He is young and single and a complete star of New York the way Joe Namath once was. The young guys want to be like Derek Jeter, the young women just want to be with him. Maybe that is why Yankee Stadium sounds different for him than for all the others. Jeter is the one who makes the oldest place the city has in sports sound as young as a rock concert.
Derek Jeter: As good as it gets.
It was David Cone who once said, "Being Derek Jeter in New York right now is about as good as it gets." Somehow it all seems to keep getting better, the way Jeter's baseball does.
There was always a bit of a lounge-lizard quality to the young Namath when he was making his way through the big-city nights. Jeter reminds you more of the coolest kid in high school. Back in the '50s, when the football Giants were the most glamorous team we had, Frank Gifford was this kind of golden boy of New York.
Now the Yankees are No. 1 again, here and everywhere. It all seems to start with No. 2. When the Yankees came back against Greg Maddux and the Braves last night in Game 1 of the World Series, it was Jeter knocking in their first run, reaching over the plate, going out there to get such a tough outside pitch from Maddux, singling into left field with the bases loaded.
Here is Jeter at his locker the other day, finished answering all the Game 1 questions. He looks around for his glove suddenly, as if some inner alarm has gone off. He is supposed to be on the field in two minutes, exactly. Jeter acts as if he has all day, the way he does even when he is deep in the hole and there is a fast man running toward first.
"Does your life change at all at this time of year?" he is asked.
He thinks about that and smiles in a way that buckles the knees of all the girls with their Instamatics, begging him to look their way at the Stadium.
"Don't change a thing," Jeter says.
"Go out less at night?"
Another smile.
"Nah."
"Sleep later?"
A shake of the head, no.
"I can feel the city change around me, get more excited in October," he says. "But I don't."
He looks at the clock, moves across the clubhouse in that loose kid's bounce.
"Why change anything?" Derek Jeter says, and heads out the clubhouse door, up the runway toward the Yankee dugout, into the sun.
He is the Yankee shortstop at a time when the Yankees have become the Yankees again. He was a rookie when the Yankees won it all in 1996, finally beating the Braves in the World Series. The Yankees were upset by the Indians in the first round of the playoffs the next season. No one took it harder than Jeter. Even now, when talking about all the winning he has known since 1996, he always finds a way to bring up what happened against the Indians the next year.
"Losing is something I'm not familiar with," he said the other day.
He has hit town as a winner the way Joe DiMaggio did in 1936. DiMaggio was a rookie that year and the Yankees won the World Series and then won three straight after that. Mantle showed up as a rookie in 1951 and the Yankees won three in a row. Jeter, at 25, goes for his third World Series ring in four years. This year he hit .349 and hit more home runs - 24 - than ever. His batting average is right there at .400 now for the postseason. He was 2-for-4 last night, the one RBI, the one run scored.
Maybe he will go through the Series the way he went through the season, like a kid making his way across campus.
"He goes through life like he's still 15 years old," Yankee coach Don Zimmer said on Thursday. "We'll be getting ready to play one of these big games, and he'll come up to me and Joe [Torre] right before he takes the field. And he'll tap Joe on the shoulder and say, 'You know, Mr. Torre, this might be the biggest game you'll ever manage.'"
"You should see when he makes a mistake out there," Zimmer continued. "Most guys, they come in and go right to the end of the bench. Not Jeter. Oh no, not the kid. All of a sudden I'll feel this hand on my shoulder and then he'll be wedging his way in between Joe and me, like a kid in class who knows he's going to hear it and wants to get it over with."
The old man smiled. The old man was a star shortstop once, signed by the Dodgers out of high school in the '40s.
"I always get a kick out of that one," Zimmer said.
Jeter makes all the plays at short. He strikes out more than 100 times a year and still hits for high average. He is the Yankee shortstop who can hit home runs to the opposite field, and hit them in the upper deck.
"In four years here, he hasn't changed one half-inch," Zimmer said. "He'd be on his way to the Hall of Fame if he just kept hitting .300 every year. But now he has to go and hit .350."
Then the media get around Jeter and occasionally act surprised that he's having so much fun being this kind of player, for this team, at this time. He looks at them as if they're asking him about global warming, or Y2K, or maybe just what it will be like for him to get old someday.
"It's a game," Jeter said when everyone was gone from his locker. "How can you not have fun playing baseball? I'm the shortstop for the Yankees, in Yankee Stadium, and we're trying to win the World Series again. What could be better than that?"
He was asked if he was ever in last place, his whole life.
"High school," he said.
He left last place behind, then brought high school with him to the Yankees. Everybody else seems to be going for another championship ring. The shortstop acts like he's trying to win another varsity letter.