Tough to make switch

So now Derek Jeter is set up to become Boss Jeter in Miami, a long way from the field at Yankee Stadium. The captain of the most famous team in American professional sports now gets his chance to run a team of his own in South Florida. Once he worked for Boss George Steinbrenner, the most famous boss in the history of baseball. Now, pending approval from Major League Baseball, he becomes one himself.

All Steinbrenner did back in the ’70s was put some of his shipbuilding money on the line when he got the Yankees from CBS, before he set about getting the Yankees back on top in baseball, and redefining an owner’s role in the modern world of sports. Jerry Jones came later. Mark Cuban came later. Steinbrenner did it all first.

Now Jeter, if this deal goes through, will be the baseball boss in Miami, and put more than some of his money on the line. He will lay down his brand as one of the great winners of his time, the player who became even more the face of the Yankees than Steinbrenner was. The Captain moves upstairs now. And we will see if he can make the transition from great player to great executive that only a handful of sports legends have ever successfully made.

“Some can do it,” one sports executive said to me recently, when it was first reported that the group Jeter fronts was in line to get the Marlins. “And some turn out to be Isiah Thomas.”

Michael Jordan, whose Air Jordan shoes Jeter wore as a player, was better at basketball than Jeter was at baseball, and won more titles with the Bulls (six) than Jeter won with the Yankees (five). Now Michael is the owner of the Charlotte Hornets of the NBA, a team that is lucky to make the playoffs once in awhile, stuck in the worst place of all in the modern NBA, which means the middle. He hasn’t moved all that far from the court. You see him sitting right there. He just isn’t the one shooting the ball anymore. Or winning the game.

Jerry West, who played in 10 NBA finals, is the best example of a Hall of Fame player who became a Hall of Fame executive, most notably with the Lakers. He is the one who got a teenager named Kobe Bryant to Los Angeles. He made the trade for Shaq. If Jeter wants to emulate a basketball immortal, it isn’t Michael. It’s West.

John Elway, who won two Super Bowls as the Broncos’ quarterback, now runs the football operation in Denver the way Jeter reportedly will be in charge of the business of baseball in Miami. On Elway’s watch, the Broncos have played in two Super Bowls, and won one. He isn’t Jerry West yet, but he is on his way.

But for every example like that, there is an Isiah Thomas, who turned the Knicks into a Dumpster fire. Later at Madison Square Garden it was Phil Jackson running the basketball operation into the ground. Jackson was much more of a legendary figure as a coach, first with Michael in Chicago, then with Kobe and Shaq in LA, than Jeter was as the star shortstop of the Yankees. And turned out to be completely out of his depth as an executive. In the end, his three lousy years in charge of the Knicks felt like 30.

Jeter was one of the smartest, toughest star athletes of his generation. He will certainly be a first ballot Hall of Famer when he becomes eligible in two years. He ran out to shortstop for the Yankees in April of 1996, stayed there for nearly 20 years and retired with a .310 batting average and 3,465 hits, and a legacy as one of the great October players in the history of the Yankees. He was made for the team, the history, the place, for big moments.

The Yankees won in ’96 and won three more championships in the four years after that. There were times in those years when it seemed as if the winning would go on indefinitely, until the Yankees lost Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, in the bottom of the 9th, to the Diamondbacks. They wouldn’t win again until 2009, the last World Series of Jeter’s career.

But there was a day, when the Yankees were still in the middle of all the winning, when I said this to him at his locker at the old Stadium:

“This can’t go on forever, you know.”

Jeter looked up, his face serious and curious at the same time, and said, “Why not?”

Now his group gets the Marlins, managed by Don Mattingly, whose career just barely intersected with Jeter’s at the end. Jeter gets the Marlins, who took a World Series from him and the Yankees in 2003 that the Yankees were sure they would win. Not much good has happened in baseball in South Florida since. Now Jeter and his money guys are poised to come riding into town to save baseball down there.

It has been reported that Steinbrenner put up as little as $2 million of his own money when he got the Yankees. He was a shipbuilder from Cleveland and nobody knew much about him, until the whole world knew everything about him. Everybody knows about Jeter. He was the Yankee all the kids wanted to be, for a long time. Now he is set to become a different kind of player. No. 2 becomes the No. 1 guy in the front office in Miami. He is about to become Boss Jeter. Long way from shortstop at the Stadium. Lot more than money on the line.