Author’s note: this is a rather personal subject for me, and as such there’s a bit more emotion in this piece than I normally like to include. As usual, I’ve put in my cursory effort to be level-headed when writing about the Yankees, but due to the subject matter my efforts may not have been as strong as they were in the past. I offer my forgiveness in advance, and hope that you bear with me.
The Derek Jeter farewell tour is a touchy subject around baseball, without question. It seems that TV networks can’t get enough of it, and the fans at Yankee Stadium are in the same boat. In fact, it seems fans at almost every ballpark couldn’t be more thrilled when the Yankees come to town, a vast departure from recent years.
Jeter, naturally, is at the center of this. It’s a rare event when Jeter isn’t at the center of something involving the Yankees. When that’s the case, his evil twin Alex Rodriguez is usually to blame. It’s almost a blessing then that Rodriguez has been whisked away by a wave of the magic wand of the commissioner’s office, leaving Jeter alone in the limelight of the national press. However, if you’re not one of the New York faithful, or one of the revelers on the road, it’s not difficult to imagine that Jeter-palooza has become a bit grating.
It’s even become a bit grating for me, a staunch member of the New-York faithful. Tuesday’s game marked the thirteenth and final Yankees game I attended this year, by far the most I’ve ever been to in a season. The Yankees have been an institution in my family for three generations now, and I’ll be damned if they don’t become one for a fourth.
And ever since I’ve been old enough to comprehend what exactly is going on in a baseball game, Derek Jeter has been the shortstop for the New York Yankees. Players have come and gone, even most of the “Core Four” (who really should have been called the Core Five, but apparently Bernie Williams retired too early for such canonization). I have witnessed the height of a dynasty, the death of an emperor, and now a kingdom’s slow descent into austerity. Jeter’s been there for every minute of it. Even when all but a few games were lost to injury last year, Jeter could still be seen in the first base dugout at Yankee Stadium. There was no one shortstop to replace him, despite the best efforts of Eduardo Nuñez, Jayson Nix, Brendan Ryan and more. Even if someone had run away with the job, Jeter would still have been the shortstop in my head. So when Jeter announced his retirement before the beginning of the season, it wasn’t much of a shock. The man is a forty-year-old shortstop, who has accomplished nearly everything a player could hope to. 3000 hits. A handful of World Series rings. A captainship. Endorsement deals. The adoration of the biggest sports fanbase in the world.
Yet despite all that… for so long I’ve felt the fanfare this final season has been overblown. TV spots, ceremonies, t-shirt upon t-shirt, all painting Jeter as the modern messiah of baseball. For a while, I enjoyed it. Then it permeated more and more of the game, to the point that I couldn’t turn on a game featuring two non-AL teams without hearing about all the great things Jeter’s done.
I don’t need to explain why I love Derek Jeter, why I have his shirt as the one I wear to ballgames. But here I was, watching the Giants and Pirates, and hearing about Derek Jeter. The hits just kept coming, too. Broadcast after broadcast would talk about it. The All-Star Game became the All-Jeter Game, in a way. It lead to an identity crisis for both my father and I. Were we bad fans for growing tired of the celebration?
I wrestled with the issue for months. The jadedness showed up in my writing, it showed up in the stands at Yankee stadium, it showed up in my vented frustration on Twitter. Even the New York writers, who had long been the cheerleaders of the Jeter fan club, seemed to catch a case of the same ailment I was suffering from.
That all changed the morning of September 18th. That night I had tickets to see the Yankees begin the final homestand of Jeter’s career against the Blue Jays and R.A. Dickey. In a vacuum, the game meant nothing special. The Yankees are essentially out of the playoffs, as are the Jays. I had seen the Jays earlier in the year as well (Jose Reyes lead off that game with a laser home run into the short porch off Masahiro Tanaka).
Those facts didn’t keep me from getting emotional. For the first time since his announcement, the reality of Jeter’s impending retirement hit me like a freight train. Not only was the last member of my childhood Yankees leaving forever, but also the last vestige of my childhood itself would be gone. It was an incredibly sobering thought. It made me really think about what Derek Jeter had done for the Yankees, and how easy it was for his brilliance to fly under the radar.
When I first started watching the Yankees, Jeter was already there. I had nothing to compare him to, especially given that I didn’t follow the rest of the league all that much at the time. There was whoever the other team that day’s shortstop was, and there was Derek Jeter. It’s been that way for me seemingly since the dawn of time. In a way, that makes Jeter a dinosaur of sorts. He is the last of his kind, the final member of the ancient group of monsters that once laid waste to the ranks of baseball’s finest.
What started on September 18th was nothing short of a blast from the past. The cobwebs that had entangled Jeter all season were shed off and the old him came to party one last time in the Bronx. Over the course of his final homestand, Jeter hit .352/.371/.559. He notched 8 RBIs, 4 doubles, and what in all likelihood was the final home run of his career. I was there when he hit that home run, and I knew what it was as soon as it left the bat. I had seen my own little bit of history.
In that moment, everything became worth it. I remembered why Jeter had defined my childhood, how he had been the personification of the game for so long. I remembered the career .309/.337/.439 hitter, the 3643 hits. I remembered the laser shot off of none other than David Price to secure his 3000th hit. The postseason heroics, the spinning plays that enraptured my young star-struck self. I remembered my first game out in the famous short porch in right field. It was a 2003 game with the Texas Rangers, and Jeter put one in the first row in the first inning. I remembered watching him fly into the stands to catch a ball in the most hotly contested regular season game against the Red Sox I can remember, besides last year’s infamous return of Alex Rodriguez to Fenway Park.
Thursday night’s game was not nearly as vital from a purely objective standpoint. The Yankees had been eliminated from making the playoffs the day before, and all the Orioles had left to fight for was home field advantage in the ALDS. Yet it was the biggest event in all of sports. Derek Jeter was taking the field in New York for the very last time.
I could have sworn I saw him get choked up when the Bleacher Creatures started the Role Call. A brief “Oh my god” passed over his lips, followed by a swallowed sob. Jeter, normally a portrait of stoicism, was looking human. He would later say in interviews following the game that for the first time in his career, he was mentally pleading for the ball to not be hit to him. When asked by YES Network reporter Meredith Marakovits what he was telling himself as he stepped up to the plate in the first inning, Jeter replied “Don’t cry.”
From that first at-bat on, it was all Jeter, all the time. He drove in the Yankees first run with a booming double off the left field wall, and then scored on a wild pitch and a Brian McCann grounder to the right side. He plated another run when J.J. Hardy, who may be his replacement next year, wildly fielded a Jeter ground ball and allowed a run to score. Then, after David Robertson allowed homers to Adam Jones and Steve Pearce in the top of the ninth to tie the game, the baseball gods had their way.
Due up third in the bottom of the ninth was Jeter. Buck Showalter brought in right-hander Evan Meek to face the Yankees. Jose Pirela singled and was replaced at first by the speedy Antoan Richardson, Brett Gardner moved him over with a sac bunt. You can guess what happened next.
Throughout his career, Derek Jeter has seemed to conjure these moments out of thin air. Who could forget his home run in the World Series at the stroke of midnight to put the Yankees on top? These new heroics seemed all but destined to happen the moment Robertson allowed the home run to Pearce. I told my father as much. “There’s no way in hell Jeter doesn’t walk this off.”
For a Yankees fanbase that has missed October baseball for the first time in two straight years since the early 90’s, it was a vindication of what at times has been a hellacious year. Injuries and ineffectiveness have seemingly doomed the Yankees to at least a few more years of mediocrity, with no end in sight despite the presence of interesting prospects down on the farm for the first time in quite a while. It all went away Thursday night. So did the universal griping over the farewell tour, at least in this fan’s heart. Naturally there will still be holdouts. Already some grumblings of a setup have begun circulating around the internet. Meek is hardly the pitcher one would expect Showalter to bring in to protect the game (never mind that Andrew Miller, Darren O’Day, and Zach Britton have all been used thoroughly of late, and that Meek has finished a healthy number of games this past month), and that Jeter wasn’t walked to set up a double play (never mind that the Orioles seldom ever pick that route, and that McCann, a hot-hitting lefty with power, would then face the right-handed Meek. And just imagine the riots that would have ensued if Jeter ended his Yankee Stadium career with an intentional walk). And can endings really be that magical outside of Hollywood?
The answer is yes. Jeter is a natural at these kinds of things. We shouldn’t be surprised at this anymore; that goes for both naysayers and revelers. Even though I in a way predicted the end of Thursday’s game, I still could not believe my eyes. Half of my shock was the sheer perfection in how the game had ended. The other half was that the very last bit of my childhood was gone. Suddenly I was no longer a twenty year-old kid watching his idol. I had become simply, well, twenty. I couldn’t have asked for a better way for it to happen. How can you not be romantic about baseball?
There will be another face of baseball next year. Many signs point to it being Mike Trout, others to Clayton Kershaw or Giancarlo Stanton. Maybe a newcomer such as Kris Bryant or Byron Buxton will seize the mantle. Yet there will never be another Jeter, at least not for me. That’s okay. I will always have the memories of the star that led my favorite team to the promised land, and how he rode off into the sunset. The petulant buzz of the media hype surrounding his departure will be but a distant memory of a half-forgotten bad dream fifteen years from now. The bliss of watching Derek Jeter win his final game in pinstripes, and the final game of that tiny sliver of what was left of my childhood. I know I speak for all Yankees fans when I say thank you, Mr. Jeter. Thank you.
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