Michael Jordan's Brief, Strange Life in Baseball

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the midst of becoming the greatest basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan retired from the NBA and set his sights on baseball. The reason? To pay homage to his recently slain father. Jordan training with the White Sox and joining the minor leagues created major media buzz, as ball players and fans criticized the move. ESPN senior writer Steve Wulf was with Sports Illustrated at the time, and his 1994 coverage of Jordan's foray into baseball made news of its own, as it angered MJ himself. Wulf tells us about Michael's efforts to succeed with the Double-A Birmingham Barons, and how Jordan may have been closer than we know to being called up to bigs, had he not returned to basketball. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It was always his father's dream that he'd be a baseball player.
0:04.5	And so I didn't try to talk about it.
0:05.7	But I did say to him, you know, playing baseball is a lot harder than you think it is.
0:18.4	That's Chicago Bulls owner, Jerry Reinsdorf, talking about the most unusual chapter in Michael Jordan's career.
0:25.8	His brief and divisive stint as a minor league baseball player.
0:30.6	Many fans think of Jordan's baseball career as a failure, but the truth is more complicated.
0:36.3	Today, ahead of the last dance, we hear from a former
0:40.2	baseball writer who was a skeptic at first, but learned over time not to underestimate his erinus.
0:48.0	I'm Minikimes. I'm Sunmin Kimes, mother of Minakimes. It's Friday, May 8th.
0:55.8	This is ESPN Daily, presented by Marathon.
0:59.7	Happy Mother's Day.
1:01.2	Mina will take it from here.
1:07.5	Perfect.
1:08.5	No, let's do it again.
1:09.6	No, you know it. There was Wallace. Oh, don't do it again. No, you nailed it.
1:11.7	There was Wallace.
1:16.3	Oh, please.
1:17.3	Okay.
1:18.0	Yeah, that was perfect.
1:19.1	Thank you, Mom.
1:20.7	All right.
1:21.2	Thank you so much.
	...

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