Stop reading this now if what you seek is the definitive answer as to whether Michael Jordan will be able to hit a live curve from a live arm attached to a live major-league pitcher. It’s too early in the experiment for him to know and too late in life for us to become that smart.
Yet, while the professed purists wring their hands about the folly of it all, perhaps those of us with untrained eyes can focus on the story’s flip side. That is, not whether Jordan can be taught baseball but what baseball can learn from Jordan. If he’s wasting his time trying out for the White Sox, he might not be wasting baseball’s. But only if baseball pays attention.
You’ll get no argument here about baseball. On its worst day, it is the best game. That baseball has survived some of the people in it confirms its indestructiblity. Which is part of the problem. The most perfect sport, by proving it can take a punch, leaves itself open to lightweight challenges. You step into the ring often enough, you’re going to get hit by some tomato can.
Pro basketball, conversely, endured the industry’s version of last rites. The NBA was this close to extinction before realizing that a little personality goes a long way. Basketball comprehended that it could live only if it showed it could breathe and smile and talk, too.
Jordan is the most badgered athlete on the planet, but he’s also among the most accessible. When he gives an interview, it’s not as though his throat hurts. When he signs an autograph, it’s not as though his hand hurts. Will baseball be watching Michael, however brief his time may be?
Maybe it’s the territory. NBA owners and players decided peaceful coexistence was better for all than open warfare. Management didn’t knock the product, and labor sold it. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were gifted, yes, but they contributed beyond the box scores.
When rookies like Jordan came aboard, they understood that the job of marketing and entertaining isn’t measured by a 24-second clock. Jordan will tell baseball about this phenomenon, if baseball will listen.
If. Baseball, for all its scandals, scoundrels, frayed edges should have an absence of arrogance. But, no, it’s the NBA that reaches out to the public, the NBA that is the envy of every other league. Jordan can play a Sunday afternoon game on national TV before the youth of America and, somehow, the NBA doesn’t fold.
Yet, baseball starts its World Series at bedtime, then wonders whatever happened to the next generation? Well, who abandoned whom here? Did the fans forget baseball or did baseball forget the fans? Michael could answer that one, too, if baseball bothers to ask.
In the first week of the 1985 season, only his second with the Bulls, Jordan incurred a broken bone in his left foot. He missed 64 games and should have missed more. His bosses begged him to sit out. Let it heal, come back next year. Michael refused. He wanted to play, he had to play, he played.
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There’s no cruise control on his gear box. He could address that issue of effort with baseball, but he’ll have to do it in the training rooms. Since free agency and arbitration introduced sloth to our national pastime, the whirlpool business has been booming. You’re nobody in baseball if you’re not on the disabled list.
Jordan, from an uptempo game where everybody’s on the run, never seems too hurried to pat a kid on the head. He could feel out of place in baseball, a sport that should lend itself to conversation instead of hiding. Jordan, a people person, might have to get used to baseball, which has lost touch with its roots. Jordan, who played every inch of the court, probably will be shocked to see a $5 million ballplayer loaf after hitting a three-hopper to shortstop. But he’ll learn.
Then again, maybe baseball will learn something from him about what it takes. That’s really the question. Not whether he can hit a curve. But whether baseball, the best game of all despite itself, will strike out or grant him an audience.