The Millionaire Who Played the Game Right

The announcement went out, received almost instantaneously in today's hyper-networked world, that Derek Jeter would retire from baseball at the end of this year.  19 years to now, if you include the handful of games Jeter played for the Yankees in '95; it'll be 20 when he's done.  All of them at shortstop.  For those who know baseball, you know shortstop is the key to the whole deal.  In baseball, you have to be strong up the middle.  If you've been good enough to start nearly everyday at shortstop for 19 years on a consistent championship contender, you've been strong up the middle.  For a long time.

I've always felt a special kinship with Jeter.  As kids, most of us imagine ballplayers -- guys in any sport, really -- as men; "older guys" having reached some sort of maturity we squeedunks hadn't.  At some point in your 20s, however, you realize you're  the same age as the guys on the tube.  Then, come your mid-30s, no matter what sport it is, you realize you're older than many of the guys on TV.  Then they begin to retire.  Then you realize that, in point of fact, you're not young anymore.

Jeter was always around the same age as I; I turned forty in the autumn, he'll do that this summer.  However, Jeter was always there; since my early twenties, when I rediscovered my love for the game after taking a few years off to act disaffected and pretend I had a future in jazz (or that I wanted one), Jeter was there -- the centerpiece of a team that for a decade or so gave me a taste of what it must have been like for my dad's generation:  a time when the Yankees always won and the "NY" and pinstripes were a kind of national institution; the army or Ford Motors of sports.  It was exciting to follow.  As a boy I read a lot of baseball history -- a lot of Donald Honig.  The Yankees, led by Jeter, seemed to be like that history.  It was true excellence; the question was not whether the team and its players would be good, but how good.  The question was how that excellence would be expressed.

In all honesty, Jeter wasn't my kind of player.  As young guy, I liked Reggie Jackson and Dave Kingman -- men's men who struck out a lot, spun themselves into the ground while doing so and hit the ball a country mile when they found it.  Jeter always seemed skinny to me.  He hit 19 home runs for the '98 team -- perhaps the greatest team in the history of baseball; 24 for the '99 team (also a great team, but inevitable losers of a few more games than the off-the-charts total of 114 in '98).  I hoped Jeter would do more of that.  He didn't.  He hit a hell of a lot of singles to right field.  He didn't pull the ball much.  Late into his '30s he was still skinny (I wasn't so much anymore).  At forty, I asked myself how in the world he keeps himself in that kind of shape.

However, it grows, or at least grew, on you (at least it did me), what Jeter did.  Jeter didn't just hit singles to right field; he hit hundreds of them -- maybe thousands -- to right field.  Jeter gained a reputation as a near indestructible clutch player -- which he was in a way, but largely by simply maintaining the consistently high level of play he had in regular situations and games that didn't count too much (Jeter hit .312 in the regular season, .308 in the postseason; if you're a baseball fan, you know it's a wash).  Jeter was a good fielder, but not great; he never moved left well.  Jeter struck out more than you'd think.  But Jeter had the moments -- not just moments, but the moments -- we dream about; performances in situations so intense that most players would feel immortalized if they had one Jeter moment.  But Jeter's moments being Jeter's moments, he had a basketful of them.  The Jeffrey Maier homerun in '96.  The I-ran-all-the-way-across-the-diamond-to-catch-a-ball-no-one-else-should-have-in-any-way-shape-or-form-least-of-all-I-then-I'll-freak-all-of-you-out-by-making-an-insane-awkward-flip-to-get-a-runner-no-one-thought-could-be-got play ("The Flip") against Oakland in '01.  The walk-off homerun against Arizona in game 4 of the '01 World Series -- that sent New Yorkers drained from the world of post-9/11 into pandemonium.  The headfirst dive into the stands on the third base side of the old Yankee Stadium in '04.  The guy hit a homerun -- a homerun -- for his 3000th hit, for Christmas' sake. As a kid, you couldn't make this stuff up.  Maybe one moment.  Not a whole bag full, though.  And at the end, it was especially satisfying because you knew it was no fluke.  Jeter's numbers were always good.  They weren't the videogame numbers of Barry Bonds or other big bashers of the era.  But they were  good.  All the time.  For a long time.

And there another point needs to be made.  Jeter didn't take drugs.  He stayed off the juice.  So many other prime players of the era did not.  They can say they did.  But they didn't.  The bodies, and body changes, were too massive for it to be otherwise.  Jeter, though, did what you were supposed to, and only that.  Keep your head down and put a level swing on the ball.  Solid contact, not more.  Field the ball in front of you; two hands.  Square your shoulders before you throw.  Hustle on every play.  Show some modesty.

Make no mistake.  Jeter earned a ton of money for what he did -- a man playing a boy's sport.  The salaries in professional sports are criminal.  It can't be ok to make 15-20 million dollars a year to play a sport many of us wanted to play when we were kids, and would have done so for free.  To even make a million is too much.  Teachers should get a million.  Sanitation workers should get a million.  Librarians should get a million.  Derek Jeter participated in and profited from a world that may well be morally wrong.  As "dignified" as he has behaved by sports standards -- and he has -- it's hard to tell if he's been aware of that fact.  The size of the compound Jeter lives in in Florida indicates maybe not.

Sometimes, though, whether it's with bands we like, the privileges middle class life affords us or the sports we watch, we have to trade in our higher ethos for the entertainment and escape sports, music and the arts provide. We deserve that sometimes.  With Jeter, if we just let baseball be baseball for a minute -- and we should, because it's still, along with jazz and saving Europe from itself in a couple of world wars, one of America's great contributions to the world -- we encounter what might have been the best baseball player of a generation.  That's because he played the game right.  Jeter played baseball in the way you want to teach your kids.  He did it on the premier franchise in perhaps the world's premier city under enormous pressure.  He did it everyday for 19 -- what will be 20 -- years; from Bush, Sr. to the last years of Obama.  Jeter was the Mickey Mantle of his generation.  It seems he's retiring.  And as he does, the last guy playing where I can say, "well, if I had the skills, I could still be playing" retires too.  Give 'em hell for us 40-year olds, DJ.  We've got one more year before we have to officially say we're not kids anymore.