For all the gifs and memes and fragments of an Internet broken by his prodigious swings, Tim Tebow turned out to be a decent baseball player. Probably not a great prospect at 30 years old, but good enough to show that his second sports career wasn’t a joke.

His best shot at a cup of coffee in the major leagues most likely ended with Monday’s diagnosis of a broken wrist. At the time he had been playing for the New York Mets Class-AA team, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies, two levels below the big leagues. And the fact he was hitting a respectable .273 with six home runs and a .734 OPS, along with the prospect of the Mets finishing a dreary season in an empty Citi Field, gave legitimacy to the idea he could be called up to the majors when the rosters are expanded to 40 players in September – if for no other reason than to sell tickets.

With the Mets hoping to rebuild for next year, relying on the promise of new, young players, not former football stars in their fourth decade of life, the window on Tebow’s big league dreams almost certainly slammed shut the moment his wrist cracked last Friday night. But if this is the end for Tebow and baseball, we should appreciate what he has done. He has proven himself to be a sports renaissance man.

It’s so easy to fixate on Tebow’s failures as an NFL quarterback that an impressive athletic resume is perpetually clouded. He was, for three years, the best quarterback in college football, winner of the Heisman trophy and a key cog of two national championship teams at the University of Florida. He is one of the only men in the world to lead an NFL team to a division title and throw a walk-off touchdown pass in a playoff game. He has proven to be an honest and discerning football analyst on the SEC Network and – it turns out – a solid minor-league baseball player with good speed and a little power.

Decades ago, when Michael Jordan famously flopped as a Class-AA baseball player, his manager at the time, Terry Francona (now the Cleveland Indians manager) said: “Give (Jordan) 1,000 at bats (in the minors) and he’d have found his way to the majors.”

Tebow has 701 in a little over two minor-league years. He would have beaten Francona’s Jordan prediction by some 250 trips to the plate.

In my times around Tebow I always felt there were two of him. There was the Tebow who seemed packaged by his evangelical parents, sent into competition with carefully curated Bible verses scrawled on his eye black, feeding a religious frenzy with an anti-abortion commercial aired during the 2010 Super Bowl. Then there was the sports Tebow, a football savant who filled his idle hours with piles of DVDs loaded with NFL offenses that he studied for hours.

The day after Tebow’s most famous NFL game, the one on 12 December 2011, when he led the Denver Broncos from 10 points down in less than two minutes to beat the Chicago Bears (prompting a Saturday Night Live skit about the scripted Tebow), the sports Tebow and I sat in a hallway at the Broncos practice facility talking football. He spoke passionately about the work he was doing with the Denver coaches, about the game films he devoured, about the plays he loved to run. He even told a small joke that mocked the perceptions of his scripted, evangelical self, though his face quickly clouded as he told the joke and he begged me to not use it.

Tim Tebow won the Heisman Trophy during three successful seasons with the Florida Gators. Photograph: J. Meric/Getty Images

What became clear in that hallway is the sports Tebow is very much the true Tebow. While his faith is important to him and the good he vows to do is genuine, he is at the core a sports geek – a man not fully comfortable with being a cultural sensation, a man happiest when finding a way to isolate a tight end against an undersized cornerback.

This suspicion has been confirmed by coaches and scouts who have worked closely with Tebow. They tell fantastic stories about a player who could walk up to a dry-erase board and diagram the plays of many of the NFL’s best offensive minds. Those who saw it for the first time were flabbergasted. No one, they said, did this. No one.

I’ve often thought this is why Tebow got so may chances in the NFL, landing with the New York Jets, New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles after being cast aside in Denver. While the public was obsessed with the packaged, evangelical Tebow, football coaches kept falling in love with his sports mind. It seems likely the coaches in the Mets system felt the same way. the sports Tebow is just too earnest, sincere and determined to resist.

When you strip away the headlines and hysteria and the chuckles and jokes about the packaged, evangelical Tebow we are left with a man who loves sports so much he was determined to keep playing, even when the world told him to stop. A little more than 30 years into a life lived in bold type, he has been an NFL quarterback, an excellent television analyst and a minor league baseball player who almost proved he deserved a chance at the big leagues.

Not a bad sports life at all.