Sandy Alderson: A's offered Michael Jordan MLB contract in 1994
If Sandy Alderson had his way, we would have seen Michael Jordan in green and gold.
The former Oakland Athletics general manager was seriously eyeing Jordan the baseball player. During an appearance on ESPN's Baseball Tonight podcast with Buster Olney, Alderson revealed that when Jordan famously retired from the Chicago Bulls to play baseball in 1994, he offered His Airness a major-league contract in Oakland - no questions asked.
"When I heard that (he was going to play baseball), I called his agent right away," Alderson said. "And (I) said, 'Hey, look, I understand he may be going to Double-A. I don't even know who the 25th man is on team, our major-league team right now, I will sign him and put him on the major-league roster. He'll be part of our 25-man team tomorrow.'"
"It never came to fruition. But I was totally serious," he added.
The Chicago White Sox in part squashed Alderson's attempt to land Jordan, and he claims they accused him of tampering. The White Sox, whose owner Jerry Reinsdorf also owns the Bulls, signed Jordan to a minor-league deal in 1994.
The longtime executive acknowledged that publicity for a struggling team 12 games under .500 in 1994 partly motivated his interest in bringing Jordan to Oakland.
"He wouldn't have won us the World Series," Alderson quipped. "I'm sure he would have played, we were going nowhere at that time.
"It wasn't about we got a spot for him, he's got a particular skill, that wasn't the idea. The idea was hey, we got Michael Jordan on the team, and who knows what kind of interest that would have generated."
Jordan hit .202/.289/.266 with three homers, 51 RBIs, 30 steals, and 114 strikeouts over 127 games with Chicago's Double-A affiliate, the Birmingham Barons, in 1994. The next year he returned to the Bulls, and the legend led the team to another three NBA championships.
Alderson, now a senior adviser with the Athletics, was Oakland's GM from 1983 to 1998, and the architect of the Athletics' 1989 World Series championship club.
In 2016, while serving as the New York Mets' GM, Alderson signed former NFL quarterback Tim Tebow - who hadn't played baseball in over a decade - to a minor-league deal.