On Derek Jeter (9/25/14)
This is something I wrote moments after Jeter’s final home game as a Yankee.
I am not a Yankees fan. Yet I had tears in my eyes after this game.
Derek Jeter, man. When I was a kid, I went through a phase of hating Derek Jeter — he was a Yankee, after all, and the Yankees beat the Mariners (my favorite team), and the Yankees beat the Red Sox (my dad’s favorite team). And Jeter was always there, making that jump-throw play, and doing that fist-pump thing. And so I hated Derek Jeter.
Then later, in the early 2000s, I went through the more sophisticated “Jeter is overrated” phase. Articles were coming out about how defensive “zone ratings” and “range factors” showed that he was actually an awful shortstop. I was cynical, and it felt fun to try to tear someone else down using cherry-picked statistics. Some people still enjoy doing that.
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to have nothing but 100% respect for Derek Jeter and his career. It’s actually insane what he’s done. He has been a superstar on the biggest team in the biggest city on the biggest stage in the world for almost 20 years, and he has never fucked up.
He just has not fucked up. Let’s ignore the fact that he was a great player with so many amazing moments for a second — he never fucked up. Think about that. Look at the sports world. Look around you at the athletes in the current sports world. In the age of the Internet, in baseball’s age of steroids, where everyone is under a microscope, and everything is recorded, and soundbites can be misconstrued, and people look to knock down those that are on the highest pedestals — Derek Jeter is spotless. Do you have any idea the kind of grueling, grinding, exhausting consistency and just pure “goodness” that takes? It’s unbelievable.
Derek Jeter is a machine. It almost makes me feel bad for him sometimes, like he won’t let himself experience joy. My favorite thing is how, at the beginning of every game at Yankee Stadium, the bleacher fans chant each position player’s name one-by-one until they turn around and acknowledge them. Many players let those chants go for a few rounds, soaking in the fact that a crowd of people is cheering their name, before waving it off. When they get to Derek Jeter’s name, however, the fans barely even get the first “Der” syllable out before Jeter raises his glove at them, almost as one would swat away a pesky fly — almost as if to say “Shut up, I’m working here” — without even turning his eyes away from the game. It’s admirable. It’s exhausting. It’s insane.
I think the thing that got me about this game is that of course he got a walkoff hit. Of course he did. Just like of course he hit a home run to win that World Series game when the clock struck November in 2001. Just like of course he just “happened” to be there to flip that ball to Posada against the A’s. Just like of course his 3,000th hit was a home run. At a certain point, that stops being “luck” or “coincidence” or “right place right time.” Derek Jeter is a “riser.” Where most people would let big moments crush them, he rises to them.
And so I, the non-Yankee fan, was standing up in my apartment, saying out loud “Come on, Jeter!” when he walked up to the plate in the 9th inning. I wanted his career to end the way he deserved it to. And with every fan in the stadium hoping and expecting that hit, and with his parents in the crowd expecting that hit, and with his first manager Buck Showalter in the opposing dugout, and with his former teammate turned manager Joe Girardi in his dugout, and with Joe Torre, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada, and Bernie Williams in his stadium, of course he got the hit, the same hit he’s gotten thousands of times before, and of course he won the game.
I love baseball.
