Mack’s Apples – Michael Jordan, Romelio Martinez, Cole Hamels, Route Efficiency, China Baseball

Good morning.

Michael Jordan year in baseball could be made into a movie produced by Will Smith –

It’s been nearly 15 years since Michael Jordan first retired from the NBA and signed a minor-league contract to play baseball for the Chicago White Sox organization. Yet to this day, Jordan’s 1994 season with the Double-A Birmingham Barons is one of the most intriguing sports stories of the past 25 years. After a career as the greatest basketball player of all time, he wanted to try his hand at another sport.

That unexpected development, which almost has the status of a fable in professional sports, could be the subject of a feature film produced by Will Smith. As reported by The Tracking Board’s Jeff Sneider, Smith’s production company, Overbrook Entertainment, has picked up a script by Ben Epstein titled The Prospect.

Cuban Outstanding Baseball Player  Romelio Martinez   Dies-

        

    Cubans are in mourning for the death of Romelio Martinez Hernandez, one of the strongest batters who played in the national baseball championships.

The former player from the extinct Havana province died of cardiac arrest on Sunday at the CIMEQ Hospital in this capital at the age of 52.

Martinez was one of the greatest sluggers of all times in Cuban baseball. He batted 370 home runs in 13 National Series, so he is tied in the fourth place with another outstanding player, Antonio Muñoz.

  Cole Hamels donates his mansion to Missouri charity –

         

     Texas Rangers pitcher Cole Hamels and his wife, Heidi, are donating a 32,000-square-foot mansion and 100 acres of land in southwest Missouri to a charity that provides camps for children with special needs. The mansion and land is in the Table Rock Lake area, near Reeds Springs.

Heidi Hamels grew up in nearby Buffalo, Mo., and they were building the house when her husband was traded from Philadelphia to Texas in 2015. The Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader reports an attorney for the couple said they thought the mansion would be their dream home, but after the trade they moved to Texas and never moved to the Missouri property, which is valued at more than $9 million.

Major League Baseball's Statcast Can Break Sabermetrics -

         

   “On a historical basis, a decade from now, we’ll be looking back saying, ‘That was the highest route efficiency that’s ever been captured in baseball.’”

That’s what Joe Inzerillo—the executive vice president and chief technology officer of MLB Advanced Media—said in a league press release announcing baseball’s revolutionary new player-tracking system, Statcast. It hasn’t quite been a decade since that quote; it hasn’t quite, in fact, been three years. But route efficiency, the metric in question, has already disappeared.

MLB announced a 10-year deal that should significantly grow baseball in  China -

         

   The MLB facilities will teach baseball skills to children in grades 7 through 12 and offer mainstream school curriculum. It’s not an entirely different idea than some of the baseball academies that have been opened in Latin America. Right now, MLB has three development centers in China. They’ve turned out 36 players in the last four years that have gone on to play higher levels of baseball in the U.S., China, Japan or Korea. Three of the players have signed MLB contracts, 11 are on the Chinese National Team and 12 play professionally in China.

How do you say in Chinese: “seedy scumbag so-called agents handing out in the parking lot”?