This was last week at Yankee Stadium before the start of the Red Sox series and before they shut down Derek Jeter for good,Thursday afternoon, Jeter in the Yankee dugout.
I asked him how he was feeling.
“I’m playing,” he said.
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Yeah, I said, but how are you really feeling.
“I’m playing,” Derek Jeter said. “And if you’re playing, everything else is excuses.”
He was reminded then of a great line from the great old Australian Davis Cup captain Harry Hopman, who once said, “If you’re hurt, you don’t play. If you play, you’re not hurt.”
Only he was hurt this season, even when he played, even as he kept trying to come back from the ankle he broke late in the first game of the American League Championship Series against the Tigers. He came back in spring training and hurt the ankle again. He came back and joined the season late, hurt his quad. Came back again and hit a home run his first time up. Got hurt again.
“Entire year has been pretty much a nightmare for me,” he said on Wednesday in Baltimore, on the day when the Yankees finally shut him down for good, this season ending 11 months after his last one did against the Tigers, Jeter talking about next year, the year when he turns 40 in baseball.
And so they wanted to know in Baltimore on Wednesday if Jeter, as great a Yankee as he has been, now thinks about the end of his career, coming at him with different questions asking him the same thing.
“Lot of ‘end’ talk,” he said at one point.
He paused and said, “You guys want this to be the end for me?”
No one does. Mariano Rivera goes after this season, he now tells people to stop asking him if he wants to change his mind about this being the end for him. Maybe Andy Pettitte, another remaining member of the Core Four, past 40 himself now, will be back, just because he has pitched well enough to make him think he has another year in him, for the Yankees or somebody else.
But no one wants Jeter to leave on terms other than his own, no one wants to see him walk out the door until he is ready, knowing that when he does quit the Yankees for good, it will be like a hundred guys left the room. But these were fair questions for him on this day when this season ended for him, just when the games are getting good, when it is his time of year.
Once, a dozen years ago, the baseball season that was interrupted on the same day, Sept. 11, by the planes hitting the buildings, Jeter and the Yankees ended up in the World Series, ended up playing games at the old Stadium that helped lift the city for a few hours at the end of the worst days the city has ever known. That was the year when it was Jeter, of course, against the Diamondbacks, who won a game with the home run that had us all calling him Mr. November.
Now he doesn’t make it to another baseball October for the Yankees whether the Yankees make it or not. He has always been called this generation’s DiMaggio, because it was always more about the playing and the winning with him than it was about the talking. But finally there came the season, and the first serious injury of his storied career, a spectacular career of talent and grace, when he was like DiMaggio in another way, when he was DiMaggio limping around in his last season as a Yankee, in 1951.
Jeter played 17 games and 63 official at-bats and 12 hits and had an average of .190. He had just that one home run, a shot over the right-field wall against Matt Moore. He says he will come back strong, make himself strong around that damaged ankle in all the weak places that finally took his season from him. He will see about that and so will we.
“You don’t just think about the end because you happen to have an injury,” Jeter said in Baltimore.
But then he described the player he had become this September this way: “I wasn’t moving the way I wanted to move, not hitting the way I wanted to hit, not throwing the way I wanted to throw.”
“If you’re not playing the way you’re used to,” Jeter said, “you’re not helping.”
Brian Cashman, the Yankees general manager, said that he doesn’t believe he has seen Jeter’s last game. Jeter clearly doesn’t believe he is through, even though he does turn 40 in June, and knows enough about baseball history to know how rare it is for any shortstop, no matter what kind of career he has had in the field or at the plate, to play that position at a high level at that age.
You know what Jeter is thinking, though, you know he looks at Mo Rivera and thinks that no power relief pitcher was ever supposed to be getting to 42 saves — Mo’s magic number in all ways — at the age of 43. You know, just because of the way he is wired, that he is sure that if one member of the Core Four can defy age this way, so can he.
He is sure that if Mo can come back at his age from ending up in a heap at the base of the outfield wall in Kansas City with a knee that fell apart underneath him, that he, Jeter, can come all the way back from ending up in a heap against the Tigers near second base last October.
“I’ve always said that if it’s not broke, keep playing,” Jeter said. “Then it broke. Then it broke again.”
Now a season that never really started for him ends this way in Baltimore. There have been a lot of long winters for Jeter, because of the way seasons ended too soon in October. Never like this. Never because of one that ended the second week of September.
