Michael Jordan, baseball player
Opting to take a year off from his usual dominance of the NBA, so goes the story anyway, Michael Jordan signs a minor league contract 30 years ago today to play baseball with the Chicago White Sox.
After a few spring training games, the White Sox send Jordan to Class AA Birmingham, where the wannabe outfielder hits .202 in 127 games with three homers and 51 runs batted in.
While Jordan steals 30 bases, he also strikes out 114 times in 436 at-bats, the latter number of which by today’s standards does not seem so bad.
After one season traveling by bus along the backroads of the Class AA Southern League, Jordan returns to the NBA and wins another three titles with the Chicago Bulls, with whom he previously wins three NBA titles before his one-year baseball sabbatical.
Jordan’s manager in the minors?
Terry Francona with Michael Jordan
That would be Terry Francona, who 10 years after tutoring Jordan in the minors leads the 2004 Boston Red Sox to their first World Series championship in nearly 90 years.
Francona later tells ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt of first meeting Jordan in the spring of 1994.
“One of the first things I asked him, I said, “Hey, for this to work, you’ve gotta respect what we’re doing and the game,’ because that was important to me,” Francona says.
“I had 24 other guys that had worked really hard to get to the Double-A level. They weren’t making very much money, and that was important to me.”
While Birmingham finishes the 1994 season with a losing record at 65-74, five of the 18 position players on Francona’s roster that summer eventually reach the major leagues.
Francona says that Jordan, with a full commitment to the game, could have been on that list, too.
“If he had been willing to commit three years” Francona tells Van Pelt, “I think he would have found his way to the major leagues, I really believe that.
“One, because of some of the tools he had, but the other one and maybe more important, and I found out first hand, when you tell Michael, ‘No,’ he finds a way to make the answer be, ‘Yes.’ And it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, he’s really good at that.”
