I didn’t have a job the summer between college and grad school. I was busy swapping out all my undergrad stuff for Vandy-issue black and gold – that is, when I wasn’t watching the World Cup or trying out my new Power Mac 6100…or going to Barons games.<\/p>\n
It was the perfect storm. I was 22, I was fixated on all things sports, and my best friend from high school had a dad in local government in Hoover – right where the Birmingham Barons played. Which means that for an entire summer, I had premium seating to watch rookie Baron right fielder Michael Jordan.<\/p>\n
There are a couple of things people don’t realize about that team and that season:<\/p>\n
1) The Hoover Met, in 1994, was very nearly an un-leavable yard. In the pre-steroid age, a classic round-symmetric park was a tough enough thing to hit out of without being positioned with the prevailing wind blowing in.<\/p>\n
2) The 1993 Barons won the Southern League pennant going away – and more or less the entire roster got called up to triple-A Nashville. So what rolled into Birmingham in April of 1994 was, essentially, a single-A ballclub plus a three-time NBA champion off-guard.<\/p>\n
There’s no real way to dress up a .202 batting average, but the three total home runs don’t look as bad in retrospect. The thing that really stands out, though, are 50 RBI – and a team-leading 30 steals. And the guy I watched from behind the first-base bullpen didn’t look like he was going anything less than all-out. This wasn’t a guy on an extended fantasy-camp outing, this was a guy with something to prove to himself.<\/p>\n
I was more than thrilled to have the Bulls knock off the hated Lakers in ’91, but I was rooting hard for Portland in ’92 and Phoenix in ’93, so I wasn’t really a Jordan fan by any stretch of the imagination. But after 1994, I respected the hell out of him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I didn’t have a job the summer between college and grad school. I was busy swapping out all my undergrad stuff for Vandy-issue black and gold – that is, when I wasn’t watching the World Cup or trying out my new Power Mac 6100…or going to Barons games. It was the perfect storm. I was … <\/p>\n