COMMENTARY : Jordan Puts His Spin on Why He Quit, but Is Anyone Fooled?

In the end, Michael Jordan seems to have the same denial about baseball that he did about his gambling. He issued a statement last week to announce his retirement from baseball and said because of the strike, it was “difficult to continue to develop at a rate that fits my standards.”

The statement really could have been reduced to these two sentences: “I didn’t want to be a pawn in the baseball strike. And I wasn’t much better than a replacement player, anyway.”

Michael Jordan retired from baseball before baseball retired from him. To suggest anything else is phony of him, even as he is about to make us all cheer with a return to basketball.

Jordan was pure about baseball, right up until he issued that statement Friday. He put himself on the line, he didn’t seem to mind embarrassing himself, he played with a smile and he played hard. And when he left White Sox camp the other day, his disgust about the strike also seemed pure.

But the truth about Jordan is that he would have fit right in with replacement players. He might even have found a level of the game where he could be a star. Jordan was bigger than replacement ball, but just not on the field.

The wonderful television commercial Jordan just did with Spike Lee pokes gentle fun at Jordan’s inadequacies. He’s not Willie Mays, the commercial says. He’s not Ken Griffey Jr. And that was never the problem.

In baseball he wasn’t Michael Jordan. That was the problem.

Now he goes back to basketball, where he belongs, where he is the biggest star in the world. And, who knows, maybe he will be bigger than ever. Maybe he will be better off because of nearly two seasons in which he did not have to run up and down the court. Maybe he can play five more years.

The fact that he could make another $50 million or so, from the Bulls and in endorsements, over the rest of his career had to help his decision-making process. Jordan is smart enough to see what happened to Bo Jackson. Nike wasn’t going to make commercials with him forever. Same thing with Hanes, and all the rest of them.

Jordan will never say that. But then he has had some trouble saying what he means the past couple of years, whether talking about hitting golf balls with Richard Esquinas or trying to hit the curveball. When he retired from the Bulls, he said again and again he wanted to get away from “you guys,” meaning the media. Then he went right into a sport, baseball, in which there is a game almost every day of the week, even in the minors.

But baseball made him more human. It made all of us root for him harder than ever. Maybe he would have stayed with it if there had been no strike. Maybe that is another thing we never will know about him.