What if the New York Yankees actually signed Hulk Hogan?

I recently binged the phenomenal new Netflix docuseries on the life and legacy of Hulk Hogan, the outrageous wrestler who transcended pop culture to achieve global mainstream ubiquity.

Hulk Hogan: Real American was released in April, and it includes some of the final footage ever shot with the unmistakable enigma before his July 2025 death, aged 71. (1) The treatment drips with nostalgia, and I cannot recommend it enough. 

Naturally, one montage piqued my curiosity more than most in the film: sepia-tinged shots of Terry Bollea, the man who played Hogan, on baseball fields as a kid. Those grainy Little League photos unlocked a dubious nugget of lore from the back of my baseball-addled brain: the persistent rumour that Bollea was scouted by the New York Yankees and Cincinnati Reds during his youth, and that only a freak injury curtailed his path to the big leagues.

Most normal people would think about that tantalising possibility – Hulk Hogan mashing homers at Yankee Stadium – for, oh, 17 seconds, before forgetting all about it and moving on to something else. Overwhelmingly, it would be considered an innocuous piece of sports flotsam, to be tossed out haphazardly in barroom conversation, perhaps, without a whole lot of consequence. I’m not normal, however, and investigating such kitsch crossovers gets me out of bed in the morning. 

Yes, Bollea was an incendiary figure who did and said some abhorrent things. And sure, his All-American lustre was sullied by unending controversy – personal, professional and political. My interest in the mystique of a character does not condone the worldview of its exponent, though, and we are talking about Hulk Hogan and the New York Yankees here! I’m like a dog with a bone over these sorts of stories. And so, I launched headlong into a deeply irrational study, intent on proving or disproving the regurgitated yarn.

Firstly, I sought primary sources, straight from the Hulkster’s mouth. “I was scouted in tenth and eleventh grade by the Cincinnati Reds and New York Yankees,” he told the Nelk Boys on a 2023 episode of the Full Send podcast. “But I broke my arm.” (2)

Further context is buried in Hogan’s various autobiographies. “If you were a baseball player when I was a kid, you had to worship the New York Yankees,” he wrote in a 2002 effort. “There was Mickey Mantle, Rogers Maris, Yogi Berra, Joe Pepitone…and because the Cincinnati Reds had their spring training camp in Tampa, I liked Pete Rose and Johnny Bench a lot, too. (3)

“I’d always had a strong throwing arm,” Hogan continued. “When I was eight, I started putting it to good use in Little League. I was pretty good at baseball. When I turned nine, I became one of the few kids my age ever allowed to play in what they called the majors. I was a hard-throwing pitcher and a pretty good third baseman. The problem was that I was fat and really slow, so if I didn’t hit the ball over the fence, I couldn’t get an extra base hit. The other team would always throw me out at second base. And let me tell you, brother, it didn’t take a genius to figure out why I was fat. Even when I was really young, I was a serious candyholic. My favourite vice was Baby Ruth candy bars. They used to make them real big, like about six or nine inches long. I just remember I’d buy two or three of them at a shot and shove them down my throat one after the other….

“I remember one day, they installed a brand new electronic scoreboard. In our town, where kids didn’t have much in the way of toys or bikes because their parents didn’t have much money, it was a real big deal to hit a home run. Then you got to take the whole team to Burger King for a Whopper or something. Sure enough, the first night they had the scoreboard, I hit a ball over it for a home run. That was a good day. A real good feeling.” (3)

Bollea was born in 1953, meaning he started Little League in 1961, by his own retelling. Many decades later, in 2017, the Detroit News corroborated those claims by contacting Bollea’s childhood manager, who confirmed young Terry pitched and played third base as a six-footer in the Interbay Little League, a Tampa kids circuit with fields next to MacDill Air Force Base. (4) (5)

Bollea claims to have made the Interbay Little League All-Star team at 12, before surrendering a game-winning home run in the 1966 national regional finals. (3) (6) From there, the narrative becomes a little murky, however, thanks to Hogan’s signature penchant for embellishment. “We went to the Little League World Series,” he wrote in a 2009 memoir, “where I got up to bat fourteen times – and I went ten for fourteen. I had a .714 batting average in the finals of the Little League World Series! It was unheard of.” (7) 

It was also a complete fabrication. You see, the Little League World Series maintains a searchable online database of all participants in its 79-year history, and the name ‘Terry Bollea’ produces zero hits. ‘Hulk Hogan’ is absent, too, for completeness, suggesting Bollea hallucinated an entire glorious chapter of his dubious baseball career – right down to the oddly specific .714 batting average. (8)

Nevertheless, I followed the suspicious thread through the end of Bollea’s baseball journey, from Tampa’s Robinson High School to Pony Ball and Babe Ruth League. (3) (9) “I probably would have kept at it, maybe even tried to make a career of it, if I hadn’t gotten hurt,” Hogan wrote in his 2002 book. “One day when I was sixteen, I was playing third base and a batter on the other team hit a slow grounder down the line. I picked the ball up with my right hand and threw it on the run, fired it sidearm as hard as I could to the first baseman. Big mistake. As soon as I released it, I knew I had messed up my arm. It turned out I had broken something. After that, I was never the same as a baseball player.” (3) 

I made an earnest attempt to prove or disprove Hogan’s claims regarding interest from the Yankees and Reds, but some embers of folklore defy verification – even when subjected to my maniacally obsessive inquisition. After all, if big league scouts trailed Terry Bollea, they would have done so in the 1960s, per his own reminiscence. Every Yankee scout linked to Florida during that era has sadly passed away. Trust me – I checked them all, pouring through every name in every media guide. And besides, they probably wouldn’t have recalled one podgy kid, among the thousands they watched, 60 years after the fact, anyway. Memories fade and chubby third basemen merge into one. Plus, hopes of the Yankees maintaining scouting reports from that era – through multiple stadium renovations, a total relocation, and the migration from paper to digital record-keeping – are scant.

I tried to reach surviving Little League teammates of Bollea whose names appeared in bygone newspaper reports, but those leads ran cold, too. Gradually, then, a sense of superfluity coloured my outlook. Maybe the Yankees wanted him. Maybe they did not. I struggled to decipher the morass, while Hogan’s infamous reputation for sensationalism loomed large. 

This, after all, was a guy who claimed to have been invited to play bass guitar for Metallica. (10) A guy who said Elvis Presley was a huge Hulkamaniac despite dying two years before Hogan ever wrestled in Memphis. (10) A guy who claimed to have invented wrestler entrance music. (11) Hulk Hogan was exaggeration incarnate, I realised, and theatrical enhancement – in all spheres – was intrinsic to the charade. 

To that end, one possible spur to Hogan’s baseball fantasy may have been the very real hardball achievements of Randy Poffo, the man behind ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage, a longtime WWF frenemy. (6) Poffo was, in fact, signed by the St Louis Cardinals as a switch-hitting catcher, and he actually played 289 minor league games, topping out in A-ball. Indeed, it was during his penultimate season that Poffo moonlighted as an upstart wrestler. He caught the bug and developed a legendary career in the ring, oscillating between Hogan’s tag team partner and challenger to his individual world championship belt. Perhaps jealousy fuelled Hulk’s hardball hallucinations. (12)

Regardless, reality stymied my esoteric quest. All but stumped, I confronted the folly of my chosen mission. Realistically, I determined, any smoking gun tying Hulk Hogan to the Yankees (or Reds) will have been long since buried – if it ever existed at all, beyond the hyperbolic oral tradition that stoked his intoxicating mythology.

My efforts were futile, in other words, and my time would be better spent daydreaming about a potential world in which Bollea was scouted – and, indeed, signed – by the Yankees, rather than attempting to authenticate his throwaway claims.

I imagined a world in which Hulk Hogan swapped the ring for the diamond and wowed America with home runs instead of leg drops.

I imagined Hogan as a larger-than-life bridge between Ruth and Shohei Ohtani as a two-way force.

I imagined Hogan wearing a red and yellow bandana underneath his interlocking NY cap and fluorescent sunglasses – even for night games. 

I imagined Hogan kissing his biceps and cupping his ear to the Bleacher Creatures; hitting back-to-back with Reggie Jackson on successive World Series winners; and dousing George Steinbrenner in champagne amid his first Yankee dynasty.

But I didn’t need to imagine anything, of course. Nowadays, artificial intelligence does all that for us – sickeningly. And so, I tapped my vision into ChatGPT and wasted a few gallons of Sam Altman's precious water asking his dystopian little chatbot to conjure Hulk Hogan in pinstripes: