Pride of the Yankees
Gentlemen's Quarterly, September 1998
by Peter Richmond

We've had a quarter century of George now, and to anyone paying close attention to the chaos of his unseemly reign, one constant has emerged: Each modern generation of New York Yankees has featured one humble, homegrown baseball player possessed of enough grace to save the franchise's dignity in the face of the Cleveland shipbuilder's unending assault -- men of no self-strut at all, but endowed with an innate sense of style that they've carried for their appointed terms and then passed on to the next bearer of the torch. If the outsized personae of the Reggies and the Winfields have defined the Yankees on the field, as Ruth's did the ancients, then the quiet Yankees have defined the Yankees' soul, as Gehrig once did. But how, I've wondered over the course of my thirty-five years of watching from the upper deck of Yankee Stadium, do they do it, exactly? How did the spirit of quiet Mel Stottlemyre, the first Steinbrenner-era saint, pass into the body of stoic Roy White, the silent outfielder? How did White will the energy to Ron Guidry, whose astounding slider managed, for a time, to mute George's blather? And how did Guidry get it into Don Mattingly, Citizen Baseball himself? How has each quiet Yankee been able first to inherit and then to bequeath something that's so obvious to the true fan but to which each of the players was almost certainly oblivious? I'd interviewed them all and divined nothing of their secret. If there was a question to be asked that would solve the mystery, I had not been able to find it.

It turned out that only when I stopped looking for the answer could it, Zen-riddlishly, reveal itself -- something that did not happen by design but by chance, when I stopped asking impolite questions of Derek Jeter, the latest in this mystical line, and let him talk about baseball. He's quite reserved, Derek Jeter, and the few minutes of conversation about personal topics over lunch before the food arrived felt like a stone skipping off the surface of a still pond, each successive splash growing smaller and smaller.

Eventually, we just talked baseball, which is the only thing he generally wants to talk about -- naturally enough, because playing it is all he's ever done. He has this quiet, lower-register Dean Martin voice, where the words blend into one another, as if his voice itself were shy; but when he's talking about baseball, his words are crisp and clear. Imagine an astronomer sitting with his astronomer friends over a couple of beers and saying something like "Can you imagine the magnitude of the bang behind a Type Ia supernova? No wonder the light travels 6 trillion miles a year!" That's how Jeter looks when he says something like "Third base is dangerous, man. Can you imagine playing third base with Mark McGwire hitting? On turf?" and he gets this distant look as he imagines what it would be like, and his face takes on this bleep-eating grin, because he doesn't swear. So I gave up asking the personal questions about whether, when they were still dating, he'd really taken Mariah Carey to a strip joint ("It didn't happen," and then, a cloud of anger shadowing the face, "Of course it didn't happen") and settled back and let his baseball reel unspool. We got to the story of his first big-league spring training at the old Yankee complex in Fort Lauderdale, in 1994, when he was just out of high school and he suddenly found himself sharing an infield with his idols. And that's when he gave up the secret. Of how he got the torch. Even though, of course, he doesn't know he has it.

"I'm 19, and I'm throwing to Don Mattingly. I'm going from Kalamazoo Central High School -- with a friend of mine at third and another friend of mine at first -- and here I am at spring training, with Wade Boggs to my right, and I'm throwing to Don Mattingly. I couldn't believe it! Here's a story about Don Mattingly I'll never forget," he said, and he hunched forward a little to tell it. He's all limbs, like a colt, but he was relaxed now; his eyes, at rest, were heavy lidded.

"We were on one of the back fields working out. We were done running our sprints. Me and Mattingly happened to be finished at the same time. We had to cross the main field to get to the clubhouse. There's nobody there -- no fans, not even the grounds crew. So we were walking. And Mattingly tells me we'd better run, because you never know who's watching. This is Don Mattingly! Who's going to tell him he has to run? We've already done our work!"

He paused, waiting for it to sink in for me: No one around, and still Don Mattingly doesn't let himself dog it. Because dogging it is not what a true Yankee does, because there's a responsibility that comes with the uniform. And here he was letting the kid in on it. "I'll never forget that story," Jeter said, smiling. "He probably doesn't even remember it. Don Mattingly! Running across the field! Mind if I eat this? I eat a lot," and he reached for his Caesar salad just as it hit me: That's how they do it. When they pass on the Rules of Yankeedom, they pass on the spirit. Or the energy. Or whatever the hell it is.

For didn't Mattingly retire on the last day of '95? And on Opening Day '96, didn't Jeter, who had hit a total of two home runs his entire previous season in triple-A in Columbus, Ohio, hit a home run? And didn't he go on that year to win the World Series ring Mattingly never got to wear?

From that day on, didn't Derek Jeter look as if he'd been playing his position for a lot longer than he really had? As if his baseball soul had been around, well, forever?

Maybe something passed between them that no one could see, as if Wim Wenders had made a Yankee movie and this little gray archangel cloud passed from one guy to the next, from one chosen Yankee to the next, until now, when we need a real Yankee like we've never needed one before. A time when the depth of Steinbrenner's greed threatens to sink the most famous athletic stadium in the land.

The DiNoto Bakery sign beyond center field has already disappeared. It had been visible from the upper deck since the '50s, painted on the side of a brick apartment building. It was bright green and red and white not long ago, so bright you could almost smell the bread baking -- a beacon of greeting from the Bronx that signified the compact, the contract between the team and the borough. No matter how much Steinbrenner pretended, Trump-like, that he knew what was good for New York even though he didn't have a clue; no matter how often he fired great men like Dick Howser, who did stuff like win 103 games in a season, and hired Billy Martin, who did stuff like get his ear nearly cut off in a fight in an alley behind a topless bar, and who would have been hired eleven or twelve more times by now if he hadn't died in a drunken wreck one Christmas day; no matter how much George chipped away at the team's luster, the DiNoto sign said there was something bigger and immutable at stake: the relationship between the ballpark and the Bronx, between cityscape and all the baseball history that came before. As long as the Yankees and the Bronx were one, the DiNoto sign stood as a bastion against the greedy train wreck of a sport baseball was threatening to become.

But the DiNoto sign has disappeared beneath a coat of fresh white paint, which can only mean -- if we're looking for cosmic signs here -- that the darkest days are upon us. For now George is threatening to shutter the Stadium in favor of a midtown-Manhattan palace, to be built at a cost of a billion dollars of taxpayers' money.

He could support the idea of renovating the Stadium and expanding the parking. He could move the team's offices back north from Tampa and market the team to the Bronx's Hispanic population instead of crying wolf about the attendance while he's drawing 50,000 to the games that count. He could help revitalize the Bronx at a time when the rest of the city is reclaiming itself, from Hell's Kitchen to Coney Island. He could stop the madness of owners burgling their cities for fancier domains.

When pigs fly, he will. For what George hopes to do is abandon baseball's Parthenon and extort a new, faux-old ballpark from the city by getting into bed with a megalomaniacal mayor, leading us boldly into a future where cities from San Diego to Boston to Miami get new theme-park parks and ticket prices soar while the pitching descends to triple-A quality curveballs. A future where the game becomes, finally and irrevocably, nothing but another piece of sellable, Disneyed entertainment on the carnival-America landscape.

Which is why the first time I saw Derek Jeter and the way he owns his position and the way he hadn't sought stardom but stardom had sought him, and then saw how he doesn't swear and how he gives to charity and loves his parents and, finally, saw how sweetly he signs autographs for the teenage girls with his name painted on their foreheads and hearts painted on their cheeks, I knew why he'd been summoned by the baseball gods: to carry the torch, to help save the team and the Stadium and maybe even the game of baseball itself.

That's what I was trying to suggest to him, anyway, over lunch in the generic restaurant down the road from the Ballpark at Arlington, even though Arlington, Texas, was nowhere to be seen. I told him he was the latest in the long line of those chosen to do battle with the dark prince.

He had no idea what I was talking about, of course, but this only proved my point. And, being a dutiful Yankee, he certainly wasn't going to allow himself to be dragged into a stadium debate by some ranting idealist.

"Yankee Stadium is my favorite stadium; I'm not going to lie to you," he said over the generic chicken Marsala, after he'd eaten the Caesar salad in six seconds. "There's a certain feel you get in Yankee Stadium."

Exactly! Can you describe the magic?

"Well, the playing surface, infieldwise, is the best in the league," he said, chewing. "They keep it wet, so balls stay down."

All right. Maybe I was reading too much into it. Maybe Derek Jeter is just a good baseball player, a kid who grew up in Kalamazoo, with a Dave Winfield poster on his wall, dreaming of playing for the Yankees and following in the footsteps of his father (who hit a home run in his first game as a college-freshman shortstop but wasn't good enough to make the majors, so he earned a Ph.D. instead); a kid who started a foundation for troubled kids after his first year in the majors and hired his father to run it; a kid who has good manners and bright, twinkly eyes. When someone like that shows up in pinstripes, it's only natural to enlist him in the good fight, isn't it? And when you ask that someone why he hasn't let success swell his head and he gets a look of stunned confusion on his face and says, "I wouldn't be able to go home; if I want to go home, I can't do that" -- well, could you be faulted for wanting to glorify him?

All right, I thought. Maybe I'm reading a little too much into it. Maybe I should just sit back, forget the symbolism and watch the guy play ball. So I did. That night in Texas. But even his batting practice was mystical. I've seen hundreds of batting practices, but none like this. Jeter was in a threesome with Tino Martinez and Paul O'Neill, certified home-run hitters. He'd already missed half of infield practice because he'd been signing autographs down the left-field line. He was in something of a slump at the time, but in the first few rounds of batting practice (each player takes about a dozen swings, steps out, lets the other two guys go, then steps back in for rounds of fewer and fewer swings, until, finally, one last swing), he cuffed a few home runs, the clock of the ball rocketing off the bat, echoing all over the Ballpark, which borrows design features from about five different parks, as well as from a French Quarter whorehouse.

O'Neill began to take note of Jeter's home runs, although O'Neill is generally so lost in fine-tuning his own swing that you could fire a bazooka next to him and he wouldn't flinch. On another round, Jeter hit two more. When O'Neill stepped into the cage, he hit one. Then Jeter stepped back in and hit three in a row, all of them propelled by the snap of his wrists. None were titanic, but they were all home runs. From one side of the cage, the implacable Martinez watched the flight of this last bunch of Jeter home runs and said, "Jeez, Jeet," which represented lengthy and rambling oratory coming from Tino Martinez. They were down to the second-to-last round, by now running in and out of the cage. Jeter hit two home runs with his two swings. As O'Neill watched the second one fly out of the park, he said, simply, "Stop it."

Jeter ran back into the cage for his last swing. He practice-swung the bat once, then he hit the last ball high and long, and it settled five rows deep in the right-center-field bleachers.

O'Neill and Martinez were silent. Jeter had hit something like twelve or fourteen home runs. He was smiling a little smile, but a smile, nonetheless. Chuck Knoblauch opened the game for the Yankees with a double against an old Ranger warhorse named John Burkett. Jeter stepped in. I expected him to swing for the fences. Instead, he took a pitch and then, hiding his intent until Burkett had thrown the ball, choked halfway up on the bat and pushed a perfect bunt single between Burkett and first baseman Will Clark. A glimmer of frustration twisted its way through Burkett's features, and two pitches later O'Neill lined the ball down the right-field line for a three-run home run. All the air left the Ballpark at once. The crowd could have gone home right then and there. The Yankees won the game going away.

"The thing that impressed me most about Jeter," Joe Torre had told me before the game, "was the way he either started or finished every rally we had in '96." Torre had started the conversation about his shortstop by saying, "Jeter is the next leader of this ball club." Torre likes Jeter because of the way he plays the game off the field. He likes to talk about the things Jeter does that young players aren't supposed to do. Like the time Jeter snuffed a rally by getting thrown out trying to steal third for no reason and Torre was livid but decided he'd wait for the right moment and not bawl the kid out in front of everyone. But then Jeter sat down next to him, silently volunteering for the lecture he knew he deserved. Torre cuffed him on the back of the head and sent him out to the field.

Or the time Jeter made a bonehead throwing error during a play-off game against the Rangers in '96. Jeter sometimes drops by the manager's office after games and says to Torre, "Get some sleep tonight," but on this night the media pack wanted to know if Torre was going to reprimand the rookie. Torre was saying he might do it the next day, and just then Jeter's head appeared in Torre's doorway.

"Get some sleep tonight," Jeter said and disappeared. "A lot of kids would have buried themselves," Torre said. "He didn't."

That was another way of Joe Torre's saying that Jeter plays beyond his years, and sometimes it's true that Derek Jeter sounds way beyond his years, and not only because he houses the Yankee ghosts. Because he had to grow up very fast.

"It's overwhelming at times," Jeter said over dessert when I asked him what it feels like to know that kids have his poster on their walls now. This was my first and last glimpse of a wistfulness I saw about him. He talked about how much easier it had been in Little League. And how because he was always away from home, sluicing up through various minor leagues, he had missed his little sister's growing up.

"It's like everything happened so fast," he said. "My first year, everything happened. We won the World Series, the Rookie of the Year; everything came so quick. It was like everything's been in fast-forward. It's overwhelming."

When Derek Jeter talks about his age, he says he's only 19, because he decided to start counting backward when he turned 21. It's odd to hear a 23-year-old say he wants to be younger, unless he missed his childhood because he took baseball so seriously, and then it makes perfect sense.

"I don't want to grow older," he said. "After you turn 21, what birthday do you look forward to? I'm not saying I don't want the future to come. But I wouldn't mind staying 23.

"Of course," he said, because he didn't want it to sound as if he were complaining, "I wouldn't change anything; I have the greatest job in the world. Only one person can have it. You have shortstops on other teams -- I'm not knocking other teams -- but there;s only one shortstop on the Yankees."

His eyes were half closed; he was back to relaxed and mellow at the thought of it, his great station in life. Or maybe it was because the dessert tasted so good. I hadn't even seen him eat it. It just sort of disappeared.

I found tall Mel Stottlemyre reading a boating magazine in the cramped visiting coaches' locker room before the next game, while the Yankees were next door sitting on plush couches watching Liar, Liar on a giant television screen.

"He's like someone who's 30, 31, 32, a guy who's played eight, nine years," Stottlemyre said. "He's been like that a couple of years now."

Stottlemyre, himself a torchbearer and a five-time all-star, does not know that in the Yankee mythology I have created he was the original archangel to Steinbrenner's Antichrist or that he inherited his aura from the great Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson. Nor does he know that Derek Jeter is the latest recipient of the magic.

All Mel knows is hunting and fishing and boating and baseball. When he was a Yankee and he came home from road trips, Mel's three sons would not even give him time to take off his coat and tie before making him play catch with them, and so he did, and one of them, Todd, became a major league star.

After he stopped pitching, Mel was a coach for the Houston Astros and then the New York Mets, where he helped the team win a World Series, which is what he's doing now for the Yankees. Like all the torchbearers, Mel is a man of few words. So we spoke for ten minutes or so, and not much was said. I thanked him for his time, and we headed into the Yankee locker room. "You can see he enjoys playing the game," Stottlemyre said as he walked away from me. "That's a treat." Then he stopped and said it again, smiling. "That's a treat."

I agreed, and he started to walk away again, and then he stopped and looked back at me one more time and smiled widely and said, "You know what I mean." I still don't know what to make of that. Maybe he meant that he and I had been around long enough to know that players these days don't enjoy the game enough. But maybe he was telling me I was right. About the torch.

Jeter and I were supposed to have another interview that day, but there he was -- sitting on one of the big, comfortable couches with the other Yankees, watching Jim Carrey, laughing loudly. He looked so happy I decided to leave him there. Taking a break from the weight of his responsibility. Enjoying childhood. Gathering his strength for the battle ahead.

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