Russell Wilson threw out the first pitch on Friday night for the Mariners against the Yankees. (USATSI)
Russell Wilson threw out the first pitch on Friday night for the Mariners against the Yankees. (USATSI)

In another life, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson was a baseball player. And a pretty good one too: he was selected out of North Carolina State by the Colorado Rockies. So it shouldn't be a surprise that when he was asked to throw out the first pitch for the Mariners against the Yankees, Wilson brought some cheese.

MLB.com kindly and wisely allows people to embed most of their videos (ahem, NFL), so we have some shots of Wilson firing what looks like a cut fastball that breaks hard outside. 

The M's stadium announcer says they recorded 98 mph for Wilson; the Seahawks broadcast said they had 75 mph. But was it a strike? Probably not as the GIF version of Wilson's pitch shows:

Still, that's better than 99 percent of the first pitches you see, and that's the kind of pitch that would either cause a lefty to hack away or break a righty's wrists.

"It was awesome,” Wilson said Seahawks.com. “This is my childhood right here. I used to play baseball all the time."

Childhood? More like his entire life except for the last two years. I don't want to make it a whole thing, but Wilson bolted baseball while with the Asheville Tourists (the Rockies Single-A team), wanting to give the NFL dream one more chance. Tom O'Brien, then the coach at NCSU, gambled on two years of Mike Glennon (who likely would've transferred if Russell returned for a season) over one year of Wilson (who still kind of wanted to play baseball too). 

It's infinitely more complicated than that, but the long and short of it is the decision worked out pretty well for Wilson ... not so well for O'Brien.

But I digress. The point here is that Wilson's quite the baseball player and he showed on the mound. He even had a little smacktalk before the pitch as well.

That wasn't the full extent though. Wilson's teammate Kam Chancellor recorded a Vine video of Wilson's curveball in the locker room and threw it up on Twitter prior to the pitch as well.

It's safe to say that the Seahawks won't be running Wilson off any time soon. But if they do, he's got a pretty solid fallback option as far as careers go.