Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Margalus: Jose Bautista demonstrates a lesson in lineup construction for Hawk Harrelson
(www.southsidesox.com)
Joey Bats: Show-up time.
Read More...As Jose Bautista came to the plate as the second hitter of the game, Steve Stone noted that Bautista was the rare slugger in the No. 2 hole. He couldn’t really explain it, but that didn’t stop him and Hawk Harrelson from attempting to discredit it.
Stone: One of the reasons why Bautista’s hitting second—and we wondered about that—was that Alex Anthopoulos, their general manager, feels that the best hitter in your lineup should hit second. And this is a guy that ...
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1 2 >I mean, I don't know what was in it for Michael Jordan (my theory is that he was trying to work through the unexpected death of his father, who was a baseball fan), but it was amazing.
Why did the White Sox send Jordan to AA, anyway? It should have been obvious he would be overmatched there, having not played baseball at all for almost 15 years. I'm too young to remember the details of it. Did Jordan refuse to play any lower?
I always felt sort of cheated by the timing of Jordan's absence from the NBA. I think the 1994/1995 Rockets were better than anyone Jordan beat in the Finals except maybe the 1993 Suns, plus they would have presented a unique matchup problem for the Bulls (the Bulls would have been completely helpless to stop Olajuwon). If any team in the 1990s might have had a chance at taking down Jordan's Bulls in the playoffs, I think that Rockets team would have been it.
It would be phenomenal if *I* bat .202. (also 30 steals, 18 CS..ouch Michael). I don't think .202 in AA is outrageous for any world-class athlete who played high-school ball. IMHO.
RTFE
Yep. Hitting professional pitching is an exceptionally difficult athletic feat.
Not revisionism, common sense.
The Jordan piece to read is this one:
http://espn.go.com/espn/story/_/page/Michael-Jordan/michael-jordan-not-left-building
"THE OPPOSITE OF this creeping nostalgia is the way Jordan has always collected slights, inventing them -- nurturing them. He can be a breathtaking #######: self-centered, bullying and cruel. That's the ugly side of greatness. He's a killer, in the Darwinian sense of the word, immediately sensing and attacking someone's weakest spot."
"Jordan is used to being the most important person in every room he enters and, going a step further, in the lives of everyone he meets."
"The people in the suite know about his ego, and his moods, and his anger. They know better than most.... But they also know Jordan, and if they're being honest, they love him.... So they think all the stories of Michael being Michael are funny, even endearing, while someone from the outside can hear the same story and be horrified."
Well said.
I agree with everyone above it's actually amazing that Jordan could jump into the high minors after a decade of not playing baseball and be merely very bad.
That's pretty much said about the great in any field. The exact same thing was said about, oh, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill, Bob Dylan, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Marlon Brando....
But he's Michael Jordan. I'm sorry, I just don't think it's amazing that "Michael Jordan" could do that.
I do give him points for last playing in a baseball program that was probably just a level above sandlot. And he walked 51 times, which is about 30 more times than Pedro Ciriaco would do in a full season. Heh...he was also HBP 4 times. How'd you like to be able to tell people that you beaned Michael Jordan.
Francona did okay. But is it actually amazing that a random AA team didn't have a future significant major leaguer on it?
That is good to note. IIRC, his OBP actually went down late in the season, because crowds would boo when he got a walk. Jordan, as competitive as he was, still wanted to please the crowd and stopped walking as much.
Aren't we supposed to hold him to a higher standard. I'd be impressed if some other early 30s professional athlete could switch to baseball and not completely embarrass themselves. But Michael Jordan? It's not impressive and it's not in the the top 100 on his list athletic accomplishments.
That's exactly my point. If I told you that Bo Jackson secretly played goalkeeper for the New York Cosmos one summer, and did acceptably well...I wouldn't expect anyone to be surprised. That the greatest basketball player in history OPSed .550 in AA just isn't outrageous to me.
Tons and tons of excellent athletes can't hit a baseball to save their life. The Red Sox drafted Shaq Green-Thompson, a top football recruit, precisely because of his athleticism.
In contrast, just about any excellent athlete can make a reaction save.
There's a hell of a lot more to GKing than that...but I do recognize everyone's point about hitting a ball.
It seems like you think baseball is really easy. I would guess that he is the only person who has lived in my lifetime who could take up the sport, after essentially never having played it (he was pitcher before) and not completely embarrass himself. Is your higher standard supposed to mean that he'd somehow be expected to be more than the best non-baseball-playing baseball player in the world over a 40-year span?
Is he supposed to win a Cy Young - while batting in AA?
It is phenomenal for anyone to hit .202 when they are utterly unprepared. I was a 2nd-team all-state player in high school, and after 14 years away from the game, I'd not have been able to hit .050 in AA.
It would be phenomenal if you hit the ball fair.
That's only true if you buy into the notion that general "athletic" skills which are vital in other sports are transferable to hitting a baseball. I've seen very little evidence of that over the years. Even in the days when seasons were shorter and two sport pro athletes were relatively common, there were virtually no star athletes in other sports, other than Bo Jackson, who showed hitting talent in the Majors that was even close to the skills they'd demonstrated in the NFL or NBA.
EDIT: cokes all around
He was a pitcher in HS. Which is almost always utterly meaningless.
You're not a world-class athlete. For a sabr-friendly crowd, you guys are going in some crazy directions to make your point.
Am I impressed that an NBA player, away from the game for 14 years...coming from a program not known for competitive ball could bat .202 in AA ball? Yes. Yes I am. Am I impressed that MICHAEL JORDAN did it? Less so. Am I sneering? No. Does Michael deserve credit? Of course. I shouldn't have made it sound like "anyone who went to last year's baseketball All-star game could hit .202 in Tulsa this summer".
"there were virtually no star athletes in other sports, other than Bo Jackson, who showed hitting talent in the Majors that was even close to the skills they'd demonstrated in the NFL or NBA."
Deion Sanders had a 130 OPS+ as a CF in 1992 for Atlanta, with a league-leading 14 triples in only 97 games while hitting .304. His other years, he hit like - well, like an ok CF, not great.
Brian Jordan, a pretty good NFL player, was 8th in NL MVP voting in 1996 and had a 134 OPS+ in 1998, plus 115 RBI in 1999.
do they count?
Sure, most of them were younger than Jordan when they made the switch and all of them have taking at least a few hacks since high school, but many of them were also far more successful than Jordan at hitting.
I've always worked under the baseless assumptions that Jordan's ego wouldn't let him go to A-ball and/or that he wasn't planning on spending more than a year in the minors so there wasn't any point in putting him on anything vaguely resembling a standard development path. I have a hard time believing that Jerry Reinsdorf was so worried about the media re-enacting the Who concert tragedy in Peoria that he would retard Jordan's development as a baseball player.
Others future MLBrs in other parts of the 1994 CWS system: Mike Cameron, Ray Durham, James Baldwin, Scott Eyre, Carlos Lee, Magglio Ordonez, Mike Sirotka, Orlando Saenz - but they were all above or below AA.
Why? Why is it less impressive for Michael Jordan to hit .202 in AA than for any other NBA player (or even NBA All-Star) who hasn't played baseball above the high school level, and even that 14 years ago? Is there something about being an all-world shooting guard that should make you better at hitting a baseball? What would that something be?
I mean, I could see it if you said you were less impressed that Michael Jordan played a bad defensive center field. There I can see where his speed, athleticism, and ability to read where a basketball was going could be expected to translate directly. But as a hitter? You're talking about an all-world athletic guy coming into the sport cold with a GIANT strike zone and not COMPLETELY embarrassing himself.
Should we also say that we shouldn't be impressed by Miguel Cabrera because he's Miguel Cabrera so he should be Miguel Cabrera.
It's another of those things - - what are we measuring here?
But Jordan was 31 years old. Put him on a "standard development path" and he's 5 years from the majors, which makes him a 36-year-old rookie outfielder whose primary athletic skill - speed - peaked a decade earlier. The only way Michael Jordan could have ever made the majors was if he could blow through the minors in two years and one way to see if he could blow through the minors in two years was to start him out in AA.
Did Jordan play any baseball at all during that 14-year gap. Did he do any practicing at all as a player during that time?
I pretty sure I read that Jordan bought a luxurious bus for his team to travel in? Didn't he also have the locker rooms re-tooled to his specs?
Deion Sanders had a 130 OPS+ as a CF in 1992 for Atlanta, with a league-leading 14 triples in only 97 games while hitting .304. His other years, he hit like - well, like an ok CF, not great.
Brian Jordan, a pretty good NFL player, was 8th in NL MVP voting in 1996 and had a 134 OPS+ in 1998, plus 115 RBI in 1999.
do they count?
Deion Sanders was an A-level Hall of Fame football player with a career 89 OPS+ in the Majors. That one 97 game season aside, I wouldn't call his demonstrated baseball skills remotely comparable to his NFL skills.
Brian Jordan's entire NFL career consisted of 20 punt returns and 8 kickoff returns. He was a good baseball player who dabbled in football, not the other way around.
You're making this binary, which it isn't. There's no reason he couldn't have started at A-ball, and then moved up mid-season. I also think you're under-selling Jordan's athleticism if you think his primary athletic skill on a baseball diamond would've been speed.
I got to see a few games of Rick Ankiel at A-ball after he converted to the OF when he was 25. His path was accelerated, but he was given more opportunity for rudimentary development. From his interactions with players and the coaching staff, even from the stands in Ft. Wayne it was clear he was on a crash course for learning how to hit (I've never seen a player jabber as much with coaches during a game as he did). He apparently was not happy with the Cardinals when they sent him all the way down to A-ball, but that's what you do when a guy is overmatched at AA.
Brian Jordan started at safety for the Falcons and I think he made the Pro Bowl (though he could have been named as an injury replacement if I'm even remembering correctly) the season before he abruptly quit to play baseball full time.
What would it have been?
Exactly. I, unlike Michael Jordan, was a baseball player. In what alternate universe is this not a point in favor of "Jesus Christ, that's impressive!"????
Brian Jordan's career consisted of 32 games, 30 starts, at strong safety for the Atlanta Falcons at the ages of 23-24 (plus 4 games at age 22). He made the NFC Pro Bowl team as a reserve in 1991.
He played minor-league ball from 21 through 24 but given he never played more than half a season during that time, I'm guessing he prioritized football. I don't know when he officially gave up football but he made the Cards opening day roster at age 25 (1992) and never played in the NFL again.
I sometimes wonder how we'd look back on MJ if we'd had social media during his playing career. That really applies to the 90's as a whole. Between Michael Jordan: minor league baseball player, the OJ trial, and the Lewinsky Affair, I think it's fair to say we missed out on some absolutely fantastic memes.
If Brian Jordan was a Pro Bowl reserve - clearly an "above average player" - while only "dabbling" in football, then he is even more of a marvel than I thought!
If Bo was 31 and hadn't touched a soccer ball since he was a high schooler playing forward against low-level competition, then yes, I would be extraordinarily surprised and impressed.
Chad Ochocinco pretty much tried to do exactly that. He went back to football.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/a/aingeda01.shtml
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