LOS ANGELES – At the end of the day, when the joint’s swept out and the lights turned off, there will be those who did and those who watched.

Those who did, they’ll have won or lost. They’ll have tried. They’ll have been chosen once to do, way back when, and so they’ll have stood in front of those who were left to watch and made something of it. Or not.

That goes for everything. Go be a good parent. A decent husband. A cool Little League coach. A reasonable accountant. Go throw a football or hit a baseball, if you can, try that, as there’s no harm in showing up in a navy blue shirt and orange socks, waving a Dinger bat around and seeing what comes of that.

Hell, you can’t BS baseball anyway. It’s there, in you, or you watch. It’s not about big or strong or tall, not always anyway. It’s about talent and precision and repetition and failure, and then dragging your butt back for more. It is, however, like any other game, in that it will decide whether you do or you watch, which brings us to midday Tuesday on the University of Southern California campus, on a diamond named for Rod Dedeaux, who is baseball royalty, and the incredibly earnest dude that is Tim Tebow, who is pop royalty.

He still wants to do. He is 29 years old, a former terrific college quarterback who, turned out, didn’t have the arm for much more than that, and on the way out of that game picked up a glove and a bat because, presumably, the alternative was to watch. What else do you do with a body built for adult sports in massive stadiums but keep swinging? What else do you do when your name is bigger than your game but find a new game? As for the rest, those believe you’re dumb for trying, a waste of freshly mown grass and perfectly good batting practice pitchers, a threat to those who’d given the best of their lives for the next at-bat, well, Tim Tebow said, “I’m just thankful they don’t get to make the choices in my life.”

First off, he’s a beast. Through a handful of wardrobe changes – these black shorts and this black T-shirt for warming up, these blue compression shorts for running the 60 (an average 6.75 seconds, though perhaps not average for a 250-pound anything), these white baseball pants and navy shirt for shagging flies, the same for batting practice, all with orange socks – he was always about the biggest, most carved-up, most athletic person you’ve ever seen on a baseball field.

Second, he moves like he’s played football his whole life, where thick muscles, sometimes at the cost of elasticity, mean survival.

Third, he ran through baseball drills as though somewhat unfamiliar with what might happen next. How a batted ball might slice or curl. How a pitched ball might bend. How shorter, choppier steps might’ve softened his hands for that irregular hop.

Fourth, he hit the crap out of the ball, when he hit the ball, once or twice into the tops of the pine or fir trees beyond the right center-field wall, the kind of power that when Tebow laid down his bat, more than one of the 28 teams in attendance sought a few minutes with him privately. That alone would get him a job somewhere.

The goal here, 12 years after he left baseball behind as a junior in high school, was show just enough of the peripheral stuff – he can run, he can throw a little, he has an idea of how to put a bat on a BP fastball – to convince baseball he could become something one day. Not today. Probably not tomorrow. But out there somewhere, not too far out there because he is after all 29, and worth a roster spot and a coaching staff’s time and energy.

He called Chad Moeller in May. Moeller is the former big-league catcher and current proprietor of a hitting school in Scottsdale, Ariz. They talked about why Tebow was doing this, and apparently it’s because Tebow loves the game very much, and then they hit together a lot. Asked if in the course of instruction Tebow ever grew disillusioned, Moeller smiled and said, “Never anything close. The hardest thing I did was taking the bat away. He’s bigger than me.”

The man does seem to love to hit. From the left side, he spreads his feet wide in the box. He does not stride so much as he lifts his right foot a few inches, then drops it nearly into the same spike holes, and swings very hard. The result is something that sounds a lot like hitting, often top-spun, and maybe something somebody can work with.

“This is a great game,” one scout muttered when Tebow swung over a David Aardsma changeup. “But it can be cruel.”

He hit for something close to an hour, first batting practice, then something more like a simulated game, some of that against Aardsma, who last season got a bunch of big leaguers out. That’s a lot of hitting, and even then – admittedly nervous, almost certainly fatigued, and having a rough time with that changeup – Tebow seemed disappointed to have it end. He’d have gone on hiking up his baseball pants and hunting fastballs all day.

Tebow’s agent, Brodie Van Wagenen of CAA, said he hoped to have a contract in time for September instructional league, maybe the Arizona Fall League, maybe winter ball. His client is eager and getting no younger. Maybe, through the scouting reports landing in in-boxes tonight all over the game, that will happen. Maybe the road looks more like indy ball.

“The goal,” Tebow said, “would be to have a career in the big leagues. And then the pursuit of it.”

And if not?

“Guess what?” he said. “I don’t have to live with regret.”

Yeah, you can’t mislead baseball. It’ll tell him soon enough. We all watch eventually, but in the meantime …

“When did that become such a bad thing?” he said. “When did pursuing what you love become a bad thing?”