No, the working title is not “He Can’t Hit the Curve.”
Michael Jordan’s short-lived baseball career — 121 AA minor league games where he hit .202 — is going to be the focus of a movie produced by Will Smith, reports The Tracking Board (hat tip HoopsHype).The 2017 Black List was announced this morning, and with it came the news that Will Smith is set to produce a movie about Michael Jordan’s short-lived baseball career.
In The Prospect, written by Ben Epstein, Michael Jordan uses a year as a baseball prospect to find himself after his father’s death. James R. Jordan Sr. was murdered by two men on the side of the highway in July 1993. In February 1994, four months after the first of his three retirements from the NBA, Michael Jordan signed a minor league contract with the Chicago White Sox.
There is potential for a story here. Any good movie needs drama, and Jordan leaving the sport where he is the best in the world to pursue the dream his father had for him of being a Major League baseball player has that. Also, Jordan fails at it and ultimately returns to the NBA to dominate again. There is room for a lot of emotion and good story arc.
In one season in Birmingham — the AA affiliate of the White Sox, owned by Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of the Bulls — Jordan hit .202 with three home runs, 51 RBIs, 114 strikeouts and 11 errors. So this movie is not a hitting clinic.
What Jordan thinks of this would be interesting. And there is zero chance they get into the long-debunked David Stern suspension for gambling rumor.
