TORRE ON JETER
Ex-skipper says he's lucky he got to watch Derek every day: Lupica
IN TAMPA on Wednesday morning, Derek Jeter will do something he has never really liked doing very much: He will talk about himself. Jeter will sit in front of the media and explain in more detail than a Facebook post allows why he has decided to make the upcoming season his last.
So on the day before that happened, Joe Torre was asked to talk about Jeter, something that was never a hardship for Torre when Jeter was his shortstop, is not a hardship now.
When the Yankees became the Yankees again, their partnership, manager and shortstop, was as much a foundation of it all as anything. This is not to diminish or dismiss the accomplishments of Bernie Williams or Mo Rivera or Paul O’Neill or Jorge Posada. But i f you watched those teams win and remember how they won, you know how much Jeter and Torre did to make the Yankee brand as popular and powerful as it had ever been.
In those years you always heard the same thing, again and again. You heard how hard Jeter and Torre made it for people to still hate the New York Yankees.
“We live in a time when we glorify too many bad things,” Torre said Tuesday. “Derek has always represented good things.”
Torre was just back from a two-week vacation with his wife in Hawaii, back home in southern California, on his way to Florida for spring training on Thursday.
Torre on Jeter: “I was just in the car listening to a radio show. They were into that Mount Rushmore thing about pro basketball. And some guy called and said that Bill Russell didn’t belong, because — this was the guy talking — Russell didn’t have as much talent as the other players they were talking about.
“For me, Derek is in the same position as Russell. Bill Russell may not have been the most talented person. But he made everybody around him better. I’m still not sure that people grasp that. I used to say that if you dropped somebody down from Mars, and had him look at the shortstops who were around when (Jeter) was younger, had him look at (Miguel) Tejada and Nomar (Garciaparra) and Alex (Rodriguez), maybe he wouldn’t think that Derek fit in there.
“But that was why I was the lucky one. I got to watch him every day. I watched what he did and how he did it. And it wasn’t just me. The year Paul Quantrill was with us, he came up to me one day, unsolicited, in either June or July, and said, ‘I always knew how good a player he was. I just didn’t realize how good.’ ”
Torre was asked about the kinship he so clearly had with Jeter and Jeter with him, the bond they shared, from the beginning.
Torre on Jeter: “I tell people this all the time, and they look at me like I’m a little screwy. But I was impressed with Derek before I really knew him. When I got the job, they told me he was going to be the shortstop. At that point, though, all the kid was to me was a name. So when I talked to the media, I just basically said, yeah, he’s going to be the shortstop. Then I saw how he answered the same questions. Somebody would say, ‘Sounds like you’re the shortstop.’ And Derek would say, ‘I’m going to get the opportunity to be the shortstop. I’m going to get the opportunity to win the job.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Wait a second, this kid is answering those questions better than I did.’ From the start, there was never a sense of entitlement.” He wasn’t done there. Torre on Jeter: “From the start, it was clear that we had the same set of values. We had the same respect for the game. The only thing that was important to either one of us was winning, all the stuff that went into winning. I can only describe it this way: Derek never had enough of winning.
“I could never get him out of a game. I’d say to him, ‘You want a day off?’ His answer was always the same: ‘I’m fine.’ It took me a long time to figure out that the way I had to do it was come up to him and say, ‘Do you want this day off, or that day?’ It was the only way to sit him down.
“I remember one time we’d clinched and I wanted to give him a couple of days off. I think he was trying to get to 20 home runs for the season. And what happened was, he stunk. Later he came up to me and said, ‘Next time I’m gonna do what you ask me to do.’ To me, that capsulized exactly who the kid was. He was trying to do something of a personal nature, only that wasn’t where he thrived. He has always thrived on being part of a team and showing the way and never thinking about stats. It was just about the winning. That’s when he performed at his best. That’s why he’s been this special for so long.”
There was a pause. Then Torre said this: “I always treasured the relationship and always will.”
Torre finally left. They all left. Now it is Jeter deciding it is time to go. He will try to win one more time. But even if he does not, he has to know what he did with Torre’s Yankees, the footprint he leaves, what he did to make the Yankees the Yankees again. Torre on Jeter: “This is really turning the page. Turning the page, closing the book, then creating the void that you know will be there. It will never be fair, and I mean never, to ask somebody to replace him. He was this kind of Yankee and this kind of star for this long, and somehow he’s made it look easy. And on top of it all, he never made an excuse.”
You want to glorify something in sports?” Joe Torre said. “Glorify that.”