Jeter gets a warm welcome

JUPITER, Fla. — It was a sellout crowd at Roger Dean Stadium on Sunday afternoon to see the Marlins, not a surprise given Aaron Judge and the Yankees were here for a rare spring training visit.

And among the crowd was Marlins CEO and partowner — ah, yes, a Yankees icon, too — Derek Jeter.

Jeter, wearing dark slacks and dark gray golf shirt, took a seat in a suite on the first-base side several minutes before firstpitch.

The crowd of 7,648, about 50 percent of whom were wearing Yankees T-shirts, hats or uniforms, stood and applauded. Jeter, not nearly as popular with the Marlins fan base after overseeing the offseason trades of several of the team’s stars — including Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich and Marcell Ozuna — smiled and waved back.

“I heard the people going crazy,” Judge said with a smile of the moment.

Judge, who hit his first homer of the spring in the Yankees 7-5 loss to the Marlins, a moonshot to left-center, did not see Jeter before the game. But the 25-year-old had spoken to him in the past has he was part of a group of select Yankees prospects Jeter, who retired after the 2015 season, treated to dinner in 2015 and 2016. That was part of the “Captain’s Camp,” a program for those prospects instituted by Gary Denbo, a close friend and mentor of Jeter who used to oversee the Yankees minor leagues and is now the Marlins vice president of player development and scouting, designed to instill leadership skills.

“Always been good,” Judge said of his interactions with Jeter, who in turn has spoken highly of Judge. “He’s a professional. A guy I looked up to, and just always played the game the right way. Just respected the game, his opponent, respects his teammates. Just a lot of respect for the game, that’s the biggest thing.”

A Marlins spokesperson before Sunday’s game said Jeter would not be making himself available to reporters at any point during the day.

Jeter, 43, did spend some time outside the Yankees clubhouse before the game, catching up with, among others, GM Brian Cashman, bullpen coach Mike Harkey, batting practice pitcher Danilo Valiente, vice president of communications and media relations Jason Zillo and director of team security Mark Kafalas.

Behind the scenes Aaron Boone, a teammate of Jeter in 2003, met with him for a few minutes.

“It was good to see him,” Boone said, offering little more details of the conversation. “It was fun to see him for a couple of minutes and to catch up.”

There are plenty more connections between the franchises, who consummated the bombshell Stanton deal in December, than Jeter and Denbo.

There is, of course, Marlins manager Don Mattingly, on the Yankees icon scale for fans not all that far behind Jeter.

“Derek’s talked about building this team from the ground up — making sure that we invest into our minor league system, the draft, international,” Mattingly told reporters before Sunday’s game. “And then you go beyond that, it’s just the way we’re going to handle ourselves, the consistency of how we treat players. The accountability that we’re going to have as coaches and players and (as an) organization. Then I think the certain way he wants to go about his business and us to go about our business, and those are very similar to the Yankees.”