrick had a chance to be special. My son Gage was the same age, and he was a really well-rounded, good athlete. But Patrick was just different.”
Mahomes, as Hampton recalled, would turn batting practice into a game: How many fly balls could he catch in a row?
At age 5.
On fly balls hit by major-leaguers.
“You already knew,” Agbayani said. “He was going to be great.”
After the field had cleared out following batting practice ahead of that Game 3, Pat Sr. took a bucket of balls to the outfield and started pitching them to his son. Mahomes could already swing it, and he’d occasionally pop a ball over the fence from his home plate in the outfield.
That night, a national broadcast team had placed its makeshift set beyond the bullpen in right field.
A thud greeted the set.
And then another.
Then another.
“He’d never hit one over that bullpen fence,” Pat Sr. said. “But once he saw them up there, he just started hitting them up there regularly. He saw it as a challenge.”
The next night, Pat Sr. looked up at the broadcast set, as he recalled. A few employees were waiting for his glance.
They’d brought something to the ballpark, a layer of protection of sorts. And the same thing the 5-year-old brought with him to the ballpark.
Baseball gloves.
‘He was there to get better’
The baseball days are long. A 7:10 p.m. first pitch, for example, features a mandatory arrival time in the early afternoon.
Pat Sr. had invited his kid to the ballpark as an opportunity to spend some extra time with him.
But Mahomes?
“He was there to get better,” Hampton said. “He was competing. He was working, just like the rest of us.”
He was, at least in his preschool mind, just like the rest of them.
A big-leaguer.
Pat Sr. actually gave his son a portion of his locker in the clubhouse, if you can believe that. Rather than wearing his full uniform to the stadium, Mahomes wanted to be like his pops, so he’d dress in the clubhouse alongside him.
Then chase some fly balls.
A few swings.
Maybe even some throws in the bullpen.
Then he’d retreat to the stands to watch the game with his mom. And after it all, he’d be right back in the clubhouse.
“He’d come around and shake everybody’s hand,” Agbayani said. “Then he’d be sitting there on the chair in front of his dad’s locker, just taking it in.”
Mahomes even had shower shoes in the locker.
“We treated it like a game,” Pat Sr. said.
A lot of 5-year-olds dream of the pros. They hold onto that dream for as long as possible until, frankly, they’re mature enough to understand its impracticality. It’s a long shot.
The ambition, that dream, never left Mahomes.
Because that memory never left him.
“I could just see that you really could obtain it — you could get to the top of your profession,” Mahomes said. “Being in the locker room every single day and seeing my dad work to get himself in that position, you learn where you can really get. I think just seeing that, it gave me the perspective that I could go and do it.”
Agbayani keeps a picture of he and Mahomes together at the stadium one day, Mahomes sitting on his lap.
Hampton and his son Gage, who remembers him, too, “talk about it quite often.” How could you not? Mahomes has a prominent place in sports culture. On Sunday, he will tie John Elway for the second most Super Bowl appearances of all-time.
He’s not yet 30.
But he’s an ancient memory for a few.
Hampton and Agbayani are planning to watch the Chiefs play the Eagles in Super Bowl LIX on Sunday. They can’t help but root for the kid they once knew.
And the kid they already knew had something special.
There’s a funny symmetry about that, right? It was 25 years ago that Mahomes showed up to the ballpark to be one of them. Now, they sit back and watch him on TV.
It evokes the same reaction it did then.
Amazement.
“I don’t care how old he’s gotten, or how his hair’s grown out,” Hampton said. “I still see the same face. I still see that little boy.
“And I really feel like he still plays with that little boy’s spirit.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2025 at 2:33 PM.