The Yankees had Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte and Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams, and for a time it was as storied a five as the Knicks once had in the old days. One by one they all left, and now it is only Jeter left. And when he is gone at the end of this season, the Yankees will go on, the brand of the Yankees will go on, the big business of the Yankees sure will. But more than Jeter’s extraordinary career ends when he goes. The extraordinary culture that he and his own storied teammates helped create — or recreate with the Yankees — goes with him.
Oh, we will continue to hear about how the pinstripes and the uniform and the place will transform the new hired guns they bring in. That will happen just by hype and old glory, like the kind we get about Madison Square Garden still being a mecca of basketball after one victory in a playoff series in the past 14 years.
The Yankees have only had one World Series title over those same 14 years, even as they are constantly treated and covered like some sort of sleeping baseball giant about to rise up and roar again. But across that time, they have mostly made the playoffs, even as their old stars have left one by one, and more hired guns have been brought in to replace them.
But once Jeter is gone, there is no one who connects to any of that. There really is no one. It is why the notion that Jeter got too much money in that last contract scrum he had with the Yankees a few years ago was always so chowderheaded, and short-sighted. Or it was just people just thinking and saying what the people running the Yankees wanted them to think and say. You could never properly quantify what Jeter has meant to the brand, and still means.
Tim Duncan will never be treated or considered the way Jeter has been, like that kind of surpassing and iconic star of this time in American sports. Duncan never had New York, never had the Yankees, never was marketed that way because he frankly didn’t want to be. But the two of them are remarkably the same, and not just because they have each won five championships.
Duncan came along in 1997, one year after Jeter became the Yankee starter at shortstop. Only now, after all the winning he has done with the Spurs, he still is part of the Core Three in San Antonio along with Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker. They just won another NBA title together a month ago, and thrilled us all the way they did. The supporting cast in San Antonio, incidentally, has been replenished without spending a fortune year after year — after year — on hired guns.
You tell me who carries on all the old-Yankee values and traditions at Yankee Stadium once Jeter is gone for good. I used to love it when people used to say that Jeter wasn’t a vocal leader with the Yankees. It was never words with him, it isn’t words now, it was and is the way he went about his business and, along with the Core Four Plus Bernie, and Joe Torre, changed the way people thought and felt about the Yankees, whether they were Yankee fans or not.
The current manager of the team is a good guy. CC Sabathia seemed to embrace the culture before he broke down this way, and the back end of his contract became the pitching version of Alex Rodriguez’s. We will never know how Robinson Cano’s presence and excellence — and the fact that he was actually the first star, homegrown position player since Jeter — would have factored into all of this, because the Yankees chose not to give him 10 years at a time when they gave Jacoby Ellsbury seven.
For now, Jeter gets people to keep coming to the ballpark in numbers commensurate with what the Yankees have drawn in the past, so people can continue operating under the illusion that they are as big and entertaining as ever, when clearly they are not. He gives the Yankees another farewell tour after Mo Rivera’s last season.
But this is the last farewell tour that matters at the Stadium. The dynasty ended a long time ago. Those days are gone, the way the big Yankees who helped Jeter win four World Series in five years are long gone. The dynasty effectively ended, as my friend Buster Olney wrote in a book once, with Game 7 of the 2001 World Series against the Diamondbacks.
The Yankee name will always be treated like the royalty of American sports, properly so. It does better these days than the Celtics or Lakers or Dallas Cowboys. The face of that royalty, more than anyone, as much as anybody the Yankees have ever had, has been Jeter.
The Yankees will go on, and will win again. It just won’t be like the winning they got from Jeter and Bernie and Mo, Pettitte and Posada. And Paul O’Neill. There will never again be a time like this. Jeter takes that with him. They can buy a lot at Yankee Stadium, maybe even one more postseason for Derek Jeter.
But when he goes, in all the ways that matter at the Stadium, there is no one.
A-Rod’s lonely thoughts, Sandy’s shine and Phil is sublime…
-What does Alex Rodriguez think about when he watches the reception Jeter got in Minneapolis the other night?
What does Rodriguez think about when he watches the All-Star Game?
Does he finally have some awareness that he did this to himself, or is he still blaming everybody else — including the lawyers he hasn’t paid — for everything that has ever happened to him?
I don’t know how long this all can last with the Mets, but they have sure been fun to watch lately.
And for a couple of weeks they’ve been a whole lot more fun to watch than the Yankees.
By the way?
One of the current fictions in town is that the Yankees are being written off, boy, nobody should write off the Yankees.
Who in the world is writing off the Yankees in this American League East?
But of course there’s always the larger fiction around here that if the Yankees can just win nine or 10 in the row, it will be 1998 all over again.
Maybe Sandy Alderson wasn’t wrong about Travis d’Arnaud after all.
Maybe that trip back to the minors has turned out to be exactly the wake-up call that the Mets wanted it to be for the kid.
I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, and I’m trying to be strong, but I am missing Tim Howard and Clint Dempsey and the guys a little bit.
-Phil Jackson, as you’ve been reading in our paper, has added new material to his last book, “Eleven Rings.”
And in it he describes how his bromance with Jimmy Dolan first bloomed “under the desert sky” — I started to think it was an old script from “Gossip Girl” there for a second — and how that meeting convinced him to come back to New York.
But later in the excerpt Jackson says this:
“Soon, the honeymoon (in New York) will be over. I can already sense the sharks circling in the water. But that doesn’t bother me.”
The sharks are circling in the water?
For Phil?
Is he serious?
He has been treated like a rock star in New York from the moment it was first rumored that he was going to take this job.
What sharks?
If he’s expecting constant peace and love, and praise for every move he makes, he ought to go back to Southern California and gaze at the ocean with his Jeanie.
Even for returning stars like Phil, the big city is a hardball league.
He’ll have to wear a helmet at least occasionally.
Curtis Strange and Paul Azinger are always terrific talking about golf on television, and one of the reasons is that they don’t act as if the golf police is going to come arrest them for criticizing Tiger Woods’ golf swing.
Both of them have seen too much to join the crowd of people who want to give Tiger back his title as heavyweight champion of the world every time he makes three birdies in four holes.
-Big home run from Jacoby Ellsbury Friday night.
Big hit from Carlos Beltran.
Big hit from Brian McCann.
The Brian who spent all that money on all those three guys, Cashman, was probably so lightheaded watching them start the traditional second half that way he probably had to lie down a couple of times.
You know who are running the front office of the Cleveland Cavaliers now?
LeBron James and his agent, Rich Paul, that’s who.
-Daniel Snyder clearly knows as much about doing the right thing as he does about pro football, which is why he is so stupidly dug in on not getting rid of “Redskins” as his team’s nickname.
He’s on the wrong side of history here, and that is a place where you never volunteer to be.
But the idea that announcers this season shouldn’t use “Redskins” while this all gets sorted out happens to be ridiculous.
I understand why Native Americans think “Redskins” is racist, and why it should be removed from the culture and from the conversation.
But somebody will have to explain to me why Chief Wahoo of the Cleveland Indians is still in play while we’re cleaning up sports of offensive nicknames and logos.
If you have not yet had the chance to see Stuart Scott’s speech from the ESPY Awards about his ongoing fight against cancer, do yourself a favor and try to find it, because it was such an eloquent and powerful statement about Stu and about the disease.
Am I going to have to start some kind of grassroots campaign to get another season out of Jack Bauer and “24”?
-There’s nothing more fun than a United Nations leaderboard at the British Open.
Maybe one of these days golf fans are going to start to figure out that their sport needs Rory McIlroy to be a big star going forward more than it needs Tiger Woods.
When I saw Kiefer Sutherland at the ESPYs the other night, I just thought Jack Bauer was there to save Kevin Durant from his green jacket the way Jack keeps saving the world.
***
“The Mike Lupica Show” can be heard Monday through Friday at noon and Sunday at 9 a.m. on ESPN 98.7.
