Derek Jeter Says Michael Jordan Could Really Play Baseball

On April 24, 1994, at Greer Stadium in Nashville, Birmingham Barons right fielder Michael Jordan hit a single off Nashville Xpress pitcher Joe Norris.

That was one of the hits. Jordan had signed a Minor League Baseball contract with the Chicago White Sox on February 7, 1994, after retiring from the NBA following three straight championships with the Chicago Bulls. He was assigned to the Barons, the White Sox Double-A affiliate, and played 127 games in the outfield. He finished the year batting .202, with three home runs, 51 RBIs, 30 stolen bases, 51 walks, and 114 strikeouts, a total that led the team. Later he batted .252 for the Scottsdale Scorpions in the Arizona Fall League. On March 18, 1995, amid the MLB strike, he announced his return to the Bulls.

Years afterward, a shortstop who built a Hall of Fame career with the New York Yankees spoke about that season in a recorded interview that has circulated under the title “Derek Jeter Says Michael Jordan Could Really Play Baseball.” Derek Jeter did not treat the .202 as a punch line. He treated it as evidence.

“A lot of people laugh. ‘Oh, Michael was this. Michael was that.’ Michael Jordan played baseball in Little League, and then the next time he played, he’s playing in Double-A baseball,” Jeter said. The gap between those two levels is the point he kept returning to. Jordan had played baseball at Emsley A. Laney High School and quit two games into his senior year to focus on basketball. The next organized baseball he played at any length was Double-A.

Jeter walked through the professional ladder the way a player who climbed it remembers it. “Now, when you play in the minor leagues, once you get to Double-A—the biggest jump, right? I just want, for everyone listening, you know, you have rookie ball, you have Low-A, you have High-A, you have Double-A, you have Triple-A, then you get to the major leagues.” Then the sentence that has traveled farthest from the clip: “Once you get to Double-A, the biggest jump is from A to Double-A. If you can play in Double-A baseball, you can play in the major leagues.”

Jordan went straight into that level and hit .202. The current major-league batting average sits at .243. Jeter refused the easy reading of the gap. “Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, you hit .200.’ And that’s not easy to do.” He offered his own first professional number as proof. “I hit, my first year…I was, you mentioned, a high school Player of the Year. I went to rookie ball, hit .202. And had a great two weeks. I was hot the last two weeks to get just over .200, man.”

Jeter’s .202 came in 1992 with the Gulf Coast Yankees, the Yankees’ rookie-ball club, after he had been named a high school player of the year and drafted out of Kalamazoo Central. He was a baseball prospect from the start. Jordan was not. He had just left the peak of basketball, and the move carried a personal weight. His father, James Jordan Sr., was murdered on July 23, 1993. The baseball experiment that followed was tied to a dream the two of them had shared of Michael playing in the major leagues.

None of that, in Jeter’s telling, made the translation automatic. “So it’s tough to do, and people just think you watch something on television and because you’re great at one sport, it should translate into another. It doesn’t happen like that.” He said the same idea again in nearly the same words: “People think because you’re great at one sport, it should translate into another. It doesn’t happen like that.” The repetition was the argument. Skill in one sport does not hand a player the instincts of another. Jordan had to acquire them in public, at Double-A, against pitchers.

Jeter’s judgment of the result was plain. “So Michael was a lot better than people give him credit for. And if he played longer, I think he would just continue to improve.” That is the claim the video carries. Not that Jordan was already a finished big-leaguer in 1994, but that the work he did at that level, after so long away from the sport, was real work, and that time would have moved the numbers.

Jordan did not stay. He left baseball and went back to the Bulls, where he won three more titles from 1996 to 1998. The Barons season remained the odd chapter people reduced to a single average. Jeter’s account puts the average beside another one that looks almost identical and means something different: a future Yankees captain scratching out .202 in rookie ball with a hot stretch at the end, and a basketball champion doing the same in Double-A after Little League and a high-school exit.

The single off Joe Norris was one swing inside that year. The rest of the record is the full 127 games, the strikeouts that led the club, the stolen bases, the walks, the Fall League average a few points higher, and a shortstop years later refusing to laugh at any of it.

“So Michael was a lot better than people give him credit for. And if he played longer, I think he would just continue to improve.”