PITTSBURGH -- Braxton Ashcraft is making his name on Major League mounds now, but the Pirates right-hander once made a habit of stealing the show under the Friday Night Lights in Texas.
That background helps explain why the 26-year-old doesn’t flinch at the spotlight. Even so, Ashcraft said nothing quite matched the nerves of football’s opening kickoff.
“I don't think I've ever been as nervous as I was on an open kickoff,” Ashcraft said. “That's a different feeling. Looking back, I miss it a lot.”
Ashcraft’s first All-Star nod came as a replacement for teammate Paul Skenes on the National League roster, a fitting reward for a pitcher who entered his final start before the All-Star break on Friday with a 3.24 ERA and nine wins across 18 starts in his first full season as an MLB starter.
Long before he was piling up outs for Pittsburgh, Ashcraft was piling up ridiculous numbers as a wide receiver at Robinson High School in Texas. In 2016, his junior season, he put up 2,090 receiving yards and 37 touchdowns, a total that sat above even now-Dallas Cowboys star CeeDee Lamb on the state leaderboard.
“That must be fake,” Skenes joked when hearing the leaderboard.
It’s not.
At 6-foot-5 with enough speed to run away from defenders, Ashcraft was a nightmare matchup. Robinson head coach Tommy Allison, whose son Chase was the quarterback, built the offense around him.
On the goal line, Ashcraft was sent wide for jump balls. When defenses tried man coverage, the Rockets leaned on screens to get the ball in his hands and let him work in space.
“He was kind of like a baby giraffe,” said Bryan Kent, Ashcraft’s baseball coach and an offensive assistant at Robinson.
“With Braxton, it was just anywhere, anytime,” Chase Allison added. “If he was double-covered, triple-covered, it really didn't seem to matter. Just throw it to him, and he'd go find it.”
Ashcraft said there were stretches when he believed he might have been better at football than baseball. Chase Allison even thinks he could have gone anywhere he wanted for football. But Ashcraft was already committed to Baylor for baseball and understood where his future was headed.
Still, he says football shaped the competitor he became. Robinson entered his junior year in 2016 with little outside belief, then Ashcraft exploded out of the gate with four first-quarter touchdowns and seven total in the season opener.
Later that year, he broke a finger in practice before the district playoffs. Tommy Allison worried baseball obligations might keep him out, but Ashcraft played anyway, wearing a soft cast and catching a touchdown to help the Rockets win.
Ashcraft sees a parallel between that Robinson team’s rise and what the Pirates are doing now. He points to the way both groups took a step forward one season before everything fully clicked the next, even if he knows the comparison only goes so far.
His football days also came with a cost. Ashcraft practiced through summer camps in turf temperatures near 120 degrees, never shying away from contact.
That physical style carried into his baseball career, where he has dealt with multiple shoulder surgeries, Tommy John surgery and a meniscus tear. He didn’t reach the majors until 2025, seven years after the Pirates selected him in the second round out of high school.
Even with all that, he says the weekly rhythm of football helped prepare him for life as a starting pitcher.
“When I was growing up, I played everything, and I was playing the whole time,” Ashcraft said. “For football, to compete once a week, that was the biggest thing going into professional baseball. It’s like throwing every six days.”
Ashcraft still worked on baseball during football season at times, and he sometimes split his days between sports, with football in the morning and baseball in the afternoon. But after his breakout junior baseball season, when his velocity jumped and scouts started paying close attention, he decided to shut down football after that year.
“It was an easy decision to not play my senior year,” Ashcraft said. “But looking back on it now, it’s probably one of the biggest regrets of my life.”
Now he gets his football fix by watching Lamb and following his favorite team in Dallas. The baseball path has taken him all the way to the Midsummer Classic in Philadelphia, but the old adrenaline is still there.
“I get the itch,” Ashcraft said. “It's fun when I go home, to be able to talk about it with the people I grew up with and kind of reminisce on what could have been. But it's hard to say I made the wrong choice.”
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