Revisiting Michael Jordan's Baseball Career

On October 6, 1993, Michael Jordan held a press conference in Deerfield, Illinois to announce his retirement from the NBA, at the age of 30.  For that moment, the world stopped.  I was 7 and a huge Chicago Bulls fan.  All I really knew of existence to that point was that Michael Jordan was great, and I had no reason to suspect that would ever change.  I played hundreds of hours of basketball from my Little Tikes hoop to the driveway, and I never played the role of anyone but Michael Jordan at his most heroic.  Had he walked away from sports all together, and disappeared from the spotlight to never return, it might have taken me a decade and a half to fully understand.  Michael Jordan's father, James Jordan Sr. was murdered in July of 1993.  The weight of that loss was impossible for me to grasp, and probably still is to some degree.  As the 1993-1994 NBA season approached, and details of his father's murder, and the subsequent arrests played out the news, Jordan's grief intensified.  At his retirement, Jordan would tell reporters "I went through all the different stages of getting myself prepared for the next year, but the desire..... was not there."  Looking back now, it was an unexpected time of vulnerability from someone who in every other way seemed invincible.  Michael Jordan was superhuman.  I never expected to see his frailty.  That fall, MJ began working out at the Comiskey Training Facilities with the Chicago White Sox, and in January, Michael announced his plan to attend Spring Training with the White Sox in Sarasota, Florida.  Months later, Phil Jackson, Michael's legendary NBA coach, would say "It was really his father's dream that he play baseball.  His father wanted to play pro ball and did play semi-pro.  When his father passed away, I think Michael was kind of living out his father's dream."

Michael Jordan played one season of professional baseball before eventually returning to the NBA.  Jordan's time as a minor league baseball player is often regarded as a failure.  I think that's wrong.  Jordan's accomplishments in baseball are unfairly compared to his greatness as a basketball player.  There was no level of success he could have reached as a baseball player that could have measured to what he had already accomplished in the NBA.  In that sense, he was doomed to fail.  However, if you analyze Jordan's baseball career on it's own merits, it's in some ways as remarkable as anything he accomplished in the NBA.

Baseball is really hard.  I think that's obvious to most people, but I'm not sure it's widely enough appreciated just how fucking hard we're talking about.  There are a lot of people that can dunk a basketball that never played competitively.  I used to play a turn-based game with my Dad and brother where we'd all take a three-point shot.  If you made it, you got a point.  If you missed, you had the opportunity to make two consecutive free-throws to recover the point.  The first to five points won.  I played the least amount of basketball and was the worst natural shooter of the three of us, but I hated to lose.  I quickly realized I wasn't going to be able to match them in shooting threes, so, like a maniac, I spent every evening for about a month shooting hundreds of free throws until I was making them at something around a 75% rate.  I broke the game and made it not fun for anyone.  The point is, after only a few weeks of practice, I was making free throws at a rate only slightly below the NBA average.  As a fairly ordinary athlete and unskilled player, there's at least one thing on a basketball court that, through repetition, I'm capable of doing at a near professional level.  The basic fundamentals of the game are accessible to anyone.  The difference is, at the professional level, they're played by giant human beings and freak athletes.  Baseball takes the same principles and turns them up to 10.

Think of the best baseball player you know.  No, it doesn't count that Anthony Rizzo gave you a re-tweet for your Birthday.  I'm talking personally.  The best baseball player you know is an awful baseball player.  About one in 200, or 0.5% of Senior High School baseball players will eventually be drafted by a MLB team.  Of that group, only 10% will ever reach the Major Leagues.  That's 1 in about every 49,000, or .00002% of the male population will play in the Major Leagues.  Michael Jordan, past his athletic prime, and having not played baseball competitively in over a decade, debuted at Double-A.  The following comes from Jeff Moore at The Hardball Times (here).

Double-A: The entrance to the “upper minors,” the jump to Double-A tends to be the most difficult for prospects, and tells us the most about them.

The Double-A level is where hitters and pitchers begin to have a plan. This is where pitchers can’t get by without a decent off-speed pitch and the hitters who can’t hit them are exposed. The competition is good, as evidenced by the fact that we see players jump from Double-A to the majors with relative frequency. Each organization has its own philosophy on doing so, but it does happen often because of the advanced level of competition. There aren’t as many players in Double-A with major league experience as there are in Triple-A, but one could argue that the pure talent level is actually higher because players are heading in an upward direction as opposed to the stagnation that tends to take place with some Triple-A players.

I don't know how exactly to illustrate what it would be like for a 31-year old man, regardless of athletic prowess, to pick up a bat for the first time in 12 years in Double-A baseball.  It's beyond imaginable.  I'll return us for a moment to my experience.  I'm obviously not the athlete Jordan was, but I did play baseball up until I was about 15.  I had reasonable enough physical skills, but baseball requires a level of self-confidence that borders on insanity.  You need to be able to fail between 60-70% of the time as a hitter and yet, immediately forget the failures in order approach the next at bat with absolute confidence.  If you can't do that, it makes no difference how skilled you are.  At 20, I was invited to play in an adult baseball league, barring a try-out to make sure I wasn't handicapped or anything.  In the try-out I put on a laser show, and was happily added to the team.  Like I said, the physical skills were there.  Unfortunately, after 5 years off, stepping back into a competitive game against pitchers only throwing in the mid-80s, I went 0-14 with 13Ks before my season mercifully ended with all of my equipment being stolen out of my car.  I was over-matched early, then, horrified at my own failure, I started swinging at everything.  I swung at pitches I never saw.  Pitches I never would have swung at in batting practice, with no pressure, just having fun, instead of obsessively thinking "Don't fuck up.  Don't fuck up.  Don't fuck up."  It was a disaster.

That was a league playing with the other 99.5% of baseball players that would never be drafted.  Now, imagine doubling the time away from the game, and playing against competition that's the best pure minor league talent.  I might have been able to shoot a few thousands free throws and work my way to mediocrity.  There's no amount of repetition that would prepare the 99.5% of us to face Double-A hitters or pitchers.  You can't practice your way to throwing or hitting 95-mph fastballs.  Most of us would be so embarrassingly fucked, it would be like the nightmare I'm sure we've all had of showing up to high school completely naked.  You'd stand out.... and not in a good way.

Now, Michael Jordan was bad in his one season at Double-A.  In fact, he was one of the worst players at the level.  However, at 31-years old, in his first competitive baseball in 12 years, for MJ to blend in and not obviously stand out, was remarkable.  He looked like he belonged there.  In fact, in the last month of the season, Jordan hit .280.  He was basically doing baseball as a hobby at a top .00002% performance level.  It's hard to compare Jordan's case to anything because this case had never happened and probably never will again.

There's one other way I can think of looking at this.  Baseball is extraordinarily specialized.  None more so than the pitcher.  Jon Bois once compared pitchers hitting as reflecting our society in becoming hopelessly specialized.  He said "Take your Enterprise Rent-A-Car employee and ask him/her to work the next day at Hertz, she's not going to be able to do it.  The computer is different, the system is different, everything is different.  Which seems really strange because it's basically the same job... Chief among these examples is the pitcher who can't hit."  Now, comparing Michael Jordan to pitchers hitting isn't exactly the same thing because pitchers didn't spend 12 years in between at-bats building Hall of Fame basketball careers.  In most cases, though, a major league caliber pitcher was also the best hitter on his High School team.  Once drafted, they're assigned more specialized roles and hitting becomes far less a priority than developing pitching specific skills.  Once in the pros, some pitchers will go as many as several years between at-bats.  Because of this, despite being exceptional athletes, and great baseball players, most pitchers are terrible Major League hitters.  In 2015, Major League pitchers hit .131 AVG, .158 OBP, .168 SLG, .327 OPS, with a 37.7 K%, and a 2.6 BB%

The rough Major League Equivalent from Triple-A to the Majors is a loss of offensive production near 18% for hitters.  From Double-A to the Majors is 36%.  We can take MJ's 1994 Double-A season and find the MLE, then compare it to ML pitchers.  Jordan hit .202 AVG, .289 OBP, .266 SLG, .556 OPS, with a 22.9 K%, and a 9.75 BB%.

Penalized 36% of the MLE, gives Michael a stat line, compared to ML pitchers, of:

Michael: .129 AVG. .184 OBP, .170 SLG, .354 OPS, 30.7 K%, and a 6.24 BB%
Pitchers: .131 AVG, .158 OBP, .168 SLG, .327 OPS, with a 37.7 K%, and a 2.6 BB%

So, in Michael Jordan's one season, he put up numbers slightly better than the average production of a Major League pitcher.  That's incredible.  I know this batting line looks awful, and it is, but hopefully by now I've help illustrate, there might not be another person alive who could pick up a bat after 12 years, at 31-years old, and match the production of Major League pitchers.  Michael Jordan's baseball career might not have reflected his legendary success on the basketball court, but it should be considered no less remarkable.  It's a shame it's remembered by so many as a failure.  It wasn't.

"I talk to him more in the subconscious than actual words.... Keep doing what you're doing,' he'd tell me. 'Keep trying to make it happen. You can't be afraid to fail. Don't give a damn about the media.' Then he'd say something funny -- or recall something about when I was a boy, when we'd be in the back- yard playing catch together like we did all the time." - Michael Jordan speaking on his father's presence as he lived out his dream

Golden Corral (The Poem)

Line at the door, herded in
like cattle to the slaughter
Bribe the ferryman his obol
For awaiting is the fodder

Torment, silence's metronome
as the feet shuffle in rhythm
Grab a fork and a plate
Fall into place, now harmony's victim

The absence of hope
hangs in the air like a fog
Boundless stacks of plates
Off for more we all slog

He took the last god damn biscuit
I think in my head, now annoyed
I'll have to wait for the next batch
An eternity, to fill this infinite void

For dessert, cookies and cake
Can I dip my soul in the chocolate fountain?
Breathing is labored
The air has thinned, at the peak of this mountain

The adventure is now over, Still
Facing some difficulty recovering morale
I offer sage advice: be wary
For shit will get dark at the Golden Corral