The stories regarding Michael Jordan trying his hand at baseball in 1994 are now surfacing thanks to the recently-released documentary "The Last Dance" chronicling the NBA Hall-of-Famer's final season with the Chicago Bulls.
Thanks to an appearance on OMF with Glenn Ordway, Lou Merloni and Christian Fauria Thursday, Jordan's manager with the Birmingham Barons and former Red Sox skipper Terry Francona added some more insight.
"He respected the game so much," Francona said. "And he respected the people in the game. So it made it easy to be patient with him because you had to be because he hadn't played baseball. But he wanted to learn the lingo. He wanted to learn. He just was so hungry to learn anything he could about baseball that it made it work. I give him all the credit for that because it could have gone off the rails a number of ways and it never did."
The current Indians manager was just 35 years old when charged with the responsibility of becoming Jordan's first and only baseball manager. It was Francona's third year as a skipper in professional baseball, and second in Birmingham.
The then-31-year-old Jordan would play in 102 games for the White Sox' Double-A club, hitting .202 with a .556 OPS, three homers and 30 stolen bases.
"When I look back it was the greatest learning experience you could ever be thrust into," Francona noted. "I don't know if I viewed it that way at the time. I was just trying to survive. One of my biggest challenges was trying to make the 24 other guys feel every bit as important as Michael because I felt like that was one of my challenges. That was my job. But the other thing to remember was that Michael was thrust into baseball."
He added, "Phil Jackson said and he said it differently from the way I said it, but basically, it was if you tell him no he's going to find a way for the answer to be yes. I remember telling more people that from my year with him. Just go ahead and tell him no and I guarantee he's going to find a way to be yes."