May 20, 2020 • 42 mins
Michael Jordan’s famous sabbatical from professional basketball might have lasted much longer had Major League Baseball not experienced the worst strike in its history.
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We all need a break from the constant cycle to
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Com slash As. Before we start today's episode, please be
sure to support Flashback by rating and leaving a review
for us right here in your podcast app. A special
shout out this week to our listener Ruby two Shoes,
who got last week's pop quiz correct. The question was
(01:08):
what event helped lead to billions and extra revenue for
the NBA and you're all about to find that out.
In the meantime, do you think you're getting the hang
of history's unintended consequences? And if so, answer this question
about next week's episode for a chance to win a
shout out of your own Ready fingers on buzzers. What
(01:29):
chronic physical ailment did Adolph Hitler suffer from that led
him to seek some rather unorthodox and highly consequential medical treatment.
Think you know the answer, Take your best guests and
leave it as a comment in your podcast app along
with your five star review. It's the best of times,
(01:53):
it's the worst of times. As I record this, both
the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball are sidelined
because of the coronavirus, but the two professional sports leagues
are hardly in the same position. On the one hand,
you've got basketball. NBA salaries have skyrocketed in the past
five years. The average player makes above seven million dollars
(02:14):
per season, which makes the NBA the highest paid sports
league in the world, and basketball is also now the
most popular sport in the largest country in the world.
At one point, for a billion basketball crazed people in
a country and economy that's growing. It's unbelievable passion that
people have for the sport and for the NBA in China,
And on the other hand, you've got baseball. People just
(02:37):
don't seem to be as interested in the sport as
they used to be. Last year's World Series was the
least watched in history. So is this a wake up
call for Major League Baseball? Kind of? The World Series
continue to compete effectively last year. According to Forbes magazine,
for the first time ever, the average value of an
NBA team is worth more than the average value of
(02:58):
a Major League Baseball team. There are lots of reasons
for this reversal of fortune, from marketing to a lack
of star power to the mastery of social media. But
if you had to pick one fateful moment when everything changed,
when baseball and basketball started to go in different directions,
will might well be something that happened twenty five springs ago.
(03:20):
That's the moment when one of baseball's worst players decided
to give up on his dream rather than to be
a scab during the game's worst labor strike. Minor league
ball players have to give up on their dreams all
the time, but this minor league ball player was not
your ordinary athlete. He was also the greatest brand ambassador
that the sport of basketball has ever known, and Baseball's
loss proved to be Basketball's destiny making game. I'm Shawn
(03:44):
Braswell today on Flashback, a tale of one windy city
and one remarkable player whose fateful decision helped alter the
fate of two sports. And a very special thanks to
our guests today who joined us via phone or provided
their own local recording. Is during the global health crisis
in the shelter in Place order, Let's go back in
(04:13):
time twenty nine years for a moment. It's June. If
you've watched The Last Dance, ESPN's documentary film on Michael
Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, then you've probably already seen
this footage the celebration house, Peagne and the Chicago Locker
roll and they are celebrating in the Chicago. That's the
(04:34):
Fulls the Lakers. In five, Michael Jordan and the Chicago
Bulls won their first NBA championship. Five months later, just
north of Chicago, in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Twins won their
second World Series Baseball championship in dramatic fashion. That's Twins
are gonna wins. That's twins and it's a it's a one.
(05:04):
Game seven of that World Series between the Twins and
the Atlanta Braves was watched by fifty million viewers, double
the number that watched Game seven of last year's World Series,
and thirty million more than watched Michael Jordan's and the
Bulls beat the Lakers that year. So Jordan's first championship
might have made for a good story, but it was
baseball that truly had America's attention in But behind the scenes,
(05:30):
trouble was brewing in baseball. Fay Vincent, a Yale educated
lawyer and the former head of Columbia Pictures, was an
unusual choice to be the commissioner of Baseball. He was short, balding,
and wore large, oversized glasses. He looked like he should
be the league's accountant, and in his first year's commissioner
(05:53):
in Vincent was tested as few commissioners have ever been.
For the first time in twenty seven years, a World
Series game will be played in Candle Stick Park. The
Battle of the Bay continues Game three of the Night
nine A World Series, the Oakland Athletics against the San
Francisco Giants, I'm al Michael's less than two minutes later
(06:15):
this happening, he fails to get Dave Parker at second phase,
so the Oakland A's take take happening. A six point
nine magnitude earthquake hit the Bay Area right before Game
(06:36):
three of the World Series in October. I'm a little
run or nine and I'm not your right here, but
we are. Well. That's the greatest open in the history
of television, far none. The following day, Fay Vincent addressed
reporters amid the tragedy, We've made the decision not to
(06:57):
play tonight. That'd be a decision we made. It's a
difficult time for San Francisco and indeed for the whole
Bay Area. The great tragedy is that could coincides with
our modest little sporting event here. Vincent handled the disaster beautifully.
He was reasonable, cautious, humble smart. The following season, in
(07:23):
Vincent was again tested when baseball owners started a lockout
during spring training in an effort to limit rising player salaries.
This is Ryan Eckert, historian at Monmouth University and author
of A Game of Failure. Major League Baseball strike The
idea of a salary cap started to ender the conversation,
(07:44):
and Vincent supported the players and being completely against the
salary cap, and so very quickly he really did not
ingratiate himself to his employers that his bosses his employers.
You see, in Major League Baseball, the commissioner is handpicked
by a very select hiring committee, the owners. They thought
that Stave Vincent would kind of be on their side,
(08:08):
having selected him themselves, the owners, And when Vincent came in,
he really acted much more in the best interests of
baseball than in the interests of his employers, really, who
were no one but the owners. The owners can't actually
fire Vincent, but they started to put enormous pressure on
him to resign. After months of controversy and speculation, baseball
(08:32):
commission with faith, Vincent has bowed to management wishes that
he resigned. Although the owners have not announced their plans
for reorganization, it seems likely that baseball may never be
the same. Charlie Rose was right. After Vincent's resignation in
the owners made a more naked power grab. They installed
one of their own, Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, as
(08:52):
acting commissioner. But the owners were only getting warmed up.
One of the men behind in fave Vincen's departure was
one of Bud Sewalk's best friends and a fellow owner,
Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Ryan Storff. And if you
recognize that name, it's probably because Ryan Storff is also
the owner of the Chicago Bulls had a salary caps
(09:14):
in nine four. Ryan Storff wanted to apply this name
principal to baseball because that was working out really pretty
well for him as the owners of As the owner
of the ball thanks to the salary cap in basketball,
Ryan Storff paid Michael Jordan's, an all time great player
at the peak of his powers, less than he paid
White Sox outfielder George Bell in baseball. So at the
(09:35):
same time Ryan Storff was helping Leeda Coup to get
a salary cap in baseball, he was getting a bargain
on the best player in basketball, a star who would
in deliver the Bulls their third championship in three years.
(09:56):
The Bulls three pete was an amazing accomplishment for Jordan's,
but he was starting to show signs of wear and
tear from the immense pressure. This is Roland las and By,
a basketball writer and author of Michael Jordan's The Life.
The process of winning a three pet was absolutely completely,
thoroughly exhausting, mentally, emotionally physical in every way, and by
(10:21):
the summer of Michael Jordan was starting to contemplate a
career change. You know, his father had long hope that
Michael might consider switching over and playing some baseball, just
change up things. His father would tell him, you know,
you've accomplished everything you can in basketball. So there was
(10:46):
a lot up in the air. And then something happened
that summer that would turn Michael Jordan's world upside down,
and that would put Chicago owner Jerry Ryansdorff in the
bizarre position of watching his most valuable basketball asset turned
to one of his lowest performing baseball ones. Do you
(11:10):
have an interesting tale about unintended consequences from history or
your own life, Please share it with us by emailing
flashback at Aussie dot com. That's Flashback at o z
y dot com. Enjoying this episode, check out the Great
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For instance, in researching this episode of Flashback, I dove
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best in life, and basketball's long shot the three pointer.
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We the Great Courses plus app We can keep our
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Courses Plus dot Com slash as. That's the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash o z y the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash AUSI on July, less than a
(12:43):
month after watching his son when his third NBA championship,
fifty year old James Jordan's Michael's father, was driving down
US Highway seventy four in North Carolina. In Lomberton, North Carolina.
Mr Jordan's uh had pulled off the side UH two,
obviously to rest for a while, and he was shot
(13:07):
to death while in his car and was taken to
the state of South Carolina and placed into the swamp
where he was found. James Jordan's murder devastated Michael. He
was obsessed with it, you know, paying attention to every
little bit of news that came along, and it made
(13:27):
a lot of news at the time. Jordan had long
had a rocky relationship with his father, going back to
when he was a boy in North Carolina. He was
the fourth of five children, and his older brother, Larry,
was a better athlete pack then. It was obvious to
everyone in the family that the James Jordan's greatly favored
(13:48):
Larry over Michael, and Michael did not take that particularly well.
He had great love for his father, but he was
always angrily trying to prove himself elf to his father
after that childhood rejection, and that anger pushed Jordan to
work insanely hard. It really, in a lot of ways,
(14:11):
was the motivation for much of his achievement in sports,
and Jordan's desire to please his late father would also
be behind what happened next. In October, Michael Jordan took
to the baseball field to throw out the first pitch
at a White Sox playoff game. But Jordan was not
done making news that night. Let's go quickly to penal.
(14:34):
Brian Alright, Gregor, breaking story here. The Chicago Bulls have
called the press conference to tomorrow morning, and there's high
speculation and report that Michael Jordan will retire from basketball forever.
The news shock the city of Chicago and the sports world,
but it made sense to Jordan's He was grieving mightily
over his father, and the idea that his father had
(14:57):
wanted him to play baseball, the idea that he had
unfinished business there. All of those things played into his decision. Meanwhile,
that fall of baseball enjoyed another epic World Series finish.
Here's a pitch on the way, a swinging a belt
(15:18):
field pay back Blue Jays, the Blue Jays, the World
Series champion. Touch a ball, Joe, You'll never hit a
bigger hole let in your life. That December, the previous
collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players expired, and
with Fay Vincent out of the way, Ryan Storff and
(15:38):
the owners decided to take another crack at getting a
salary cap for baseball. The owners argued that the lack
of a salary cap was hurting competition in the game.
Ryan Eckert, the status quo of no salary cap was
seen as unfair because the big market teams could just
outspend the small market teams and dominate the game on
the field. Even with a salary cap, however, big market
(16:01):
teams would still have an advantage, so their solution was
not only a salary cap, but also revenue sharing, so
that the revenues among all the teams could be distributed
equally or at least shared to have a sort of
redistribution of wealth. But the players themselves were dead set
against a salary cap. They as free agents, wanted to
(16:22):
command whatever salary open and free market would allow them to. Meanwhile,
on February seven, Michael Jordan's signed perhaps the smallest contract
of his life, a minor league deal with the Chicago
White Sox. He was going to pursue his dream of
being a baseball player. Jordan had once been quite a
(16:42):
promising ballplayer in Little League Roland las B. Michael was
just an incredible pitcher. He would often come in and
just strike out everybody he faced in that short amount
of time. Jordan threw two no hitters on the way
to leading his team just shy at the Little League
World Series. He was also a pretty good hitter. In
(17:03):
a crucial moment on the march to the Little League
World Series down in Georgia later that summer, Michael hit
a booming home run over center field in a very
big park that allowed his team to tie the score.
Jordan's team eventually lost that game, but that home run
(17:25):
was huge for him personally. His father spent years bragging
about it. Finally Michael had his father's attention. The next year,
when Jordan was baseball did not go as well. Michael
maybe played in three or four games, but he spent
most time on the bench. And again, from what we
(17:46):
know in retrospect of Michael's personality, that kind of drop off,
that kind of come down, was devastating stuff. Jordan eventually
quit baseball during his senior year. By then it was
clear his game was basketball. But the thirty one year
(18:06):
old Jordan arrived in Sarasota, Florida, ready to try to
compete with professionals in a game he had given up
on in high school. This is Jordan in an interview
from that spring. These are the two dreams that I've
always had when I was a kid, from baseball and basketball,
and I achieved basketball so I wanted to tie my
hand in baseball, and thousands of fans and hundreds of
(18:27):
reporters to send it on Florida to see if he
could do it. Many of the other players were not
so enthusiastic about the newcomer. The success in baseball is
hard one. It is a game of repetition. And so
you have all these people with their hard one experience
in baseball, and here comes Jordan's who quit in the
(18:54):
middle of his senior season in high school. Still, Jordan
brought within the same determine, nation and work ethic that
made him a champion in basketball, and he he had
to turn his basketball body back to a leaner baseball body,
which he did. Jordan arrived at training camp early each
(19:15):
morning and left late each night. As the White Sox
hitting coach Walt Rehniac observed, quote, he's one hard working mother. Well,
you get the point. At the end of the spring,
the White Sox played across town exhibition game with the
Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. The atmosphere in Chicago was electric.
There's gonna be a capacity crowd today or close to it,
(19:35):
and everybody who came to the ballpark today, came to
see that man you're looking at right there and see
if he can indeed hit some major league pitching. Marry.
This is his first time in front of more than
thirty five thousand fans. Jordan went two for five with
two runs batted in. He received a standing ovation. You know,
he just played well. He had a He had the
kind of day that had Harry Carey singing his prey
(20:00):
aces and all of Chicago will glow. It was perhaps
to be the high water mark of his brief baseball career.
Soon after, the White Sox assigned Jordan to their Double
A minor league team, the Birmingham Barons back up and
Matt just lesson for a moment. You know who's up, Birmingham, Alabama.
Here he is, right fielder Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Let's lesson
(20:23):
for a moment. Jordan went over three in his professional debut,
but the fans in Birmingham loved every minute. The team
started setting attendance records, selling out souvenirs. The fans would
break into spontaneous chance of Jordan's gatorade anthem. I want
to be like Mike Jordan's play on the field, however,
(20:45):
did not always match the hype, but through it all
he persisted. And yet here he was going from an
average blow average showing in in spring training over to
the humiliation of being a Birmingham baron and not being
(21:07):
a very good one, of having to play this out
in front of all these adoring fans, and really being
willing to humiliate himself. Soon the media started to turn
on him. Sports Illustrated, which at once lionized air Jordan's,
came out with a cover that read, bagg at Michael
(21:30):
Jordan and the White Sox are embarrassing Baseball. Jordan often
kept to himself on the long bus rides across the
South and in Birmingham. He had a rented house in Birmingham.
But Jordan would sit up there on the deck alone
and I looking up at the stars, thinking about his father.
And this was really about his father, about mourning him,
(21:54):
about reconnecting with him, about finding what they never found
in baseball. Meanwhile, back in the major leagues, the owners
and players were having their own existential crisis. In June,
the owners unveiled their proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement,
(22:16):
one that included a salary cap. Ryan Eckert, the small
market owners, we're really pushing hard for a strike and
pushing hard for a salary cap. But it wasn't just
small market owners. They were also at the time a
lot of new owners in the league who had their
own firm views about labor disputes. A lot of them
(22:36):
had bought into these teams in recent times, and we're
coming from the business world and had experience in negotiating
against and like busting up labor unions. The owner of
the Royals was the CEO of Walmart. The owner of
the Giants was the owner of Safely A grocery stores
(22:58):
who famously lay it off, you know, thousands of employees
to prevent them from unionizing. So a lot of these
owners had been successful in negotiating against unions outside of baseball,
but those heavy handed tactics just didn't work out quite
the same against baseball players as they did with you know,
like unskilled Walmart workers. Four days after the owners released
(23:20):
their proposal, the head of the players Association, Donald Fear,
announced the union's rejection of the proposal. In August, when
negotiations going nowhere, the owners withheld a scheduled payment for
the player's pension fund. It was an act of war.
The owners might have had most of the power then
controlled the purse strings, but the players had one mighty
piece of leverage, a strike that could cancel the season
(23:43):
and the postseason. Dandy Alderson and this is a quote
that I love, was the GM of Oakland at the time,
and he compared the strike lead up to the strike
two the number one movie of the summer at the time,
which is Speed, right and um, the playoffs in the
World Series are the hostages. The players are driving the
(24:06):
bus and the owners of the cops chasing them, trying
to stop it. In the end, they couldn't stop the bus.
On August twelve, the Major League Baseball Players Association directed
its members to go on strike. Then a month later
and the other shoe has finally dropped in the ongoing
(24:26):
baseball wars. The acting Commissioner, Bud Sea Leake, the owner
of the Milwaukee Brewers, has just made it official the
remainder of the regular season and the entire postseason, playoffs
and World Series have officially been canceled. This one of
the great casualties of the strike was that the season
was setting up to be a historic one. Tony Gwynn
was in the middle of attempting to hit four hundred
(24:49):
for the first time since Ted Williams did in one
Now Tony Gwynn was getting when the strikes started eighteen
games left, playing against the Hardinals, Cubs, and Marlins and Rockies,
all of whom had really mediocre pitching staff. Gwinn wasn't
alone in chasing history. Matt Williams had forty three home
runs when the strikes started and was on pace exactly.
(25:13):
They hit sixty one home runs by the end of
the season to tie Roger Morris. Baseball fans didn't care
whose fault it was. They didn't take kindly to strike.
I mean, the fan reaction was overwhelmingly negative and fans
were heartbroken. They were crushed disappointed. The World Series was
canceled for the first time since nineteen o four, and
(25:33):
uh it was very sad, and when baseball eventually did
come back, a lot of fans were still traumatized and
very reluctant to go back to the game. They really
held a grudge. At the same time, his major league
colleagues were refusing to take the field, Jordan was getting
better at it, slowly improving his game. He finished his
(25:56):
first minor league season with a two oh two average
with thirty stolen races and fifty one r b i s.
It was good enough to keep playing Roland Lasonby. He
later after Birmingham, he went to the Arizona Fall League,
which was another victory. I think he hit two sixty
in the Fall League. Michael Jordan was getting better at baseball.
All of his hard work was starting to pay off.
(26:18):
At the start of Jordan was not returning to basketball.
He was getting ready for his second, hopefully better season
in professional baseball. Then fate and a still ongoing baseball
strike intervened. When spring training started, the owners attempted to
bring in replacement players Ryan Eckert again, and they were
(26:39):
bringing Washta veterans. They're bringing guys out of pizzerias and
all kinds of all kinds of guys and also minor
league is There's a lot of pressure on minor league
players to go in and show up to spring training
and ultimately play in replacing games. And one of those
minor leaguers was perhaps the greatest basketball player that ever lived,
(27:01):
Roland Leason By. The White Sox were eager to deploy
him in various capacities, and he really didn't want anything
to do with being any kind of scab or doing
anything to undermine those players. The owners were pushing the
White Sox to have Jordan play some exhibition games to
retain some fan interest during the strike. Ryan Eckert, That's
(27:24):
fact really made Jordan's choose aside, and I guess Jordan's
sided with his fellow professional athletes and made it clear
that he wouldn't play as a scab or as a
replacement player in any subsequent Major league games. Jordan announced
his retirement from baseball in March. As Chicago Bulls coach
Phil Jackson later summed up the development, Jordan hadn't failed baseball,
(27:49):
baseball failed him. Immediately, rumors began about Jordan's return to basketball,
the NBA legend wavered. Then the week later, Jordans issued
the shortest and perhaps most significant press release in the
history of sports, a two word facts that read, quote
I'm back. Those two words would prove to be worth
(28:10):
billions of dollars. That's next. During the year and a
(28:33):
half that Michael Jordan was playing baseball, the Chicago Bulls
and the NBA both struggled NBA ticket sales were down,
the Bulls lost to the Knicks in the playoffs in
and we're having a rough season. But on March, when
Jordan arrived in Indianapolis for the Bulls game against the
Indiana Pacers, it was all forgotten. Now. I've been covering
(28:56):
the Bulls for a while, and just to be there
and to see the insanity of his return to basketball
from baseball was a very powerful thing. And it's like
the stock market of the American sports experience had plummeted
(29:19):
while I was gone, But there was something else that
returned to action in March professional baseball, two weeks after
Jordan's departure from baseball, legal proceedings surrounding the strike were
finally coming to a head. Ryan Eckert, the National Labor
Relations Board met pretty quickly, voted and ruled in favor
(29:39):
of the playoffs, and that was notably provided over by Stonia,
said maaw Justice and sort of my hoar spoke out
almost unilaterally in support of the players, which was a
huge win for the players, huge loss of the owners.
The strike ended and play resumed a month later. Jerry
ryan'sdorff in other baseball owners did not get the salary
(30:02):
cap they wanted, but at least Rhyan Storff, the NBA owner,
had a pretty big concession prize one of the best
basketball players to ever play the game. The Chicago Bulls
ended up winning three more NBA championships for a total
of six during the nineties, and everyone knew what or
(30:25):
who was the main reason behind it. All the people
around him, whether it was Ryan Store for Phil Jackson,
all of these people owed him so much and it
didn't stop there. We all owned Michael Jordan's when I
you know, I just lived on the change that was
spilled on the floor of my years covering him and
(30:48):
writing about him. And uh, I mean all of us.
I don't care if you were a photographer, a teammate,
a writer, the newspapers in Chicago, the y I don't
care who it was. They all everything to this phenomenon.
(31:11):
So how much was Michael Jordan's worth to the game
of basketball? You really had to be alive back then
and have witnessed the phenomenon. This is Greg Leonard, an
economist and a vice president Charles River Associates, an economics
consulting firm. People were really interested in watching him play
because he was so extraordinary and um, it really was
(31:35):
kind of unique. In the ninety nineties, Leonard In, an
m I T. Professor named Jerry Houseman, decided to look
at what kind of impact a megastar athlete like Jordan
had not just on his own team's finances, but on
league fortunes. More generally, we did start thinking about the
nature of the relationship among teams in a sports league
(31:56):
like this, where you had a situation where the Bulls
were the one is paying Michael Jordan's salary, but Jordan
is so popular that he's also driving up revenues for
other teams every time the Bulls come to town. So overall,
we found that there was about a twenty percent increase
in attendance. This was in the season due to Michael Jordan,
and this translated to about two and a half million
(32:17):
dollars for the other teams in the league. It didn't
stop at just attendance all told. If you add across
TV attendance and properties, um, we found a Michael Jordan
effect of about fifty three million dollars for other teams.
And again that's back in nine dollars. You can more
(32:38):
or less double that. So we're talking about in today's
dollars about a hundred million dollars for the other NBA teams.
In Fortune magazine, building on Leonard and Houseman's work, estimated
the full value of Michael Jordan beyond just the season then,
including Jordan's endorsements, ticket sales, merchandizing, television revenues, and more.
All told, they estimated a Jordan's effect of close to
(33:01):
ten billion dollars. But Jordan's returned to basketball meant so
much more to the league than just that. Thanks to
the strike, major League Baseball owners lost close to one
billion dollars and the players more than three million. Then
baseball attendance plummeted my more than the following year. Ryan Eckert,
(33:24):
I think with the perspective of time and knowing what
the effects were, both sides surely would have been able
to find a compromise. But I think they're a little
bit naive about how bad it would be. And worse
than the money problem, major League Baseball had an image problem.
When baseball came back, fans didn't rushed back the Ballpard
(33:47):
is happy that the game was finally back to that
they keep going, and they were very slow to come down. Um,
those are very lane years of baseball. But thanks to
the explosion and home runs that started in the late nineties,
baseball started to bounce back. Of course, it turned out
that steroids and other performance enhancing drugs played a big
(34:10):
part in that bounce. All sides, players, owners, and commissioner
willingly turned a blind eye to what was happening in
terms of the integrity of the game. And we're just
grateful that baseball was back in the public eye until
(34:31):
consequently what you have is the steroid era being allowed
to take root, which obviously going forward, led to disastrous
consequences for baseball, which we still feel the effects of today.
And Eckert says, baseball was never quite the same. I
think strike really changed forever the way the game is
(34:55):
seen in the largest fabric of American culture and society.
You know, the national pastime, as the phrase is used.
But I'm not sure that talking to you now in
baseball is the national past time anymore. As a kid,
a day at the ballpark was almost an experience out
of time, right. It's the same game that my father's
(35:19):
son and the sixties. You know, my grandfather saw in
the forties and I as a kid was experiencing in
the nineties, and you know, time stands still, right, So
go to a baseball game now is just not the
same experience that I had as a kid. It's just different.
That disillusionment that's followed the strike really was the final
(35:41):
chapter we've seen now what Michael Jordan meant to the
game of basketball and how baseball has struggled to regain
its prominence after strike. But just how critical was Michael
Jordan's decision to return to basketball. Greg Leonard again has
(36:03):
come back in nineteen was obviously hugely significant and you
can really just see that, I think, without too much
sophisticated analysis, by looking at what happened to the TV ratings.
Jordan's first game back against the Indiana Pacers got the
highest rating for a regular season NBA game in twenty years.
(36:26):
It didn't stop there, you know, when Michael Jordan came
back in terms of like the NBA Finals, um, you
got about a fifty increase in in viewership in the
years where Michael Jordan and the Bulls were playing in
the finals versus the years where they weren't playing. Magic
Johnson and Larry Bird had really helped take the NBA
(36:49):
to a new level of popularity during the nineteen eighties,
but it was Jordan who truly elevated the game and
its finances. Roland las and By we know today that
the great inflation of basketball franchises it was really due
to the acceleration that Michael Jordan provided in that regard
(37:10):
and nearly stopped providing all of that crater. When Jordan
left and went to baseball, they they had no compelling figures.
But since Jordan returned, basketball has gone from a somewhat
local market sport to a global, high tech multimedia enterprise.
The NBA has expanded, as Jerry West told me, he
(37:34):
saw it coming. He told me in two thousand and eight.
You know, it's becoming a licensed print money. It has
become just a huge cash machine. We don't know where
that goes from here. But Michael's return was the shortcut.
It's possible the NBA could have built all of that
(37:56):
and regenerated all that excitement, but Michael coming back. I mean,
it was all over the world and suddenly everything had changed.
You know, that's very interesting, Ryan Eckert, what if, you know,
the strike didn't happen. What if Jordan's baseball career was
really allowed to you know flourish. You know what, if
he was convinced that that's something he really wanted to pursue,
(38:20):
rather than just sort of seeing it as like you know,
passing obsession, that he was able to give up. Broad
said the quickly. You know, I'm not sure, but I
think either way it's set up the NBA for continued success.
And you know, it was really a fork in the
road as far as the relationship between baseball, basketball and
(38:41):
their position in American culture. Flashback is written and hosted
by me Sean Braswell, senior writer and executive producer at Aussie.
It was produced by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Yorio Di Giza,
and Shannon Williamson. Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks
to the crew at i Heeart Radio podcast Networks, especially
(39:04):
Sophie Lichtman and Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe to
Flashback on the I Heart Radio app or listen wherever
you get your podcasts. Flashback is the latest podcast from Azzi,
a modern media company producing original TV series, festivals, news
and podcasts for curious people. Azzie unique storytelling focuses on
the new and the next, whether that's forward looking news
(39:25):
and features, bold new perspectives on TV, or brand new
ways of looking at history. We live in the age
when ridiculous things survive. This is Roland lason By again.
I asked him about the urban legend that Jordan retired
from basketball because he was about to be banned from
the game for gambling. Lazenby says, the theory doesn't hold
(39:47):
up under closer scrutiny. All the old NBA players road
around on trains. They gambled like fools on trains before
they gambled on planes. It's a It was, is and
remains a gambling culture, whether it's talk or betting on
any kind of little detail involved in their life, you know,
(40:11):
half court shot or whatever. Those guys have bet like crazy.
And Michael he was the king of the NBA, so
we was certainly the king of that kind of petting.
And Jordan's bet on a lot of things, especially his
own golf games, but it didn't cross the line. No
one has ever come up with a scenario, with any
(40:34):
kind of idea, with any kind of allegation that he
for a minute ever bet on an NBA game to
dive deeper on this and more, head to Aussie dot
com slash flashback. That's oz y dot com slash Flashback.
There you can find my lecture notes from today's episode
featuring extended interviews, links to further reading and more information
(40:57):
on the changing fortunes at baseball and back bsketball, as
well as links to other stories from history uncovered by
me and other reporters at Aussie. Please be sure to
support Flashback by rating and leaving a review for us
right here in your podcast app, and remember to answer
(41:18):
this question about next week's episode for a chance to
win a shout out. What chronic physical ailment did Adolph
Hitler suffer from that led him to seek some rather
unorthodox and highly consequential medical treatment. Take your best guests
and leave it as a comment in your podcast app
along with your five star review. Thanks for listening. We
(41:40):
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(42:00):
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the Great Courses plus dot Com slash o z Y
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We all need a break from the constant cycle to
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Plus streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our
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Com slash o z y the Great Courses Plus dot
Com slash As. Before we start today's episode, please be
sure to support Flashback by rating and leaving a review
for us right here in your podcast app. A special
shout out this week to our listener Ruby two Shoes,
who got last week's pop quiz correct. The question was
(01:08):
what event helped lead to billions and extra revenue for
the NBA and you're all about to find that out.
In the meantime, do you think you're getting the hang
of history's unintended consequences? And if so, answer this question
about next week's episode for a chance to win a
shout out of your own Ready fingers on buzzers. What
(01:29):
chronic physical ailment did Adolph Hitler suffer from that led
him to seek some rather unorthodox and highly consequential medical treatment.
Think you know the answer, Take your best guests and
leave it as a comment in your podcast app along
with your five star review. It's the best of times,
(01:53):
it's the worst of times. As I record this, both
the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball are sidelined
because of the coronavirus, but the two professional sports leagues
are hardly in the same position. On the one hand,
you've got basketball. NBA salaries have skyrocketed in the past
five years. The average player makes above seven million dollars
(02:14):
per season, which makes the NBA the highest paid sports
league in the world, and basketball is also now the
most popular sport in the largest country in the world.
At one point, for a billion basketball crazed people in
a country and economy that's growing. It's unbelievable passion that
people have for the sport and for the NBA in China,
And on the other hand, you've got baseball. People just
(02:37):
don't seem to be as interested in the sport as
they used to be. Last year's World Series was the
least watched in history. So is this a wake up
call for Major League Baseball? Kind of? The World Series
continue to compete effectively last year. According to Forbes magazine,
for the first time ever, the average value of an
NBA team is worth more than the average value of
(02:58):
a Major League Baseball team. There are lots of reasons
for this reversal of fortune, from marketing to a lack
of star power to the mastery of social media. But
if you had to pick one fateful moment when everything changed,
when baseball and basketball started to go in different directions,
will might well be something that happened twenty five springs ago.
(03:20):
That's the moment when one of baseball's worst players decided
to give up on his dream rather than to be
a scab during the game's worst labor strike. Minor league
ball players have to give up on their dreams all
the time, but this minor league ball player was not
your ordinary athlete. He was also the greatest brand ambassador
that the sport of basketball has ever known, and Baseball's
loss proved to be Basketball's destiny making game. I'm Shawn
(03:44):
Braswell today on Flashback, a tale of one windy city
and one remarkable player whose fateful decision helped alter the
fate of two sports. And a very special thanks to
our guests today who joined us via phone or provided
their own local recording. Is during the global health crisis
in the shelter in Place order, Let's go back in
(04:13):
time twenty nine years for a moment. It's June. If
you've watched The Last Dance, ESPN's documentary film on Michael
Jordan and the Chicago Bulls, then you've probably already seen
this footage the celebration house, Peagne and the Chicago Locker
roll and they are celebrating in the Chicago. That's the
(04:34):
Fulls the Lakers. In five, Michael Jordan and the Chicago
Bulls won their first NBA championship. Five months later, just
north of Chicago, in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Twins won their
second World Series Baseball championship in dramatic fashion. That's Twins
are gonna wins. That's twins and it's a it's a one.
(05:04):
Game seven of that World Series between the Twins and
the Atlanta Braves was watched by fifty million viewers, double
the number that watched Game seven of last year's World Series,
and thirty million more than watched Michael Jordan's and the
Bulls beat the Lakers that year. So Jordan's first championship
might have made for a good story, but it was
baseball that truly had America's attention in But behind the scenes,
(05:30):
trouble was brewing in baseball. Fay Vincent, a Yale educated
lawyer and the former head of Columbia Pictures, was an
unusual choice to be the commissioner of Baseball. He was short, balding,
and wore large, oversized glasses. He looked like he should
be the league's accountant, and in his first year's commissioner
(05:53):
in Vincent was tested as few commissioners have ever been.
For the first time in twenty seven years, a World
Series game will be played in Candle Stick Park. The
Battle of the Bay continues Game three of the Night
nine A World Series, the Oakland Athletics against the San
Francisco Giants, I'm al Michael's less than two minutes later
(06:15):
this happening, he fails to get Dave Parker at second phase,
so the Oakland A's take take happening. A six point
nine magnitude earthquake hit the Bay Area right before Game
(06:36):
three of the World Series in October. I'm a little
run or nine and I'm not your right here, but
we are. Well. That's the greatest open in the history
of television, far none. The following day, Fay Vincent addressed
reporters amid the tragedy, We've made the decision not to
(06:57):
play tonight. That'd be a decision we made. It's a
difficult time for San Francisco and indeed for the whole
Bay Area. The great tragedy is that could coincides with
our modest little sporting event here. Vincent handled the disaster beautifully.
He was reasonable, cautious, humble smart. The following season, in
(07:23):
Vincent was again tested when baseball owners started a lockout
during spring training in an effort to limit rising player salaries.
This is Ryan Eckert, historian at Monmouth University and author
of A Game of Failure. Major League Baseball strike The
idea of a salary cap started to ender the conversation,
(07:44):
and Vincent supported the players and being completely against the
salary cap, and so very quickly he really did not
ingratiate himself to his employers that his bosses his employers.
You see, in Major League Baseball, the commissioner is handpicked
by a very select hiring committee, the owners. They thought
that Stave Vincent would kind of be on their side,
(08:08):
having selected him themselves, the owners, And when Vincent came in,
he really acted much more in the best interests of
baseball than in the interests of his employers, really, who
were no one but the owners. The owners can't actually
fire Vincent, but they started to put enormous pressure on
him to resign. After months of controversy and speculation, baseball
(08:32):
commission with faith, Vincent has bowed to management wishes that
he resigned. Although the owners have not announced their plans
for reorganization, it seems likely that baseball may never be
the same. Charlie Rose was right. After Vincent's resignation in
the owners made a more naked power grab. They installed
one of their own, Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, as
(08:52):
acting commissioner. But the owners were only getting warmed up.
One of the men behind in fave Vincen's departure was
one of Bud Sewalk's best friends and a fellow owner,
Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Ryan Storff. And if you
recognize that name, it's probably because Ryan Storff is also
the owner of the Chicago Bulls had a salary caps
(09:14):
in nine four. Ryan Storff wanted to apply this name
principal to baseball because that was working out really pretty
well for him as the owners of As the owner
of the ball thanks to the salary cap in basketball,
Ryan Storff paid Michael Jordan's, an all time great player
at the peak of his powers, less than he paid
White Sox outfielder George Bell in baseball. So at the
(09:35):
same time Ryan Storff was helping Leeda Coup to get
a salary cap in baseball, he was getting a bargain
on the best player in basketball, a star who would
in deliver the Bulls their third championship in three years.
(09:56):
The Bulls three pete was an amazing accomplishment for Jordan's,
but he was starting to show signs of wear and
tear from the immense pressure. This is Roland las and By,
a basketball writer and author of Michael Jordan's The Life.
The process of winning a three pet was absolutely completely,
thoroughly exhausting, mentally, emotionally physical in every way, and by
(10:21):
the summer of Michael Jordan was starting to contemplate a
career change. You know, his father had long hope that
Michael might consider switching over and playing some baseball, just
change up things. His father would tell him, you know,
you've accomplished everything you can in basketball. So there was
(10:46):
a lot up in the air. And then something happened
that summer that would turn Michael Jordan's world upside down,
and that would put Chicago owner Jerry Ryansdorff in the
bizarre position of watching his most valuable basketball asset turned
to one of his lowest performing baseball ones. Do you
(11:10):
have an interesting tale about unintended consequences from history or
your own life, Please share it with us by emailing
flashback at Aussie dot com. That's Flashback at o z
y dot com. Enjoying this episode, check out the Great
(11:38):
Courses Plus streaming service. It's an excellent resource to expand
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For instance, in researching this episode of Flashback, I dove
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America's pastime, the psychology of performance, how to be your
best in life, and basketball's long shot the three pointer.
(11:59):
We the Great Courses plus app We can keep our
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(12:20):
Courses Plus dot Com slash as. That's the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash o z y the Great Courses
Plus dot Com slash AUSI on July, less than a
(12:43):
month after watching his son when his third NBA championship,
fifty year old James Jordan's Michael's father, was driving down
US Highway seventy four in North Carolina. In Lomberton, North Carolina.
Mr Jordan's uh had pulled off the side UH two,
obviously to rest for a while, and he was shot
(13:07):
to death while in his car and was taken to
the state of South Carolina and placed into the swamp
where he was found. James Jordan's murder devastated Michael. He
was obsessed with it, you know, paying attention to every
little bit of news that came along, and it made
(13:27):
a lot of news at the time. Jordan had long
had a rocky relationship with his father, going back to
when he was a boy in North Carolina. He was
the fourth of five children, and his older brother, Larry,
was a better athlete pack then. It was obvious to
everyone in the family that the James Jordan's greatly favored
(13:48):
Larry over Michael, and Michael did not take that particularly well.
He had great love for his father, but he was
always angrily trying to prove himself elf to his father
after that childhood rejection, and that anger pushed Jordan to
work insanely hard. It really, in a lot of ways,
(14:11):
was the motivation for much of his achievement in sports,
and Jordan's desire to please his late father would also
be behind what happened next. In October, Michael Jordan took
to the baseball field to throw out the first pitch
at a White Sox playoff game. But Jordan was not
done making news that night. Let's go quickly to penal.
(14:34):
Brian Alright, Gregor, breaking story here. The Chicago Bulls have
called the press conference to tomorrow morning, and there's high
speculation and report that Michael Jordan will retire from basketball forever.
The news shock the city of Chicago and the sports world,
but it made sense to Jordan's He was grieving mightily
over his father, and the idea that his father had
(14:57):
wanted him to play baseball, the idea that he had
unfinished business there. All of those things played into his decision. Meanwhile,
that fall of baseball enjoyed another epic World Series finish.
Here's a pitch on the way, a swinging a belt
(15:18):
field pay back Blue Jays, the Blue Jays, the World
Series champion. Touch a ball, Joe, You'll never hit a
bigger hole let in your life. That December, the previous
collective bargaining agreement between the owners and players expired, and
with Fay Vincent out of the way, Ryan Storff and
(15:38):
the owners decided to take another crack at getting a
salary cap for baseball. The owners argued that the lack
of a salary cap was hurting competition in the game.
Ryan Eckert, the status quo of no salary cap was
seen as unfair because the big market teams could just
outspend the small market teams and dominate the game on
the field. Even with a salary cap, however, big market
(16:01):
teams would still have an advantage, so their solution was
not only a salary cap, but also revenue sharing, so
that the revenues among all the teams could be distributed
equally or at least shared to have a sort of
redistribution of wealth. But the players themselves were dead set
against a salary cap. They as free agents, wanted to
(16:22):
command whatever salary open and free market would allow them to. Meanwhile,
on February seven, Michael Jordan's signed perhaps the smallest contract
of his life, a minor league deal with the Chicago
White Sox. He was going to pursue his dream of
being a baseball player. Jordan had once been quite a
(16:42):
promising ballplayer in Little League Roland las B. Michael was
just an incredible pitcher. He would often come in and
just strike out everybody he faced in that short amount
of time. Jordan threw two no hitters on the way
to leading his team just shy at the Little League
World Series. He was also a pretty good hitter. In
(17:03):
a crucial moment on the march to the Little League
World Series down in Georgia later that summer, Michael hit
a booming home run over center field in a very
big park that allowed his team to tie the score.
Jordan's team eventually lost that game, but that home run
(17:25):
was huge for him personally. His father spent years bragging
about it. Finally Michael had his father's attention. The next year,
when Jordan was baseball did not go as well. Michael
maybe played in three or four games, but he spent
most time on the bench. And again, from what we
(17:46):
know in retrospect of Michael's personality, that kind of drop off,
that kind of come down, was devastating stuff. Jordan eventually
quit baseball during his senior year. By then it was
clear his game was basketball. But the thirty one year
(18:06):
old Jordan arrived in Sarasota, Florida, ready to try to
compete with professionals in a game he had given up
on in high school. This is Jordan in an interview
from that spring. These are the two dreams that I've
always had when I was a kid, from baseball and basketball,
and I achieved basketball so I wanted to tie my
hand in baseball, and thousands of fans and hundreds of
(18:27):
reporters to send it on Florida to see if he
could do it. Many of the other players were not
so enthusiastic about the newcomer. The success in baseball is
hard one. It is a game of repetition. And so
you have all these people with their hard one experience
in baseball, and here comes Jordan's who quit in the
(18:54):
middle of his senior season in high school. Still, Jordan
brought within the same determine, nation and work ethic that
made him a champion in basketball, and he he had
to turn his basketball body back to a leaner baseball body,
which he did. Jordan arrived at training camp early each
(19:15):
morning and left late each night. As the White Sox
hitting coach Walt Rehniac observed, quote, he's one hard working mother. Well,
you get the point. At the end of the spring,
the White Sox played across town exhibition game with the
Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. The atmosphere in Chicago was electric.
There's gonna be a capacity crowd today or close to it,
(19:35):
and everybody who came to the ballpark today, came to
see that man you're looking at right there and see
if he can indeed hit some major league pitching. Marry.
This is his first time in front of more than
thirty five thousand fans. Jordan went two for five with
two runs batted in. He received a standing ovation. You know,
he just played well. He had a He had the
kind of day that had Harry Carey singing his prey
(20:00):
aces and all of Chicago will glow. It was perhaps
to be the high water mark of his brief baseball career.
Soon after, the White Sox assigned Jordan to their Double
A minor league team, the Birmingham Barons back up and
Matt just lesson for a moment. You know who's up, Birmingham, Alabama.
Here he is, right fielder Michael Jeffrey Jordan. Let's lesson
(20:23):
for a moment. Jordan went over three in his professional debut,
but the fans in Birmingham loved every minute. The team
started setting attendance records, selling out souvenirs. The fans would
break into spontaneous chance of Jordan's gatorade anthem. I want
to be like Mike Jordan's play on the field, however,
(20:45):
did not always match the hype, but through it all
he persisted. And yet here he was going from an
average blow average showing in in spring training over to
the humiliation of being a Birmingham baron and not being
(21:07):
a very good one, of having to play this out
in front of all these adoring fans, and really being
willing to humiliate himself. Soon the media started to turn
on him. Sports Illustrated, which at once lionized air Jordan's,
came out with a cover that read, bagg at Michael
(21:30):
Jordan and the White Sox are embarrassing Baseball. Jordan often
kept to himself on the long bus rides across the
South and in Birmingham. He had a rented house in Birmingham.
But Jordan would sit up there on the deck alone
and I looking up at the stars, thinking about his father.
And this was really about his father, about mourning him,
(21:54):
about reconnecting with him, about finding what they never found
in baseball. Meanwhile, back in the major leagues, the owners
and players were having their own existential crisis. In June,
the owners unveiled their proposal for a new collective bargaining agreement,
(22:16):
one that included a salary cap. Ryan Eckert, the small
market owners, we're really pushing hard for a strike and
pushing hard for a salary cap. But it wasn't just
small market owners. They were also at the time a
lot of new owners in the league who had their
own firm views about labor disputes. A lot of them
(22:36):
had bought into these teams in recent times, and we're
coming from the business world and had experience in negotiating
against and like busting up labor unions. The owner of
the Royals was the CEO of Walmart. The owner of
the Giants was the owner of Safely A grocery stores
(22:58):
who famously lay it off, you know, thousands of employees
to prevent them from unionizing. So a lot of these
owners had been successful in negotiating against unions outside of baseball,
but those heavy handed tactics just didn't work out quite
the same against baseball players as they did with you know,
like unskilled Walmart workers. Four days after the owners released
(23:20):
their proposal, the head of the players Association, Donald Fear,
announced the union's rejection of the proposal. In August, when
negotiations going nowhere, the owners withheld a scheduled payment for
the player's pension fund. It was an act of war.
The owners might have had most of the power then
controlled the purse strings, but the players had one mighty
piece of leverage, a strike that could cancel the season
(23:43):
and the postseason. Dandy Alderson and this is a quote
that I love, was the GM of Oakland at the time,
and he compared the strike lead up to the strike
two the number one movie of the summer at the time,
which is Speed, right and um, the playoffs in the
World Series are the hostages. The players are driving the
(24:06):
bus and the owners of the cops chasing them, trying
to stop it. In the end, they couldn't stop the bus.
On August twelve, the Major League Baseball Players Association directed
its members to go on strike. Then a month later
and the other shoe has finally dropped in the ongoing
(24:26):
baseball wars. The acting Commissioner, Bud Sea Leake, the owner
of the Milwaukee Brewers, has just made it official the
remainder of the regular season and the entire postseason, playoffs
and World Series have officially been canceled. This one of
the great casualties of the strike was that the season
was setting up to be a historic one. Tony Gwynn
was in the middle of attempting to hit four hundred
(24:49):
for the first time since Ted Williams did in one
Now Tony Gwynn was getting when the strikes started eighteen
games left, playing against the Hardinals, Cubs, and Marlins and Rockies,
all of whom had really mediocre pitching staff. Gwinn wasn't
alone in chasing history. Matt Williams had forty three home
runs when the strikes started and was on pace exactly.
(25:13):
They hit sixty one home runs by the end of
the season to tie Roger Morris. Baseball fans didn't care
whose fault it was. They didn't take kindly to strike.
I mean, the fan reaction was overwhelmingly negative and fans
were heartbroken. They were crushed disappointed. The World Series was
canceled for the first time since nineteen o four, and
(25:33):
uh it was very sad, and when baseball eventually did
come back, a lot of fans were still traumatized and
very reluctant to go back to the game. They really
held a grudge. At the same time, his major league
colleagues were refusing to take the field, Jordan was getting
better at it, slowly improving his game. He finished his
(25:56):
first minor league season with a two oh two average
with thirty stolen races and fifty one r b i s.
It was good enough to keep playing Roland Lasonby. He
later after Birmingham, he went to the Arizona Fall League,
which was another victory. I think he hit two sixty
in the Fall League. Michael Jordan was getting better at baseball.
All of his hard work was starting to pay off.
(26:18):
At the start of Jordan was not returning to basketball.
He was getting ready for his second, hopefully better season
in professional baseball. Then fate and a still ongoing baseball
strike intervened. When spring training started, the owners attempted to
bring in replacement players Ryan Eckert again, and they were
(26:39):
bringing Washta veterans. They're bringing guys out of pizzerias and
all kinds of all kinds of guys and also minor
league is There's a lot of pressure on minor league
players to go in and show up to spring training
and ultimately play in replacing games. And one of those
minor leaguers was perhaps the greatest basketball player that ever lived,
(27:01):
Roland Leason By. The White Sox were eager to deploy
him in various capacities, and he really didn't want anything
to do with being any kind of scab or doing
anything to undermine those players. The owners were pushing the
White Sox to have Jordan play some exhibition games to
retain some fan interest during the strike. Ryan Eckert, That's
(27:24):
fact really made Jordan's choose aside, and I guess Jordan's
sided with his fellow professional athletes and made it clear
that he wouldn't play as a scab or as a
replacement player in any subsequent Major league games. Jordan announced
his retirement from baseball in March. As Chicago Bulls coach
Phil Jackson later summed up the development, Jordan hadn't failed baseball,
(27:49):
baseball failed him. Immediately, rumors began about Jordan's return to basketball,
the NBA legend wavered. Then the week later, Jordans issued
the shortest and perhaps most significant press release in the
history of sports, a two word facts that read, quote
I'm back. Those two words would prove to be worth
(28:10):
billions of dollars. That's next. During the year and a
(28:33):
half that Michael Jordan was playing baseball, the Chicago Bulls
and the NBA both struggled NBA ticket sales were down,
the Bulls lost to the Knicks in the playoffs in
and we're having a rough season. But on March, when
Jordan arrived in Indianapolis for the Bulls game against the
Indiana Pacers, it was all forgotten. Now. I've been covering
(28:56):
the Bulls for a while, and just to be there
and to see the insanity of his return to basketball
from baseball was a very powerful thing. And it's like
the stock market of the American sports experience had plummeted
(29:19):
while I was gone, But there was something else that
returned to action in March professional baseball, two weeks after
Jordan's departure from baseball, legal proceedings surrounding the strike were
finally coming to a head. Ryan Eckert, the National Labor
Relations Board met pretty quickly, voted and ruled in favor
(29:39):
of the playoffs, and that was notably provided over by Stonia,
said maaw Justice and sort of my hoar spoke out
almost unilaterally in support of the players, which was a
huge win for the players, huge loss of the owners.
The strike ended and play resumed a month later. Jerry
ryan'sdorff in other baseball owners did not get the salary
(30:02):
cap they wanted, but at least Rhyan Storff, the NBA owner,
had a pretty big concession prize one of the best
basketball players to ever play the game. The Chicago Bulls
ended up winning three more NBA championships for a total
of six during the nineties, and everyone knew what or
(30:25):
who was the main reason behind it. All the people
around him, whether it was Ryan Store for Phil Jackson,
all of these people owed him so much and it
didn't stop there. We all owned Michael Jordan's when I
you know, I just lived on the change that was
spilled on the floor of my years covering him and
(30:48):
writing about him. And uh, I mean all of us.
I don't care if you were a photographer, a teammate,
a writer, the newspapers in Chicago, the y I don't
care who it was. They all everything to this phenomenon.
(31:11):
So how much was Michael Jordan's worth to the game
of basketball? You really had to be alive back then
and have witnessed the phenomenon. This is Greg Leonard, an
economist and a vice president Charles River Associates, an economics
consulting firm. People were really interested in watching him play
because he was so extraordinary and um, it really was
(31:35):
kind of unique. In the ninety nineties, Leonard In, an
m I T. Professor named Jerry Houseman, decided to look
at what kind of impact a megastar athlete like Jordan
had not just on his own team's finances, but on
league fortunes. More generally, we did start thinking about the
nature of the relationship among teams in a sports league
(31:56):
like this, where you had a situation where the Bulls
were the one is paying Michael Jordan's salary, but Jordan
is so popular that he's also driving up revenues for
other teams every time the Bulls come to town. So overall,
we found that there was about a twenty percent increase
in attendance. This was in the season due to Michael Jordan,
and this translated to about two and a half million
(32:17):
dollars for the other teams in the league. It didn't
stop at just attendance all told. If you add across
TV attendance and properties, um, we found a Michael Jordan
effect of about fifty three million dollars for other teams.
And again that's back in nine dollars. You can more
(32:38):
or less double that. So we're talking about in today's
dollars about a hundred million dollars for the other NBA teams.
In Fortune magazine, building on Leonard and Houseman's work, estimated
the full value of Michael Jordan beyond just the season then,
including Jordan's endorsements, ticket sales, merchandizing, television revenues, and more.
All told, they estimated a Jordan's effect of close to
(33:01):
ten billion dollars. But Jordan's returned to basketball meant so
much more to the league than just that. Thanks to
the strike, major League Baseball owners lost close to one
billion dollars and the players more than three million. Then
baseball attendance plummeted my more than the following year. Ryan Eckert,
(33:24):
I think with the perspective of time and knowing what
the effects were, both sides surely would have been able
to find a compromise. But I think they're a little
bit naive about how bad it would be. And worse
than the money problem, major League Baseball had an image problem.
When baseball came back, fans didn't rushed back the Ballpard
(33:47):
is happy that the game was finally back to that
they keep going, and they were very slow to come down. Um,
those are very lane years of baseball. But thanks to
the explosion and home runs that started in the late nineties,
baseball started to bounce back. Of course, it turned out
that steroids and other performance enhancing drugs played a big
(34:10):
part in that bounce. All sides, players, owners, and commissioner
willingly turned a blind eye to what was happening in
terms of the integrity of the game. And we're just
grateful that baseball was back in the public eye until
(34:31):
consequently what you have is the steroid era being allowed
to take root, which obviously going forward, led to disastrous
consequences for baseball, which we still feel the effects of today.
And Eckert says, baseball was never quite the same. I
think strike really changed forever the way the game is
(34:55):
seen in the largest fabric of American culture and society.
You know, the national pastime, as the phrase is used.
But I'm not sure that talking to you now in
baseball is the national past time anymore. As a kid,
a day at the ballpark was almost an experience out
of time, right. It's the same game that my father's
(35:19):
son and the sixties. You know, my grandfather saw in
the forties and I as a kid was experiencing in
the nineties, and you know, time stands still, right, So
go to a baseball game now is just not the
same experience that I had as a kid. It's just different.
That disillusionment that's followed the strike really was the final
(35:41):
chapter we've seen now what Michael Jordan meant to the
game of basketball and how baseball has struggled to regain
its prominence after strike. But just how critical was Michael
Jordan's decision to return to basketball. Greg Leonard again has
(36:03):
come back in nineteen was obviously hugely significant and you
can really just see that, I think, without too much
sophisticated analysis, by looking at what happened to the TV ratings.
Jordan's first game back against the Indiana Pacers got the
highest rating for a regular season NBA game in twenty years.
(36:26):
It didn't stop there, you know, when Michael Jordan came
back in terms of like the NBA Finals, um, you
got about a fifty increase in in viewership in the
years where Michael Jordan and the Bulls were playing in
the finals versus the years where they weren't playing. Magic
Johnson and Larry Bird had really helped take the NBA
(36:49):
to a new level of popularity during the nineteen eighties,
but it was Jordan who truly elevated the game and
its finances. Roland las and By we know today that
the great inflation of basketball franchises it was really due
to the acceleration that Michael Jordan provided in that regard
(37:10):
and nearly stopped providing all of that crater. When Jordan
left and went to baseball, they they had no compelling figures.
But since Jordan returned, basketball has gone from a somewhat
local market sport to a global, high tech multimedia enterprise.
The NBA has expanded, as Jerry West told me, he
(37:34):
saw it coming. He told me in two thousand and eight.
You know, it's becoming a licensed print money. It has
become just a huge cash machine. We don't know where
that goes from here. But Michael's return was the shortcut.
It's possible the NBA could have built all of that
(37:56):
and regenerated all that excitement, but Michael coming back. I mean,
it was all over the world and suddenly everything had changed.
You know, that's very interesting, Ryan Eckert, what if, you know,
the strike didn't happen. What if Jordan's baseball career was
really allowed to you know flourish. You know what, if
he was convinced that that's something he really wanted to pursue,
(38:20):
rather than just sort of seeing it as like you know,
passing obsession, that he was able to give up. Broad
said the quickly. You know, I'm not sure, but I
think either way it's set up the NBA for continued success.
And you know, it was really a fork in the
road as far as the relationship between baseball, basketball and
(38:41):
their position in American culture. Flashback is written and hosted
by me Sean Braswell, senior writer and executive producer at Aussie.
It was produced by Robert Coulos, Tracy Moran, Yorio Di Giza,
and Shannon Williamson. Chris Hoff engineered our show special thanks
to the crew at i Heeart Radio podcast Networks, especially
(39:04):
Sophie Lichtman and Jack O'Brien. Make sure to subscribe to
Flashback on the I Heart Radio app or listen wherever
you get your podcasts. Flashback is the latest podcast from Azzi,
a modern media company producing original TV series, festivals, news
and podcasts for curious people. Azzie unique storytelling focuses on
the new and the next, whether that's forward looking news
(39:25):
and features, bold new perspectives on TV, or brand new
ways of looking at history. We live in the age
when ridiculous things survive. This is Roland lason By again.
I asked him about the urban legend that Jordan retired
from basketball because he was about to be banned from
the game for gambling. Lazenby says, the theory doesn't hold
(39:47):
up under closer scrutiny. All the old NBA players road
around on trains. They gambled like fools on trains before
they gambled on planes. It's a It was, is and
remains a gambling culture, whether it's talk or betting on
any kind of little detail involved in their life, you know,
(40:11):
half court shot or whatever. Those guys have bet like crazy.
And Michael he was the king of the NBA, so
we was certainly the king of that kind of petting.
And Jordan's bet on a lot of things, especially his
own golf games, but it didn't cross the line. No
one has ever come up with a scenario, with any
(40:34):
kind of idea, with any kind of allegation that he
for a minute ever bet on an NBA game to
dive deeper on this and more, head to Aussie dot
com slash flashback. That's oz y dot com slash Flashback.
There you can find my lecture notes from today's episode
featuring extended interviews, links to further reading and more information
(40:57):
on the changing fortunes at baseball and back bsketball, as
well as links to other stories from history uncovered by
me and other reporters at Aussie. Please be sure to
support Flashback by rating and leaving a review for us
right here in your podcast app, and remember to answer
(41:18):
this question about next week's episode for a chance to
win a shout out. What chronic physical ailment did Adolph
Hitler suffer from that led him to seek some rather
unorthodox and highly consequential medical treatment. Take your best guests
and leave it as a comment in your podcast app
along with your five star review. Thanks for listening. We
(41:40):
all need a break from the constant cycle to learn
something new, to gain new perspectives. The Great Courses Plus
streaming service is an excellent resource to expand our knowledge
on a variety of subjects or pick up a new hobby.
I've been enjoying the Great Courses Plus while researching this
season of flashback lectures like Playball, The Rights of Baseball's
(42:00):
America's Pastime, History of the Supreme Court, and Battlefield Europe
have helped me connect the dots on several stories from history.
Right now, they're giving our listeners a special, limited time
offer a free month of unlimited access to their entire library.
Sign Up now through our special U r L. Go
to the Great Courses plus dot Com Slash Aussie. That's
(42:22):
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The Great Courses plus dot Com Slash Assi
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