The Last Dance aired last night and episode 7 focused on Michael Jordan’s baseball career. My favorite part being this all time GIF that came from it.
This got me think about how Mike would stack up against other famous 2 sport athletes that also played baseball. I created the viz below to see how he compares in career batting average and home runs per season to other notable 2 sport athletes.
As you can see Michael Jordan actually STUNK at baseball. It seems that we like to view MJs baseball career with rose colored glasses. His batting average was a pathetic .202 & only averaged 3 home runs per season.
The narrative is often written as ‘if he had more time – he could do it.” No disrespect to the GOAT but I highly doubt this would be the case.
One thing that stood out to me was how much better SEC God Tim Tebow was than ACC God MJ. Now remember Tebow routinely gets shit on for being a terrible baseball player, while we view MJ as the one that got away.
Shockingly, Tebow is much better at the plate (.16 higher batting average) and has much more power (averaging 4 more home runs per season).
So since Tim is obviously better than His Airness at football (s/o Aaron Hernandez & that wild Florida team) & as we just saw above, better than Mike at baseball. Well does that mean if Tebow would have played basketball he would be better than 23 & go down as the true GOAT? The greatest 3 sport athlete of all time perhaps?
I think the answer is obvious – thankfully for MJ this timeline never comes to fruition or he may have a couple less titles.
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