Yankees & Baseball Players Turned Poker Stars

I kind of fell into this article here and I am still doing my research on it but it truly amazes me how many baseball players have turned into poker players that we don't know about. We all heard about the whole Alex Rodriguez, who else right, attending illegal 888 poker games scandal where drugs were used and all that and it got me thinking, is it as wide spread as maybe steroids were speculated to be? So I went to PokerStars.net where they have a list of "famous" poker stars and the list really surprised me which led me to do my own research, because surely this poker craze is not a new thing, and have compiled a list here of the Major League Baseball players that have turned into poker stars.

As we referenced above Alex Rodriguez is apparently a big fan of poker and has even went as far to break the law to do it, SEEN HERE from a post that was posted when the news broke in . Also Alex's foundation was in hot water for not donating enough of the donations and proceeds from a charity poker event, also seen HERE. Alex has proven two things over the last few years when it comes to baseball stars and poker, it is much more prominent then we thought and that Alex is an idiot, but I think we all knew that already.

Hall of Fame pitcher Orel Hershiser has been playing professional poker since 2006 after retiring from Major League Baseball and moving to Summerlin, Nevada. Hershiser signed with Poker Royalty to get his professional career started after becoming a regular at Red Rock's poker room in Summerlin. Hershiser drew some attention with his poker playing and was invited to participate in the 2008 NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship and made the quarter finals under the Poker Stars banner beating poker legends like Ted Forrest, Allen Cunningham, and Freddy Deeb who has a total of 12 World Series of Poker bracelets between them. Hershisher took his hot streak all the way to the 2008 World Series of Poker and to the 2009 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure tour and has made thousands of dollars playing professional poker. It's kind of cool to play with him though because Hershiser gives an autographed baseball to the poker player that eliminates him.

There are many other examples of pro baseball players turned pro poker players including Jose Canseco who was in Celebrity Poker Live, former Red Sox player Gabe Kapler is a well known poker player, Jeff Francoeur, Ricky Henderson, Bobby Bonilla, Randy Wolf, Jason Giambi, Cory Lidle, Vicente Padilla, career minor league player  Al Barbieri, and college baseball player and star Eric Baldwin to name a few. That's just who we know about and could find links on Google talking about playing or getting in trouble for playing, imagine the players we don't know about. Poker may be on the fall on news networks like ESPN but it is still very much alive and kicking inside of MLB clubhouses.