(Originally Posted Sept 21, 2014)
I was re-reading Bart Giamatti’s “Green Fields of the Mind,” the other day and it was almost too fitting that, playing in the background, was the Derek Jeter ceremony at New Yankee Stadium. It was great to see all these old faces, his old teammates, family, friends all in suits walking out of the home team dugout in New Yankee Stadium to show their appreciation for the Captain. And while I was watching this all 1,500 miles away, I was revisiting the first two sentences of an essay that, no matter how many times I read it, will always give me chills and will forever make any significant other that I am with look at me a little strangely knowing the fact that not just a game, but an essay about a game could make me that emotional. It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The first time I read this essay I was still in my youth, maybe 20 or 21 at the time. These words didn’t necessarily resonate with me, I just thought they were pretty and a nice way of explaining the game I love.
The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
Just like Giamatti, as I get older I find myself relying more and more on the game to slow time down. And yet, every year, I feel a sense of betrayal that I cannot express as well as Giamatti. Just when you need it most, it stops. There comes a time in early September when most people I know turn their attention to football. They seemingly forget all about baseball as a sport and the only thing on their mind is their fantasy team and who they are going to draft or trade or bench that week. And I have been asked a number of times why I myself don’t just turn my attention to football instead of moping about the fact that baseball will soon be over. Because they are different sports, and they are designed for different people. I cannot just replace baseball with football. If anything, this is where some of my sense of betrayal comes from. When I need it the most, when I need it to buffer out all the football talk that I am drowned in every day at the office or at the bar or on the bus, when I need something else to talk about, I have nothing. Come November, there is no “other,” to replace the constant droning of football talk.
Now that I am older, and have revisited this essay, the opening lines ring true now more than ever. As I find myself comfortably getting into a routine of work and relationships and different activities, I now know what Giamatti was talking about when he says:
You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops.
I find myself having less time to do the things I enjoy, yet somehow, baseball has constantly been there. There is another reason, though, that it was all too perfect that I revisited this essay on Derek Jeter day at New Yankee Stadium. He’s retiring, after 20 years, The Captain is retiring and Number 2 will not be manning the space between second and third. Although he wasn’t the first to do so, there won’t be anyone in a long time that will make the play going to his left, in the hole, make the jump and throw with strength and accuracy as well or as famously as Jeter. It’s not just the fact that one of the greats is retiring, though. It’s what his career meant to us that makes his retirement so impactful.
I won’t go through the numbers. I don’t want to talk about what he did on paper; total number of hits, career games, number of gold gloves, All-Star game appearances, none of that. If that’s all this game cared about, there wouldn’t be as much pomp and circumstance throughout the league regarding his retirement. Just like so many other things in life, baseball and the stars that we the fans create are multifaceted. Yes, they need the raw talent and the numbers to make us like them, no doubt about it. But there is something else that they need, that personality that sets them apart from the rest. In Jeter’s case, that personality, his character, is what makes him so great and is what we will miss the most. He played on the biggest stage in any professional sport: Yankee Stadium in the mid-1990’s. They have a history of big names, big egos. The city itself makes these stars out to be god-like more than any other region in the country. And they’ve been doing it since Babe Ruth put on pinstripes for the first time. And they haven’t stopped since then. Jeter was brought up to the Yankees during a somewhat renaissance period for the Bombers. The Mets ran the city in the 80’s. The early 90’s saw the power start slowly shifting back uptown towards the Bronx. But it wasn’t until 1996 when they won their first World Series in 18 years, that Jeter slowly started becoming the face of the organization. Another World Series victory in 1998, and again in 99, and 00 would solidify the tall shortstop from Kalamazoo as the new “Mr. Yankee.” In an era that where remarkable feats of athleticism were met with raised eyebrows and skepticism, Jeter remained quiet. He let his performance do the talking. There was never a media backlash or any skeletons in his closet that were dug up. He was the epitome of what the game needed in an era of egos and cheaters. All he did was go to work. He did his job and didn’t expect any celebration or ceremony because he did what he was being paid to do. Slowly, not only did he become the face of the Yankees, but he became the face of the league, and the image of what the game should be, and how the game should be played.
Whether he wanted to or not, and the debate is still out there whether or not he actually likes the attention, he became Mr. Baseball for a generation of kids growing up under the dark cloud of steroids and cheaters. Myself being one of them. I have always hated the Yankees. And growing up in northern New Jersey, that doesn’t make you the most popular kid on the monkey bars. I hated their fans, I hated their swagger, I hated their arrogance, I hated Steinbrenner. I refused to wear any sort of striped shirt if it remotely came close to resembling pinstripes. I can’t tell you how happy I was when they lost to the Diamondbacks in 2001 and the Luis Gonzalez bloop single dumped right beyond Captain Jeter. I was even happier when they lost to Josh Beckett and whatever team he played for in 2003. 2004? Best year of my life. When the Indians beat them in the ALDS in 2007, I acted like my team (the Tribe) had just won the whole thing. But through all this, there was one player on the team that I just couldn’t bring myself to hate. I have found reasons to dislike almost everyone on the Yankees between 1996 through the present, except ol’ number 2. Love or hate the Yankees, he demanded—and earned—everyone’s respect. He showed us over the course of the last 20 years, too, that through good and bad, you stay loyal. He recognized the organization that brought him up, the fans that cheered him on, and the city that accepted him, and he didn’t leave. He sure could have, a number of times. He could have moved on to another team when the Yankees were “slumping” (I put “slumping” in quotes because the time-frame I’m talking about is 2003-2009 when they still made the playoffs, just didn’t win the World Series). A number of players today can learn a thing or two about loyalty and sticking with your roots. Here’s lookin’ at you Pujols, Wilson, Hamilton….
But that’s obvious; even if you didn’t grow up an hour from Yankee Stadium in a town where the overwhelming majority of your friends and peers were Yankees fans. Playing little league, I would make it a point to call my friends different players if they did something that somewhat resembled a major leaguer. If my short stop buddy made a diving play in the hole, while everyone else on the team would yell, “Looks like Jeter out there!” I would be shouting, “Way to go Omar Vizquel!” These were my little victories. I still understood though, how important he was to the game. He epitomized the game for so many of us growing up, that, when he wears a Yankees uniform for the last time in a few short weeks, it may very well mark the end of our adolescence; our collective youth. We grew up watching him, we grew up emulating him, we grew up wanting to one day be him. He was ours.
Not only does his retirement mark the end of our youth, our adolescence, but he marks the end of something greater than us. He is the last link to the old New York Yankees. He represents George Steinbrenner. He represents those 100+ win teams of the 90’s. He represents THE Yankee Stadium, none of this New Yankee Stadium garbage. And through being a representative of THE Yankee Stadium, he represents their history. He played on the same field as Mantle, Maris, DiMaggio, Ford, Ruth, Gehrig, all of them. He covered the same area of the infield as Phil Rizzuto. He stood in the same batter’s box as Mantle. This was the field where history happened. And Jeter played on it. So now, not only does his retirement mark the end of our youth, the end of an era, but there will also be no connection between the present and the past. That tie has been severed, although it has been frayed since 2009 and New Yankee Stadium’s grand opening with its sushi bars and fancy restaurants and thousand dollar seats.
There is one other important element of Jeter’s retiring that very few people I have come across have mentioned so far. And it once again goes back to his ties with the history of the team he made a career playing for (once again Albert, CJ, and Josh, that’s the one team he made a career playing for). This tie may not be important to most and I think that may be the case, because again, I haven’t heard it brought up once besides from myself. This last tie is Bob Sheppard, the Yankees PA announcer from 1951 through 2007.
Two men have the voice that IS baseball; Vin Scully of the Brooklyn Dodgers (okay, fine, the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Bob Sheppard. Carl Yastrzemski once stated, “You’re not in the big leagues until Bob Sheppard announces your name.” He was not only the voice of the Yankees for so many years, but the voice of baseball. Just take a minute to think about how many historical events he witnessed at Yankee Stadium between 1951 and 2007. He was baseball. And Jeter, in a sign of respect, had a recording of Sheppard used since his retirement in 2007 whenever he comes to bat. So when I overheard a little kid ask their dad at an Indians/Yankees game back in late 2012 who “that old guy was” that was talking when Jeter walked up to the plate, and the father explain to his son who Bob Sheppard was, it warmed my heart.
But on September 25th, the Yankees last home game of the 2014 season, pending any miraculous Wild Card berth in the last two weeks of the season, it will also mark the last time any of us hear:
Now batting for the Yankees, numbah 2, Derek. Jeter. Numbah 2.
Jeter appreciated his role as a New York Yankee, appreciated the history of not only the Yankees but of the game, and embraced the celebrity that came with being the face of baseball for a generation that boasts its own big leaguers now like Mike Trout. Whether we the fans realized it or not while it was happening, he was a living, breathing connection between present and past. On any given day between the months of May and September, we could point to number 2 patrolling short and discuss some event that happened at Yankee Stadium twenty, thirty, forty years ago. As we listened to Bob Sheppard, “The Voice of God,” as Reggie Jackson called him announce Derek Jeter’s name, we could imagine him announcing the roster from 50 years ago. Now batting for the Yankees, numbah seven, Mickey. Mantle. Numbah 7.
But alas, whether it is only one season, a career, or a lifetime, the game will eventually break your heart. It may happen slowly as a fan, like Bart Giamatti had done, relies on it more to “fill the passage of time,” in summer months. Or it may happen in an instance where one of the game’s greats retires, and leaves countless fans wondering “what’s next?” For me, this year, it breaks my heart because the ties that bind us to the past—to the history of the game—are slowly becoming undone and slowly untying. But that’s none of Captain Clutch’s concern. He did everything right. He played the game the way it was supposed to be played. And, as Frank Sinatra, another Jersey boy, once said, “I did it my way.” Derek, you most certainly did it your way.