Re Michael Jordan the living legend NBA player, who tried to be a baseball star a few years ago as well, but gave it up after a season or two in the minors. What was his problem? Bad hitting? Bad fielding? Why didn’t Michael Jeffrey Jordan cut it as a baseball player?
Just curious.
IMHO - in baseball, particularly in terms of hitting pitches thrown by major league pitchers, quick reaction time is extremely important - and if you don’t have that, then you’re simply not going to cut it as a baseball player. I know that when I was making futile attempts to be a baseball player in high school I’d always end up swinging at fastballs after they were already in the catcher’s mitt.
…which is why I like golf. The ^*(!! ball stays still until after you swing at it. Sometimes even after that. 
Given that he is a truly gifted athlete, he probably would have been pretty successful … if he had been able to play with and against other guys like himself, which is to say guys who had practiced basketball every day for years, instead of guys who had practiced baseball every day for years like they guys he was playing against.
Yes, I know “every day” is pushing it a little, but you know what I mean.
Have you ever tried that MJ cologne he was hawking back then?
Oh…metaphorically…
I think for the most part he was the victim of expectations - either very high ones or none at all.
Also aren’t most baseball players rather compactly built? His strike zone was probably twice as big as many players.
According to this site he had a .202 batting average - not too good - but I have no idea how many total at bats this is from. And he did hit 3 homers that season. I do seem to remember he did steal bases fairly well, and fielded decently. But I suppose fans couldn’t accept a mediocre Michael Jordan.
A .202 batting average in the minors is not good. Lets face it- he isn’t a baseball player. Hitting takes coordination and timing. Fielding takes coordination and concentration. He’s an athlete, but transitioning from one sport to another is not easy. Especially hand-eye sports like baseball.
I’m proud of him, though. He obviously goes after his dreams. He doesn’t play basketball anymore for reputation or money. He isn’t getting money and is losing his reputation (not in my eyes though). He loves the game. Same for baseball- he wanted to give it a shot. Not for money or reputation, because he sucked and was an amateur. He did it for himself.
In high school, I played with a guy who was eventually drafted by the Chi Cubs. He was a lefty with a good fastball and a nasty curve, nobody could hit him. I was a decent hitter, but this guy had me so off-balance that I was beaten before I even got in the batters box.
I can’t imagine what a Major League breaking ball must look like. Picking up the movement of the ball early enough to make contact (or let it go) requires something beyond athletic ability.
Practice, practice, practice, practice.
The number of people who can switch between elite levels of two different sports are very few.
There have been a lot of guys who have played two sports professionally. But there are very few who have played two sports well at the professional level.
Even a great athlete like Jim Thorpe was a rather pedestrian baseball player.
A better question might be: Why was Jackie Robinson such a good baseball player? He was terrible in college. He was a great football player and basketball player however. He only went into baseball after the War because it provided more financial opportunities for him.
No doubt Jackie Robinson would have been a great player in the NFL.
Getting to AA ball is something many many ballplayers dream about. He was a better baseball player than 98% of the rest of the world. Getting to the majors is really hard to do. He may have made it if he had stuck with it. He chose the right sport, IMHO.
Jordan probably did not have the same natural abilities for baseball as he had for basketball.
Another factor, he entered pro baseball after 30 years of age. That’s pretty late in life to learn to hit even minor league pitching.
A player hitting .202 in the middle minors at the age of 32 will probably hit about .160 in the majors and never draw a walk or hit a home run. A player with a serious chance of becoming a genuine major league ballplayer should be able to hit .202 in double-A by the time he’s 20. And Jordan would have gotten worse; he was well past a ballplayer’s normal peak. 32 is the year when good-to-mediocre ballplayers’ careers are ending.
He was a bad baseball player because he just never played baseball. By that age, he was 14 years too late. Baseball is a game of practice.
There was a book about this, IIRC. Not entirely about Jordan, but one of a handful of sample cases about how tough it is to train your body to learn new skills at an old age. At a young age, before extensive specialization, Jordan probably could have been like Robinson or Dave Winfield–capable of excelling in virtually any sport (he is a great golfer, after all). But after 20 years of basketball, he’s no better a baseball player than Winfield would have been had he tried out for the Bulls at age 32.
Bit of a hijack, but it’s been a while since you heard anyone suggest Michael was going to go on the PGA tour after retiring from basketball, eh?
I have no doubt he’s pretty good for a duffer, but it was ALWAYS ridiculous to hear sportcasters say he had PGA potential! To suggest such a thing is to show disrespect for the REAL professional golfers. Guys like Tiger Woods, Ernie Els, Vijay Singh and Phil Mickelson have been working on their golf games for hours, every day, for decades. The idea that Michael Jordan (or anybody else) could take up golf as an adult, play a little in his spare time, and acquire the same skills is not only silly, it’s INSULTING to Tiger et al.
Similarly, it’s insulting to guys like Tony Gwynn and George Brett to suggest that a 32 year old athlete who’d hardly played baseball since high school should be able to duplicate their skills after a few months in the minor leagues.
We really can’t judge whether Michael COULD have been a great baseball player or a great golfer if he’d devoted himself to those games from his youth. But we CAN say that, even if he had all the natural ability in the world, there was little likelihood of him achieving stardom in a new sport as an adult.
“Don’t you realize just how hard this game is?” - Ted Williams, on Baseball.
He didn’t love baseball. Not the way he loved basketball. He didn’t take it seriously, IMO. He thought it was going to be easy.
Actually, I think that a .202 BA showed Jordan’s amazing athletic skills really. I mean, this is a guy that hadn’t played competitive baseball since when, sophomore year of high school maybe? There are damn few people that could not touch a bat for ~15 years, then even foul tip mid minor league pitching.
As to why he wasn’t better, pretty much everything everyone has said so far. Hitting a baseball is a skill that requires hours of practice and is easy to lose. No one just picks up a bat and starts smacking even mediocre pitching. By the time he started in, it was way too late to learn that technical of a body skill to the level required to actually have a shot in the majors.
I agree with jk1245 and essvee–he DID cut it as a baseball player. I’ll bet that getting into AA ball puts a person in the top 1/2 of the top 1% of the population. That’s pretty damn good by most standards. And .202 isn’t a great average, but rather than focusing on how it would have inevitably gone lower as he got older, I’d rather imagine what it could have been had he played in his early 20’s.
I think the answer you are looking for is in this book. Klawans is a neurologist who has studied (among many other things) spatial development. Claims that the brain develops differently when we are younger if we reinforce certain skills (eg. throwing 3 pointers). If we pick up new tasks later in life, the brain has pretty well finished developing, therefore we tend not to become as proficient at these tasks.
His UCLA teammate, Kenny Washington, was one of several men (like Tank Younger) who broke the color barrier in the NFL at about the same time Robinson was doing it in the Major Leagues…
To be precise, Washington and Strode and Younger were rebreaking the color line in the NFL.
The NFL allowed players of all races in to the league in its early years. But in the early 1930s, when the NFL was starting to become a bit more respectable, it decided it had to establish a color line like other major sports.
Ahh, the “good old days”!
Right. Which is why I phrased it that way. (One of the early black pro players was Paul Robeson, who had been an All-American at Rutgers, and is [finally], in the College Football Hall of Fame.)
Baseball actually did the same thing. There were several star players before and right after the turn of the century, like Fleet Walker.
Woody Strode! What a man. 
Played in the NFL and fought Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, one of my favorite scenes in film history.