By Mike Griffin
Staff Writer
(Disclaimer-this article was written by a die-hard Yankee fan who had just seen Jeter play for the final time. It is soaked in his tears.)
I was a terrible hitter in Little League. My dad, who wanted me to improve but was never really a baseball skills guy, sent me to a fundamentals clinic in Manhattan. The first time I went there, I was told to hold the bat higher up, and bring it down directly on the ball instead of hacking at it as I had been doing. I should, the coach said, watch Derek Jeter. The way his hands were high behind his head. The way he kept his head inside the ball. Of course watched him. I watched the Yankees most nights anyway. I tried to imitate the way he did it, but I couldn’t. Baseball, as it turned out, just wasn’t my sport.
This was just one instance in which Derek Jeter was associated in my life. He’s in the lives of so many others, too, not with the Yankees or And1 or any other entity, but with the game itself; baseball as a sport, the game that we all love.
His career is coming to an end, and there are those who say that it does not deserve the intense, incessant attention it has been getting. But this level of coverage is not given to those who do not warrant it. ESPN does not spend pieces of SportCenter every night reporting on a Connecticut man’s trips to the driving range. So the question must be asked, with as little bias as possible, but with context in mind: why does Derek Jeter matter?
There is the place that the Yankees have in the recent and ancient history of the game, for better or for worse, and the place that their stars have to occupy in the baseball zeitgeist. As George Will declared in Ken Burns’ Baseball; “The best thing for baseball is for the Yankees to be contenders, but eventually lose in the end,” and this statement, even as a lifelong Yankee fan, is true; the seasons of 2001 to 2004 had some of the most eventful and exciting playoff series ever. Over the course of that four-year period, the Yankees made three ALCSs, two World Series and won exactly zero championships. But those playoffs saw the crowning of young kings of baseball, the destruction of decades of despair and an excitement of competition that had not existed since 1991, with the emergence of the Braves and then Yankees.
This period of competitive excellence was preceded by baseball’s last true dynasty; four New York championships in five years. These two eras were dominated by the Yankees, and they were, championship or not, one of, if not the most intimidating teams in baseball.
Jeter presided over all of this, took part in its most powerful and memorable moments, and was excellent individually. He remained excellent until two seasons ago, a career that warrants a first-ballot induction to the Hall of Fame and a place among the best players of all time.
But that’s a career. People have them. Good ones, great ones, better ones than Derek’s have come and gone. His numbers are not one of a kind, and there will be players in the future, including guys who are playing right now (Albert Pujols, Mike Trout) who will have careers as good, if not better than he had.
There is what he, as a person and a player, means to baseball culture. He represents the innocence, the purity of the game, on and off the field. There’s poetry, dignity to the way that he plays the game, something that in a sense has been lost. He made plays that were fun to watch, and while his range decreased and his arm lost the zip that is once had, he remained looking almost exactly the same as when he broke into the league. The process of watching him age was like a tree. It doesn’t get squat or misshapen; it just develops rings, more evidence of the time that it has gone through. He never had any brush ups with the law, was never accused of using steroids, and, it seems, arrived a leader, not just for the Yankees, but for baseball. Throughout his career, he was never the most valuable player, he didn’t usually lead the league in anything, but he was the face of the game, even in a time when the most dominant players were, and occasionally still are, being accused of cheating and generally tainting the game. This is an overused term, but he’s a throwback. He’s quite possibly the last Yankee great that we’ll ever see who played exclusively for the Yankees. He’s class epitomized. He’s the King of New York. He, as Curt Schilling put it, “has always been above the fray.”
But that’s not necessarily unique. Brooks Robinson won sixteen Gold Gloves, two World Series, and was a beacon of light in the city of Baltimore. Look at Dustin Pedroia, who lives across the street from Fenway Park with his wife and sons and who is the epitome of hustle and class and everything that baseball should be. He is a player that a kid who lacks a Bo Jackson physique can look at and gain hope that he can play the game at a high level. Players have made the game better before, and they will again.
There’s who he is as a player. Not his everyday abilities, but what he represents. He remains, in an era of statistics that can make a player who was considered great across three planes–batting average, RBIs and home runs– suddenly dominant across dozens of different minute areas to the point that he is all but omnipotent on a baseball diamond statistically, a player whose legacy will be defined by the fact that he was successful in the postseason, and more specifically, that he was clutch. He got a hit when a hit was needed, when a win was needed, even if he had been below average for most of the series. His advanced fielding and batting statistics have become below average, even dreadful, in recent years, but he has not sputtered and fallen out of the picture and become a non-entity. He has weathered the storm better than any player in recent history.
But perhaps he should have worn. Baseball is a sport obsessed with its own history, but it is rarely interested in having the history be lived unless it has something immediate to offer. There is a YouTube clip in which every mentioning of the name “Derek Jeter” is cut together, and the video title mentions that Tony Gwynn was not mentioned anywhere in the broadcast. Now, just as Mariano Rivera did not ask for a celebration in his honor last year, Jeter did not ask for one this year, but nonetheless the nonstop singing of his praises during the All-Star Game was regarded as indulgent and unnecessary. There is a very simple explanation for the grumblings of the fans. Jeter is not excellent this year, as Rivera was last year, when he finished with 44 saves at age 43. He did not earn the praise in the short term. He is batting second on a third place team with a .276 batting average and a .379 OBP (both of those numbers are well below his career stats in those areas). He is sputtering. As the season progresses, it’s becoming clearer that he is, as Mariano was last year, a star descending. But unlike Mariano, he is not gliding. He is plummeting, sort of, not into disaster but rather into mediocrity. In this world of the moment, when a player’s worth is decided by his game-to-game performance, he does not matter. Nor does he matter to baseball today. The Yankees will not make the postseason, and even if they do, there will be no return to the World Series, no more Jeffrey Maier home runs, no more The Flips. He will end his career with a whimper, like Mariano did last year, just a big name on a bad team.
Then there is the fact of who he is. He is the face of a team that, while undeniably important to the history of the game, is disliked by every other team, and every other fanbase. Just like his career, dislike of New York peaked at a time when the Yankees were the best in baseball, and so could handle the hate, but they are no longer invincible. This year, they are not just disliked but they are also old, expensive and not fun to watch. Some would say, just like Jeter. If, as it would seem, the Yankees follow Jeter and mirror his accomplishments and abilities, and if the Yankees this year do not matter in an AL race that is being fought between two teams on the West Coast and Miguel Cabrera paired with three Cy Young pitchers in the middle of the country, then Jeter, too, does not matter.
Then there is the fact of who else exists in baseball today. You have young players who are fast and strong and can outdo Jeter in literally every facet of the game. They are monsters of Sabermetrics, not helped by them physically, or even statistically (stats are the baseball equivalent of “ball don’t lie”) but perhaps in terms of their reputations. I saw part of an Angels game and saw Mike Trout strike out on three pitches, two fastballs that he could not handle and a changeup that he swung through so violently that it seemed like he would break his own back, and was then told that strikeouts are the least damaging type of out you can make. In a place where he is no longer the best, or even close to the best, at any particular skill, and where he is not measured by his intangibles, Jeter does not matter.
But when he leaves the game less than two months from now, the game will be different, changed in a way that will not be evident on a day-to-day level. Jeter is the last remainder of a different era in baseball. He has five championship rings, the most of any active player. David Ortiz, 38 years old but still doggedly productive, has three, and several players have two. But this next chapter in baseball history will lack players who have been to the highest stage before. They will not, at a young age, have had the success that will make them accustomed to the high stakes of the playoffs. His leaving resets the natural order, the mythic cycle of baseball. A new generation emerges when he leaves, new faces of the game; and those faces, especially Mike Trout, will have worn number 2 growing up. As the face of baseball, despite playing in an age when so many people played and lived the game the wrong way, Jeter did it right, and became a role model as a result. Through his sheer visibility at his prime, he will have given the new generation an idea of what success is like, how to live the superstar life the right way. Perhaps not directly, but in time, Jeter will have mattered.
So this statement is written not as a Yankee fan, but just a fan of the National Pastime; shouldn’t he matter a little bit now, before he becomes just another player who was great way back when? Shouldn’t he be given a standing ovation for making the plays that kids imitate over and over? Because those kids are growing and grown up, and when, ten years from now, we see baseball being played and represented the right way, we will be cheering on Derek Jeter, and he will matter.
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