MJ and Baseball, or How Hitting .202 is Considered a Success and Double-A is Better Than Triple-A

I happened to flip on First Take the other morning. It's a real rarity these days for me to "embrace debate," but I was feeling particularly bored with the eleventh Lakers story of the previous 15 minutes on SportsCenter, or at least it seemed like it had been that many (side note: Jay Pharoah as Stephen A. talking about the Lakers on SNL was magnificent). Anyways, Skip and Stephen A. (and Steelers receiver Antonio Brown, wearing a bow tie and what looked like a classy straw hat) were dealing with the question "Jordan v. LeBron: Who's a better athlete?" For my money, it's LeBron, simply because he's a 6'8", 260-lb. manimal who can run the floor like a point guard - but as I'm not getting paid to disagree with somebody on national TV, what does my opinion matter? Skip took MJ, Stephen A. took King James, I forget who Brown took because I was too busy laughing at his ridiculous outfit, and the yelling commenced.

Then Skip veered off into a potentially interesting line of thought, but ruined it by saying two things in defense of his argument that immediately sounded completely ludicrous to me.

If I could figure out how to manipulate Blogger to embed an audio file, I'd just upload a recording - but that will have to be a project for another day. Plus I'd probably be violating some copyright law, and I'd really like to avoid jail time, so maybe it's all for the best. Anyway, in lieu of the recording, below is the transcription of what Skip had to say on the topic of Jordan playing baseball (he was arguing that his ability to play another sport at a professional level showed his superior athletic ability):

"People laugh at Michael Jordan trying to play baseball. You realize he was a very successful Double-A baseball player. That is the most difficult level of minor league baseball - not Triple-A, Double-A. That's where most of the hot kids are before they jump up to the big leagues, that's where the most talent is. And Michael Jordan went there from nowhere - he just walked in and said, 'I'm going to be successful at Double-A.' But was he a major league baseball player like Deion was or Bo? No. But to do that as quickly as he did and be fairly successful at it is staggering to me, and it goes to the argument-" *gets cut off by Stephen A. saying he won't "dispute that with you (Skip) because I don't want to be disrespectful to the greatest player I've ever seen and the greatest competitor." He then goes on to anyway to say that MJ wasn't that objectively good at baseball by using the opinion of "baseball aficionados" as a crutch.*

So, the two things.

1) "You realize he was a very successful Double-A baseball player"

Okay, okay. Just the fact that Jordan managed to get a hit, or two, or 88 was fairly impressive. Hitting a round ball thrown at 90+ mph with a round bat - and by the way, that ball isn't just moving forward, it's also moving sideways or down or both - is commonly regarded as the hardest thing to do in sports, so bravo to MJ for at least making enough contact to get on base more than a few times.

But.

"Very successful" and "fairly impressive" are two vastly different things. By using "successful" as his adjective of choice, Skip implies that Jordan enjoyed a good deal of, well, success on the diamond. This is so far from the truth that it's laughable. Here's a link to his Baseball-Reference page, but for those of you uninterested in checking it out (it's very short), I'll sum it up.

In nearly 500 plate appearances (436 at-bats), Jordan hit .202/.289/.266 with 3 homers, 51 RBIs and 46 runs. Yes, you read that right. His Airness's OBP was higher than his slugging percentage. I mean, let's be honest - when your OPS is a measly .556, that's probably not actually all that hard. But when you don't have enough extra base hits to outweigh your walks and you're not being walked like Barry Bonds, that's not a good sign. He struck out 114 times and walked 51 times, and those strikeout and walk rates match up fairly well with Paul Goldschmidt's 2012 season for the D-backs. Goldschmidt is generally considered a rising young star, so I guess that's a point in Jordan's favor. Oh wait. Goldschmidt also hit 20 homers and drove in 82 runs, so actually that comparison doesn't work.

In Mike's defense, he DID steal 30 bases.

In defense of the fact that he was terrible, however, he was also caught stealing 18 times. Noted speedsters with career stolen base success rates around that mark (62.5%) include B.J. Surhoff (averaged 10 thefts per 162 games), Mike Bordick (9 per 162) and Melvin Mora (10 per 162).

All of this is to say that Michael Jordan, despite impressively not striking out every time he came to the plate in Double-A, did not have a "very successful" baseball career, or even a mediocre one.

2) "That is the most difficult level of minor league baseball - not Triple-A, Double-A."

I almost did a spit take when I heard this. It looks ridiculous, right? After all, which is the level that's closer to the big leagues? Hint - it's the one with more "A's" in it. But then I started thinking about the next thing Skip said - "That's where most of the hot kids are before they jump up to the big leagues, that's where the most talent is." And I realized something - I wasn't so sure of the presumed ludicrousness of Skip's statement anymore. He might actually have a point with that one, because how many times do you hear of a phenom jumping from Triple-A to the majors? More often than not (or at least, it seems to be that way), you hear about the jump from Double-A. Triple-A usually seems to be filled more with major league-ready journeyman-type guys than the hotshot prospects. 

Of course, that's just Skip's perception/my guess...so I decided to do what any journalist would do. I decided to see if there was any evidence supporting the claim. There is probably a more scientific way to do this - i.e. going through rosters at each level and making a judgment on the skill level of both - but that's not the way I did it. 

What I did was take Baseball America's Top 100 prospect listings from 2009-2011 (I'm assuming that many of those named in 2012 are still working their way up the ladder and I wanted to follow the Rule of 3), and look for two things with it - 1) see which level each player made the jump from if they've gotten the call, and 2) see what the highest minor league level each of the guys named played in. For the purposes of this look into it, "the highest minor league level" only applies within a year and only if the player was truly demoted (as opposed to being sent down on a rehab assignment). To be fair, I could have taken this one step farther and done a comparison of how many games were played at each level - in my system, 3 games at Triple-A and then a promotion counts the same as playing 120 games at Triple-A and then a promotion - but I'll leave it to somebody with more time than I to draw a conclusion based on that data.

So what did I find?*

*Hat tip to FanGraphs for being my unaware research partner.

Well, first of all, there were 213 players overall between the three years (curiously, the top 3 was different each year: 2011 = Harper/Trout/Montero, 2010 = Heyward/Strasburg/Stanton, 2009 = Wieters/Price/Rasmus). Of those 213, 160 have gotten called up to the majors at some point. Whether they all stayed for more than just a cup of coffee is a different story, but that's a quibble for another day.

Anyway, of those 160 players - and remember, these are the best of the best, the "hot kids" as Skip termed them - only 25 made the initial jump to the majors from a minor league level that wasn't Triple-A*. For those of you that are math-inclined, that's a mere 15.6 percent.

*Rick Porcello, that sneaky little devil, went straight from High-A ball to the Big Show. The other 24 got the call from Double-A. And then there's the curious case of Mike Leake, who decided he was just too good for the minors and cut right to the head of the line, aka the Reds.

It gets better, because of those 25, only 10* didn't go back to the minors at a higher level after making their major league debuts - at least, within my constraints of a year and an actual demotion.

*I'm including Manny Machado, but not Jurickson Profar in this tally because Machado is undoubtedly going to be the Orioles' everyday 3rd baseman and Profar...well, nobody knows for sure where he's going to play. The consensus at this point, however, seems to be Triple-A.

So, as they say on Mythbusters, Skip's sweeping generalization of the quality of Double-A versus Triple-A (albeit by my standards)? Busted. That's what happens when only one-sixteenth of the "hot kids" never actually make it to Triple-A within an amount of time that they could still be considered prospects.

To cap this off, you're probably wondering who those 25 players (and Mike Leake, who technically didn't go back to the minors within my given constraints...but also wasn't there to begin with, so he's excluded from being bolded) were. Well, it's your lucky day, because here's a handy-dandy listing of all of them (the 10 special guys are bolded). Unless otherwise noted, they all jumped from Double-A. Some of them aren't surprising...some of them are. Some of them, I had no idea who the hell the guy was.

• Mike Trout (#2, 2011)
• Manny Machado (#14, 2011)
• Kyle Drabek (#29, 2011)
• Jarrod Parker (#33, 2011)
• Wilin Rosario (#49, 2011)
• Drew Pomeranz (#61, 2011)
• Jurickson Profar (#74, 2011)
• Joe Benson (#100, 2011)
• Giancarlo Stanton (#3, 2010)
• Brian Matusz (#5, 2010)
• Alcides Escobar (#12, 2010)
• Madison Bumgarner (#14, 2010)
• Starlin Castro (#16, 2010)
• Aaron Crow (#40, 2010)
• Mike Leake (#72, 2010) - No minors
• Thomas Neal (#96, 2010)
• Brett Anderson (#7, 2009)
• Cameron Maybin (#8, 2009)
• Trevor Cahill (#11, 2009)
• Dexter Fowler (#15, 2009)
• Rick Porcello (#21, 2009) - High-A
• Elvis Andrus (#37, 2009)
• Ben Revere (#59, 2009)
• Lou Marson (#66, 2009)
• Gerardo Parroa (#88, 2009)
• Sean West (#96, 2009)
• Jeremy Jeffress (#100, 2009)