In the summer of '94, I went down to Orlando to check out a prospect. I had pretty much written him off earlier that spring, but I was curious to see if he had made any progress.

He wasn't in the lineup that day for the Birmingham Barons, but he was taking BP in a dark batting cage between Tinker Field and the adjacent Citrus Bowl. I watched as he hit ball after ball on the screws, keeping his head still and his shoulders square, getting beautiful extension on his swing.

I was wrong, I thought. He just might be a major league ballplayer.

Every time his name comes up, I think of that day and wonder what if. And I hear his name, or rather his initials, all the time. Even now, as he considers his third career in the NBA, I wonder what would have happened if Michael Jordan had stayed with baseball.

A little background here. I was working for Sports Illustrated back in '94, and that spring I was asked to do a quickie story on Michael's attempt to become a baseball player. I fell in step with all the skeptics in Florida, baseball people who thought it was a folly that was depriving some legitimate prospect of a chance to show what he could do.

I had nothing to do with the incendiary Bag It, Michael cover billing, but my name was on the story, and I became persona non grata in Chicago, in the Bulls and White Sox camps, in MJ's circle.

When I went down to Orlando later that summer, I knew he wasn't going to talk to me, but I had to see for myself. And I was at once mortified and exhilarated. He was a ballplayer. His manager, Terry Francona, thought so, and he wasn't blowing smoke. I actually wrote a piece apologizing for my premature judgment, but SI chose not to run it.

People only see his batting average from that season: .202. But in 436 at-bats in '94 -- breaking into professional ball at the difficult Class AA level -- he had 30 stolen bases and 51 RBIs.

Ed Wade, the general manager of the Phillies, says, "On the basis of his stats alone, you would see the possibilities. I saw him in the Arizona Fall League after the season, and the consensus among all the scouts was that he had made significant progress."

After that Arizona Fall League, and during the major league work stoppage, Jordan abandoned baseball. Since then, the conventional line of thinking is that MJ failed at baseball. "Err Jordan" they called him, and it stuck. He even made fun of his own ballplaying abilities in Space Jam. But I'm convinced that with just a little more time, he could've made the majors on merit.

Now, as people scoff at the notion that MJ can still be an impact player in the NBA, I'm thinking back to that batting cage in Orlando.

I'd be careful about what you say about the guy.

Steve Wulf is executive editor of ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at steve.wulf@espnmag.com.