Seattle Mariners draft Arizona football player Trey Griffey

Who says you have to play baseball to get drafted by an MLB club?

The MLB Draft is long. Real long. 40 rounds long to be exact.

Every year, weird things happen in the later rounds, and this year, the Seattle Mariners joined in on the shenanigans.

The Mariners used their 24th round pick (the number worn by Ken Griffey Jr.) to draft Griffey’s son, Trey, a student-athlete at the University of Arizona.

Problem is, the Mariners play baseball, and Trey Griffey most decidedly does not.

Trey plays football for the Arizona Wildcats, and hasn’t played baseball since he was 11.

"Everybody says I chose football because I couldn't live up to my dad's standards," Trey said in the piece on USA Today from 2012 linked above. "Let people talk, You know what you can do, but you also want to prove to other people who don't want to believe in you, who believe you get here for other reasons, that you don't earn it. We're out here being All-Americans. You can't tell who's who."

"At first, all I wanted to do was play baseball," Trey says. "But as I got older, my dad told me, 'You have to choose the sport you want to play.' I said I want to play football. Once I turned 11, I was done with baseball."

The MLB Draft process is so ridiculous that the Mariners waited until four rounds after this pick to draft Nathan Bannister, a legit senior arm that could actually make an impact in their system.

The pressing question after this draft pick is this one though:

@azdesertswarm So does the Baseball or Football team get to tally that in "X number of players drafted" recruiting pitches?

— Charlie Gebow (@CLEFOAINTACRIME) June 11, 2016

I’m also hoping that if baseball were to advance to Omaha next weekend that they hang Trey Griffey’s jersey in the dugout.

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