I got drafted by the Detroit Tigers out of high school, and I had been a pretty good prep pitcher. I went to the minor leagues thinking I was going to continue to be a pitcher because I threw about 92 mph in high school.

	Bubby Brister says he had a 92-mph fastball in high school.

But they put me at shortstop and wanted me to be an everyday player.

All of a sudden, I was playing a position I had never played and using a wooden bat. I had always had a strong arm and had always been the pitcher or the quarterback, the guy who controlled the game.

I played for (Colorado Rockies manager) Jim Leyland in winter ball, and I told him I wanted to be a pitcher, but he said they wanted me to be an everyday player.

I told him I would try, but that I wasn't going to give it two or three years if I wasn't happy doing that. We were getting beat 11-8, 10-7 all the time. I told him that if a team scored 10 runs off me, I'd give the Tigers their money back.

I just felt so much more confidence on the mound.

I tried shortstop for a while, but I was hitting a little less than .200.

I tried to fit in, but I didn't have much confidence as an everyday player. I probably would have given baseball a 100 percent effort in terms of time if I had been a pitcher. But as it was, I left and went back to school at Tulane the following spring, didn't even go to spring training.

Sometimes, I do look back and wonder what might have been had I stuck with baseball, but only in terms of being a pitcher. Growing up, I was always the pitcher, the quarterback or the point guard. But looking back now, I was glad it worked out the way it did, rather than if I had bounced around the minor leagues for two or three years and then had gone back to school. As it was, I didn't miss any time. I was back for spring football, and I started some games as a freshman at Tulane.

The one thing I will say about the guys who play both baseball and football professionally is that they're amazing athletes. Guys like Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson, those are the only kind of guys that I would think could do it.

Looking at Ricky Williams, he clearly made the right choice to take the guaranteed money of an NFL first-round draft choice even though baseball is his first love. But the shoe was on the other foot for me. I got a signing bonus for a lot of money coming out of high school.

There's nothing that says Williams can step right into the major leagues.

But there is something that says he can step right into the starting lineup of the Saints.

If you ask me whether it can be done, whether one individual can play Major League Baseball and in the NFL at the same time and do both well, I'm not sure. I guess Sanders has done it as well as anybody. I don't know all of his statistics, but he's done pretty well at both sports. I would say he's probably the most phenomenal athlete we've seen since Bo Jackson.

But, to me, if you do football right or you do baseball right, doing both is going to leave you very little time to sit back and let your body rest and enjoy your success.

Bubby Brister, who has played in the NFL since 1986, excluding the 1996 season, when he was out of football, is expected to be the Denver Broncos' starting quarterback in 1999. He wrote this for the Denver Rocky Mountain News.