MEANT TO BE
How Jeter and Yankees reached greatness together
For all the big hits that Derek Jeter got for the Yankees, all the way into October and especially into October and then even beyond one famous November night at the old Stadium, there is a reason we keep coming back to one play he made in the field. It’s the play known as The Flip, in the postseason of 2001, against the A’s in Oakland, a long way from 161st St.
It is a permanent and essential part of Jeter’s legend, as he becomes an official legend of the game in Cooperstown. The Yankees were down 2-0 to the A’s in a division series, playing an elimination game that they’d finally end up winning 1-0. And there was a ball that night hit to the outfield by Terrence Long. And Jeremy Giambi, Jason’s brother, was going to score the run that might have won the game and the series and ended the Yankees’ season.
You know what happened next: Shane
Spencer’s throw was off, up the first baseline, and Jeter really wasn’t supposed to be where he was when he ran the ball down and before he flipped what was nearly a no-look basketball pass to Jorge Posada, who then put the tag on Giambi, so shocked that the ball was there that he forgot to slide.
Here is all that really matters, all this time later: One more time Jeter was exactly where the Yankees needed him to be, the way they needed him to be at shortstop in 1996 when he was a rookie, and all the winning began again for the New York Yankees, and they really became the Yankees again.
Jeter came all the way across the infield in Oakland that night. He made it all the way to Cooperstown on Tuesday night. He is not the greatest shortstop ever to play the game, or the greatest Yankee. He is not the hitter Babe Ruth was, or Lou Gehrig was or Mickey Mantle or Joe DiMaggio. He didn’t win as much as Yogi did. He wasn’t the best at what he did the way Mo Rivera was at what he did.
Here, though, is what Derek Jeter really was: He mattered in his time as much any Yankee had since Ruth. He was the face of the team and the star of the team when the Yankees became the Yankees again, with him at short and Joe Torre, the guy he called “Mr. Torre,” in the dugout. He was the player kids rooting for the Yankees wanted to be, the way Mantle had been that player in the 50s and 60s.
“This kid was born to play here,” DiMaggio said to me once of Jeter, when Jeter was still a kid.
This was long before, decades before, we knew Jeter would go flying past 3000 hits and put postseason records into the books that will never be broken; before he became Mr. November with the home run that won a World Series game against the Diamondbacks, not so long after
The Flip. But already you could see that he was made for that uniform, for those surroundings, for this crucial moment in Yankee history, no one knowing yet just how much history he was going to make.
He played 20 years in the big leagues. His lifetime batting average was .310. And when he did retire with 3,465 hits, only five players in history had more. Then there is October. And November. There is that, and all that.
Jeter would eventually play 158 postseason games in his career. He would have 650 atbats. So he had a full season of the lights being turned up as bright as they possibly could be, for him and for the New York Yankees. He hit 20 home runs in those games. His career postseason batting average was two points lower – two – than his regular-season career average. You know what this really means. Didn’t matter whether the game was being played in Cleveland in April (where it officially began for him as the Yankee shortstop), or in Atlanta or San Diego or old Shea Stadium, or Phoenix or Philly in the World Series. Jeter was always Jeter.
I’ve told this story before, having coffee with David Cone at his locker one Sunday morning, the old Stadium, when Jeter came walking in, smiling, just starting to get ready for the baseball day ahead. He waved at Cone. Cone waved back. Then Jeter was disappearing through the door of the trainer’s room.
Cone smiled.
“It’s good being Derek,” he said.
Actually, it was great being Jeter, who would eventually become Captain Jeter of the Yankees. He was the star of that team, at Yankee Stadium, the old one and the new one. So he was on the biggest
possible baseball stage for two decades. He played longer than any great Yankee. In the modern world of social media, with more scrutiny than the old Yankees could ever possibly imagined, as the biggest sports star in New York City, he never embarrassed himself, or his team, or his sport.
“I wish I could vote for him (for the Hall of Fame) someday,” Joe Torre said one time. Then he smiled and added, “Twice.”
No. 2 ran out to shortstop, for good, that day in 1996. Then stayed 20 years. The Yankees won five World Series with him and could have won more and Jeter thought they should have won more, because that’s the way he was built, and wired. His DNA was old-Yankee DNA. After this there will never be another baseball career in New York like this, for anyone. One hundred percent.