The Nationals and Padres welcomed a special guest to Petco Park for their game Thursday: Heisman Trophy winner/Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel.
Manziel -- known to most as "Johnny Football" -- is in town training for the upcoming season with renowned quarterbacks coach George Whitfield Jr., so he decided to drop on a baseball game, take batting practice and throw out the ceremonial first pitch.
Manziel said that he played baseball for 15 years, and judging by this note buried in the game notes, it certainly has been 15 years:
Manziel also took two rounds of batting practice, with mixed results. The bat went flying out of his hands on his first swing, but he later hit a ball off the right-field wall at Petco Park. Manziel took BP while wearing loafers.
Manziel also spent some time chatting with Bryce Harper. The two are apparently great Twitter friends, though it seems that their face-to-face interaction was slightly more subdued:
The long-distance Twitter admiration society between two young stars made human contact.
“I checked on Twitter one day and happened to see he was following me,” Manziel said of Harper. “So I shot him a message.”
That message led to an exchange of cell phone numbers, and then to a flurry of text messages, and next thing they knew, Twitter was responsible for the hatching of another beautiful and starry relationship.
In truth, the two only spoke for about a minute or two during batting practice before Thursday night's Padres-Nationals game.
Kids these days.
Follow Adam on Twitter @AdamVingan and e-mail your story ideas to adamvingan (at) gmail.com.
