Sports Illustrated's website has had some articles up this week about Michael Jordan's attempt at playing baseball 15 years ago. I'm guessing this is related to his induction to the Basketball Hall of Fame.
It sort of strikes me as funny how down on Jordan's attempted sport switch the writers seem to be, how disappointed they were (or are) with how it went, him stuck playing Double A ball, hitting about .200, and striking out almost once per game. OK, those are pretty weak stats, no doubt, but consider the circumstances. This is a guy who hasn't played baseball frequently since his early teens, who is now in his late 30s, who trained his body towards one specific set of skills for the last half-decade, now trying to switch gears completely and compete against people that having been working to excel in this sport for as long as he had been working on that other sport. Hell, I'm impressed he did as well as he did. It would be like me trying to join a top-flight collegiate basketball program right now, except I'd fare considerably worse, I think.
I guess people figured since he was MICHAEL JORDAN at basketball, he could also be MICHAEL JORDAN at baseball. Except for that to be the case, he'd have needed to play like Willie Mays, or Musial, or someone along those lines. And that's just kind of ludicrous you know? I guess if you see a guy do what seems like the impossible (athletically speaking), you start to think he can do that regardless of the situation.
The other part of the whole "Jordan plays baseball" thing is something I find terribly amusing. That's the speculation that his time playing baseball was part of some clandestine suspension handed down by David Stern, due to Jordan's tendency to gamble. So Stern basically told the biggest marketing draw his league had to get lost for until he got the gambling jones under control*. I know people like to act as though Stern is freaking Stalin reincarnated, laying down the law and crushing all resistance, but I've always found that a bit hard to swallow. That doesn't mean it's not true, it just means I don't think it is. Everybody knows Stern was too busy arranging the playoff referee rotations to ensure the appropriate teams won**.
* Which apparently didn't work, since MJ seems to still enjoying placing bets on his golf game. I guess money would have to be involved to make golf interesting.
** Though why the hell he couldn't have used that power to spare us some of those Knicks-Heta series in the '90s I don't know. All those 73-70 games nearly killed my interest in watching basketball.
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