He wants to emulate Bo Jackson? The only guy I can recall who legitimately could play two major sports was Deion Sanders (but I think Kirk Gibson could have).
Those guys did, but there may well be many more who could have. It wasn’t uncommon up until the Sixties, when pay rates got high enough that players didn’t feel the need to have offseason income.
Danny Ainge couldn’t hit breaking balls as a Blue Jay or he wouldn’t have been a Celtic, for another example.
And Dave Winfield.
I like that iddea too, but there’s two obvious disadvantages.
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There is no really elegant way to arrange the schedule. 18 games in division and 9 games out of division gives you 162 but 9 games against an opponent is a terrible scheduling burden for baseball (think about it.) You can drop to 8 games extradivision and… uh, 22 in division? Go ahead, do the math. It sucks, no matter how you arrange it.
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You are lowering the quality of playoff teams. It’s inevitable there will be many years where a 95-67 team doesn’t make the playoffs and a 82-80 team does, and the likelihood of a losing team making the playoffs is frighteningly real. Say what you will about the wild card, it ensures that good teams get a shot.
I agree that 22 isn’t great. You could do 3, 4, and 4 at each team”s ballpark, or you could do 3, 3, 3, 2…Neither is ideal.
I’ll just point out that back in the days of the 154 game schedule, that’s what they did: 22 games against everyone else in the league. I’m not sure how they worked it, but somehow they managed.
Brian Jordan was who I thought of, after Bo and Deion. 32 WAR over 15 years with the Cards and Braves, and two years as a full-time starting DB for the Falcons isn’t shabby, if not quite Hall of The Very Good.
I thought the Wilson Yankees thing was sort of like what the Padres did for Garth Brooks a few years ago: basically let this VIP treat Spring Training like a fantasy camp.
I’d be mildly miffed if I was a Seahawks fan. How will screwing around with the Yankees help your football team to another Super Bowl? But it’s not like he’s missing anything all that important with the NFL team during that time, right?
Yeah, somehow Jordan doesn’t seem to be remembered in these conversations, even though he was by far the best baseball player of the three.
Better than Bo? I completely disagree. Had he dedicated himself to baseball, he could have been a 5 tool monster. His conditioning would have been tailored for baseball.
What are you smoking? Jordan wasn’t even a good minor leaguer. Bo was actually a really good player who if he didn’t waste time on football would probably have been great.
I believe he is referring to Brian, not Michael.
The schedules were very wonky back then. A lot of doubleheaders, periods of 2 days off, 5-game series, stuff like that.
Scheduled doubleheaders again would be great, if the MLBPA would ever go for it.
Great teams being eliminated in regular-season pennant (well, divisional) races would be even better.
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Its the owners who did away with doubleheaders. Its a loss of gate revenue.
The following two posts from RickJay, when we had this discussion in 2014, are pretty convincing IMHO that while Bo was immensely physically talented, he was never going to be a great baseball player: #10 and #20 in the thread.
His best year was probably '90, despite the All Star selection in '89, and he still only had a line of .272/.342/.523, with 28 HR and 78 RBI. Even assuming he would play a near full 162, playing baseball full time, an .860-ish OPS makes you very good, not great. Anyway, I thought Rick made some great points in that thread.
Bo sure had some amazing plays though. Throwing out Harold Reynolds, climbing the wall in Baltimore,, the timeout home run… Giggle.
That line in 1990 was actually pretty great. It’s easy to forget that from 88 to 92 offense was actually pretty low in the league. If he’d had enough plate appearances that year, it would have put him sixth in the league in OPS and fifth in slugging.
Anyway, Bo’s best season was better than anything Brian Jordan ever did, his second-best season was in line with Jordan’s best six or seven seasons, and his third-best season was not good at all. It is really hard to figure out how good a baseball-only Bo would have been due to both the injury and the possibility he could have polished his skills better; Rick made a decent case that he never would have been an all-time great, but then neither was Jordan. (Jordan actually walked less often than Jackson did, though he didn’t strike out nearly as often, either.)
Again, had Bo conditioned himself for baseball and developed his skills solely to play baseball he would have been a better player. I know its a big what if but he was a part time baseball player. He had the physical tools to be another Barry Bonds.
Well, no, it wasn’t.
Brian Jordan’s best season was 1998, which is obviously better than any Bo Jackson season. Jackson had two good years, 1989 and 1990; Jordan in 1998 had a better year with the bat than either of those seasons, and he was a better defensive player.
Jackson’s 1990 numbers are good in context, but it’s two thirds of a year. Going by WAR, which I know is flawed but it’s a good approximation, Jordan had four years better than Bo Jackson’s best year, and a few others that were pretty much just as good. Brian Jordan was a very good baseball player. He wasn’t as spectacular as Bo, but he got on base and he was a really good outfielder.
Jackson was a full time baseball player for years.
“Physical tools to be another Barry Bonds” is about as meaningful an observation as saying he had the physical tools to be another Wayne Gretzky, but if he’d only worked harder at being a hockey player.
Major League players are, of course, REALLY good athletes. They are much better athletes than I think even most fans realize. But if your definition of athlete is just pure strength or speed, there are obviously many baseball players who are stronger and speedier than Barry Bonds. There are thousands of athletes across the range of North American sport stronger and speedier than Barry Bonds. Bonds was very strong and fast, but the main reason he was a major league regular at the age of 21 and became an all-time great was not strength and speed, but SKILL. All the strength and speed in the world will not overcome a lack of skill in baseball, or, for that matter, most sports.
An absolutely central, necessary skill for a professional baseball position player is the ability to control the strike zone. The correlation between strike zone judgment and a player’s value ceiling is incredibly close to 1. The correlation is way stronger than for basically any other characteristic; it’s stronger than for power, for speed, for anything. Every great hitter in Major League history - every single one - had a very good ratio of walks to strikeouts. If they struck out a lot, they walked a lot; if they didn’t walk much they didn’t strike out much. There are no exceptions; go ahead and look. In fact, if you tier great hitters - say “the twenty best ever” and the next twenty, and so on, you will find each tier is reliably a little less impressive in K-BB ratio than the last.
Strike zone judgment is a skill that is, almost without exception, clearly possessed by a major league hitter from the moment they appear in the big leagues. I am sure there’s an exception or two - Sammy Sosa, kinda - but 99 times out of a hundred, a player who has bad strike zone judgment when he is young always will.
WSo for me to believe that Bo Jackson was ever going to be a great hitter, I am being asked to believe two really, really improbable things. One, that he would hjave been a great hitter despite the fact that he struck out four or five times for every walk, an accomplishment I believe would have been unique in all the history of MLB; second, that if that is not true, Jackson would have suddenly become much, much better at strike zone judgment at the age of 28, despite having already been a major league regular for five years - a very rare occurrence indeed.
Yeah, I wasn’t taking defense into account, where Bo was always a minus and Jordan was usually a strong plus player. My bad.
Also, in terms of natural athletic gifts, things like vision and reaction time aren’t super obvious to the casual observer but are much more important than the athletic gifts we can clearly see.
Erm, not really. I mean yeah, MLB was his only sport from 1991 on (the White Sox years), but that was of course *after *the hip injury forced him to give up football. And even then, he never played more than about a half a season’s worth of games.
It’s impossible to say how good he could have been if he’d only ever played MLB. He may have peaked in '89-'90 or he might have finished with a hall of fame career.