My first national byline, if you can call it that, came courtesy of Derek Jeter. I was an avid reader of Sports Illustrated for Kids growing up, and decided after reading an issue featuring a jump‑throwing Derek Jeter on the cover that my opinion on the sporting world needed to be heard. I also decided that SI for Kids would be honored to print my letter to the editor in its next issue.
A few weeks after sending in my letter, I received an envelope from the magazine’s editorial team. I was thanked for my readership, and informed that my note would, in fact, appear in the forthcoming issue. I brought the latest SI for Kids in to school for show and tell, I kept my copy in pristine condition in my bedroom, and I generally felt as if things were on the up and up for me.
In many ways, they were: I was a shy, precocious kid in grade school, life at home was suboptimal, and although I had friends and hobbies and was a decent little athlete, people whose childhood interests include starting kid‑businesses out of the basement and interminable overthinking tend not to peak during or around puberty. I didn’t know that words I scribbled down on a page, fussed over, and audaciously sent off for other people’s approval would get me into college, get me through grad school, and become my job. But kids rarely do.
Although it was mostly a coincidence that Jeter was on the cover of that magazine, his facsimilous existence at what now feels like a minor landmark in my life exemplifies the too‑good‑to‑be‑true essence of Jeterhood. The way I now feel about Jeter is common among Yankee fans: Derek’s an undeniably great ballplayer, but he’s primarily the living encapsulation of why we love the Bombers. Loving the Yankees is probably more about everything around the game than the tangible balls, strikes, hits, and steals; being a Yankee fan entails a willingly naïve investment in Yankee lore, in the largely irrational belief that your wearing the interlocking NY cap implicates you in the legacy of Gehrig, and the tragic virtuosity of Mantle, and the incorporeal appeal of that long‑standing oasis in the Bronx.
I know you’re gagging by now if you aren’t a Yankee fan. I would be, too. But I do think that for a lot of us that really love the Yanks, that grew up loving the Yanks, that have vivid memories of late‑night drives listening to WFAN commentary and our first live games in the old Stadium, the Yankees assume a mythical role in our lives that dwarfs the club’s status as a group of professional baseball players. You can call bullshit on religion, and not trust the government, and still believe—really believe—in the Yanks.
Jeter was all of that in one player, and he was all of that in an era when many of baseball’s old myths became either scandals or raw data. For kids my age, who were in preschool when Jeter first put on pinstripes and were easily out of college when he left Fenway to a standing ovation a few weeks ago, Jeter was also the figure whose career perfectly shadowed our growing relationship with the game. If you’ve paid any attention to sports news over the last year, or any attention to news of any kind over the last couple of months, you’ve heard ad nauseam about his shining moments: The Flip Play, Mr. November, the head‑first dive into the stands against the Sox, the walk‑off RBI to end his career in New York. Heroes always have their carefully selected, monumental moments; for kids my age, Jeter’s mark time from our first ride on a school bus to, well, wherever we are now.
Those moments combined with the massively corporate character of modern professional sports made the last few months of Yankee baseball a grotesquely concentrated elegy to Derek Jeter, albeit in a tone incommensurate with the man’s most admirable qualities. Game after game in ballpark after ballpark, every beat writer, advertising firm, and cable sports channel had to create a special JETER MOMENT. There were ceremonies and gifts from every opposing club, and the blowhardy, faux‑reverent “tributes to excellence” that ESPN has never outgrown. Between working west‑coast hours and hating to see the quiet poise of The Captain overwritten by hack sentimentalism, I stopped watching his last games. Well before his last game against the Sox, and for reasons mostly beyond his control, the player who could both be a superstar and refer to his manager as “Mr. Torre,” who could both date swimsuit model after swimsuit model and avoid any substantial tabloid scandal for over 20 years as a mega‑celebrity in America’s densest city, had gone.
Jeter was a baseball player, and his lasting legacy for me will therefore always be his existence, almost every night, for almost every spring, summer, and fall of my sentient life.
When said life at home was suboptimal, I clung to things that felt fixed. The Yankees were one of those things, and Jeter was one of those things. Always holding out the right hand to call time before the start of an at‑bat, always turning on his pitch with that unforgettable inside‑out swing, always weathering the three‑season‑long baseball year with a face that alternated between cool blankness and coy grin. Moments of sureness… baseball games were among them. Jeter’s at‑bats, and his increasingly poor defensive plays, were among them.
I feel grateful to Derek for everything he’s done for the city I was born in and the region I grew up in, even if it’s only for the ineffable and maybe not entirely real way that great athletes change their cities. I’m grateful, as so many others are, for a player whose prime in New York happened precisely when it did. I’m grateful for 2009. I’m grateful for the team he captained on the nights when I went downstairs, slouched down in the couch, and watched a few innings of ball.
I have two Jeter Moments that I’ll never forget. I’ll never forget the first time I went to Yankee Stadium as a kid and heard Bob Sheppard call Derek to the plate. Sheppard still announced every Yankee at‑bat (my childhood caught the tail end of his career as the Stadium’s public address announcer), but Jeter was different. He was one of the few Yankees that had a single‑digit number, he had already been a very young star on a title‑winning team, and the seven syllables that together summoned him to the box—the crisp number two, Derek Jeter—these are the sorts of things that can really impress a little boy, and they really impressed me.
The second came a few years ago, when Derek was inching up on 3,000 hits. I was driving my grandpa’s old Buick around the town where I grew up; I was home from college for the summer and working in New York. I had the WCBS broadcast of Rays‑Yanks on in the car, and as I pulled into the driveway at home, Jeter came up to bat. He had 2,999 hits. I drove to the end of the driveway, put it in park, and sat in the car with the radio on.
The rest of the story is already lore, even though it’s only three years old. It’s perfect Jeterness: the reliable opposite‑field singles hitter gets up when everyone’s watching and does something spectacular. It could have happened a few minutes before, when I was out running errands, or he could have gone hitless against an excellent starting pitcher that afternoon. But in the charmed history so many of us have with Jeter, it happened just when it did.
You kick yourself for not expecting the exceptional. The chorus of contrarians can justifiably raise objections to the Myth of Jeter, because yes: he got hurt, he was not a great defensive shortstop, and his last years were less than productive. He was a ballplayer. Not the greatest ballplayer ever, not the anything‑est ever, but a character who still seemed fundamentally different from the men around him. After all, with it now completely through, Derek’s career happened too conveniently, sometimes even too beautifully, to believe without awe.
