Second chance for second rounders

Ugoh and Pollack need to start playing

“I’ve got to have fun,” Ugoh said. “That’s the one thing I think has kind of gotten away from me.”

While skeptics might snicker, it’s possible these two players just needed time to develop. Metzelaars says it took him five years.

“The preseason of my fourth year, I got traded basically because I didn’t get it,” he said of being dealt from Seattle to Buffalo in 1985. “I was good enough, I was athletic enough, I could catch. But my deal was I struggled so hard to try and prove I was good enough to be out there, it didn’t allow me to play.

“I got traded from a team that was 12-4 to a team that was 2-14. I thought I was at the end of the world. It took into my fifth year to realize that the way I was going to play best was to go out and have fun.”

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