Derek Jeter Leaving Behind Yankees Organization at a Crossroads
September 24, 2014 · Scott Miller · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
NEW YORK — They arrive on foot, passing the sidewalk hot dog carts, the delis and the souvenir shops, crossing underneath the train tracks, finally covering the last yards of this, their most holy of pilgrimages.
They arrive via planes, autos, limos and yes, especially, trains, the 4 train, the D train, scores of them clad in their navy caps and navy jackets with the international, interlocking “NY” logo originally designed by Tiffany & Co. in the late 1800s as part of a Medal of Valor for a fallen New York City policeman.
The jeweler’s genesis of the logo, of course, is wholly appropriate given who the Yankees are and what they have become, never more so than in this gleaming monument of a palace with twice the size but with only a thousandth of the soul of the old place across the street where Derek Jeter took his first big league steps.
What the 3.3 million fans visiting this relatively new Yankee Stadium this summer are witnessing, of course, is far more than just the final footsteps of the great Jeter.
They are watching the final gasps from the gilded Steinbrenner Age.
Jeter is the last descendant of a bygone, eminently entertaining championship era fueled by the maniacal drive and bombastic bluster of the late, great George M. Steinbrenner III.
Next spring, when the Yankees begin life A.D. (After Derek, of course), the longest-tenured Yankee will be…shudder…Alex Rodriguez. Then closer David Robertson (if the Yankees elect to re-sign him), then outfielder Brett Gardner.
The Yankees, officially eliminated from the postseason with Wednesday’s 9-5 loss to Baltimore, haven’t been the Yankees for quite some time now.
Next year, they will become even less so.
“I don’t know,” Joe Girardi said Wednesday afternoon when someone asked him whether Thursday evening, when Jeter plays his final home game, will be his most emotional time as manager. “I got pretty emotional with Mo [Rivera]. I imagine it will be similar.
“You’ve got to wait for the moment and see. But I figure it will be emotional.”
The Steinbrenner name remains stamped along the grain of MLB‘s cornerstone franchise, with sons Hal and Hank and daughter Jennifer dutifully carrying forth their civic duty while surely knowing there is no way they can ever match the success of their old man. The world is different. Times change. When The Boss roamed these parts, you didn’t hear about things like luxury tax and payroll ceilings.
He had a lot of Al “Just Win, Baby” Davis in him, for better or for worse, often for both. Whatever it took, money and personal feelings of his employees be damned. He barked and snarled when he saw someone who wasn’t marching crisply in his vision of what a title march should look like. Didn’t matter who it was. If he felt even Jeter needed a scolding for his carousing around town, so be it.
In fact, as the sports-drink advertisement rolls this week with Jeter wistfully gulping in New York to the Sinatra soundtrack in his final days, you can’t help but remember another national spot years ago that artfully lampooned the Jeter-Steinbrenner dust-up with them participating together in a conga line.
The irony, of course, is that Jeter, Rivera, Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada all were drafted and/or developed during the three-year period from 1990 to 1993 when Steinbrenner was banned from baseball for paying a two-bit, lowlife gambler to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield. Only with his ouster did the Yankees’ baseball operations department gain the freedom and flexibility to, well, operate. So it laid the foundation for the latest Yankees Dynasty, and shortly after he returned, Steinbrenner reaped the rewards and his outsized legend ballooned even more.
It was a different time when Jeter pulled on his first Yankees uniform in the mid-’90s, a time when the seeds of what would become the latest dynasty were taking root and the club wasn’t threatening to buckle under the weight of what it has now become.
Steinbrenner’s Yankees always played by the blood oath that any season that did not end in a World Series title was a disappointment. Today’s Yankees talk the talk, but when you open a season with Brian Roberts at second base and a soon-to-be-40-year-old playing shortstop every day, even if he is a living legend, well, to truly expect a World Series in October is delusional.
“We had to deal with more in the past two years from a physical standpoint than I can remember,” Girardi said of missing the playoffs in consecutive seasons for the first time since ’92-93, something easily predictable to anybody who watched them haphazardly sign expensive and aging free agents the past couple of seasons.
So this is what it looks like to be caught between eras, transitioning from King George to his would-be princely heirs, from Jeter’s wizardry to Brendan (.176) Ryan and beyond. There is no heir apparent in place. This most certainly is not 1952, when a kid named Mickey Mantle was on hand to replace an aging Joe DiMaggio, and the Yankees won the fourth of five consecutive World Series anyway.
Girardi on Wednesday carefully walked that fault line, acknowledging that Thursday night’s finale will be “as big a game as I’ve been a part of” but making sure to put it in the “individual games” category, not in the “playoff games” department.
It is no easy task, managing a deteriorated legend attempting to exit with grace and dignity, while also pulling the levers of this franchise. With a slow bat and badly overmatched, Jeter went 0-for-4 Wednesday, delivering three ground balls and a strikeout.
“There is never an easy way for a player to go out,” Girardi said. “Because this is what we love to do.”
Of the recent vintage “True Yankees,” Posada’s departure in 2011 was the bumpiest. He hit just .235 and rightfully was rewarded with diminished playing time, though Girardi noted that Posada was his team’s hottest bat in October (.429 in the Division Series against Detroit that fall).
Pettitte’s goodbye was sentimental, and Rivera’s was a four-hanky weeper. Not that anybody around the Yankees is going to go all spoiler-alert and telegraph plans for Jeter’s Famous Final Scene on Thursday, but Girardi said he does not have anything scripted.
He had perfect pitch last September with Rivera, when he sent Jeter and Pettitte to the mound to remove him with two out in the ninth inning of the final home game, a 4-0 loss to Tampa Bay.
“It’s a hard thing to predict where you’re going to be” in the game, Girardi said. “The idea with Mo came to me about half-an-inning before.”
Then, like now, the Yankees were going nowhere. What for so long was solely about moments that would provide Jeter the stage to become “Mr. November” after Reggie Jackson’s “Mr. October” decades earlier now has been stripped and sold for parts, for individual moments.
As those go, Wednesday’s loss to the Orioles officially eliminated the Yankees from postseason play, there is rain in the forecast for Thursday and questions swirl regarding whether The Captain might follow Ted Williams’ example and close shop for good at home, forgoing this weekend’s series in Boston.
“It’s a rough feeling,” Jeter, who adored The Boss, said of the elimination. “It should be a rough feeling for everyone in here.”
No, this is not Jeter’s preferred exit, not even close.
But it is the only one he gets.
Scott Miller covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report. He has over two decades of experience covering MLB, including 14 years as a national baseball columnist at CBSSports.com.
Follow Scott on Twitter and talk baseball @ScottMillerBbl.
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