The Swan Song of Jeter Month: A Paean to The Greatest Man Who Ever Lived

I swear, sometime we're going to actually stop writing about Derek Jeter's retirement.  But there's just too much.  I don't write very much these days because I don't consume much crappy sports media these days, and I don't make the time to go search for bad sportswriting.  But when an event like Jeter's retirement comes along, it's just too easy to find.    I promise, we'll eventually stop Jeter Month™.

Here's The New York Times, ostensibly the nation's premier source of good journalism, presenting Doug Glanville's "The Book on Jeter".  Right, I know, Glanville probably just gets writing gigs because he was a player.  But  still: this is horrendous. It's a mixture of terrible writing, dramatic prose, awful cliches and a bald-faced lie.

Every major league player is deeded real estate in the book of baseball. 

Are we talking real estate or literature here, Doug?  Holy mixed metaphor!

Some may be granted only one word, others a paragraph. And then there is Derek Jeter, who is closing out, in a masterly way, one of the great chapters in baseball’s history.

Would anyone argue that Jeter is closing a chapter in baseball's history, or rather merely in his own? I'm sorry, folks, but Jeter is not a symbol of anything. Unless you want to make him a symbol of a Player Who Did Not Do Steroids, which as Larry B mentioned previously, was the sort of thing that only hundreds of other players could manage.

It is rare when you can craft both the beginning and end of your entry and also guide the pen in between. The serendipity that marks a life in the game can add pages of unforeseen horror (or romance) to your story. 

Swoon!  Oh, the horror, the romance, the drama!  Coming out next month in trade paperback, Doug Glanville's Fifty Shades of Derek Jeter.  Spoiler alert: there are no pictures.

The wayward hand of the larger forces in baseball can act like a toddler’s first dance with a crayon. Wantonly scribbling out previous work, recklessly writing outside the lines without control.

Toddlers dance with crayons?  Good lord, this is a terrible metaphor, made worse by terrible execution.  It's like a heaping dose of terrible garbage force-fed to a dancing, drawing toddler who spews the terrible garbage everywhere, even on the walls, and then the Times publishes it.

But a major league player has a magic pen, too.

What?  Is Jeter now Harry &#@*% Potter?

 In Jeter’s letter to the fans, he expressed a common player belief that this game was a dream, the domain of the supernatural and unexplainable, enduring against all odds. 

Look at Jeter, going all Puck on the audience here. Also, I can only imagine the game of baseball, with its billions and billions of revenue, feels pretty scrappy because it's enduring against all odds.

So you tap your dreams, and accept that every once in a while they will be interrupted by a trip to the disabled list or a subpar season. Yet Jeter lived the daily dream of being an exceptional player with an exceptional organization behind him, and he became one of the best of baseball's dream.

With an exceptionally huge market and an exceptionally huge amount of money behind him buying exceptionally awesome players to fit around him.

Jeter has built a career on grit and hustle, on an inside-out swing and a jump throw to first from deep in the hole. The ice water in his veins enabled him to expect victory in the most dire circumstances, and doubled as an antidote to the sometimes venomous scrutiny that comes with playing in New York.

Grit?  Hustle?  Inside-out swing?  Jump throw? ICE WATER IN HIS VEINS?  JETER BINGO!

[And I didn't even use the free The Flip square in the center]

Jeter has always been daring and fearless, 

By fielding a lot of ground balls and hitting a lot of opposite field singles?  Shit, I did that in high school.  

and it takes a lot of courage to pre-empt the inevitable physical decline of a professional baseball player and do what he did this week: declare a self-imposed deadline and submit, finally, to baseball’s history book. 

How courageous of Jeter.  What COURAGE.  It's the most COURAGEOUS letter that's ever appeared on Facebook.  Other players merely retire when they get old, but nobody does it with Jeter's COURAGE. 

This is ridiculous.  The only baseball players whose retirement MIGHT be considered courageous are Sandy Koufax, Ralph Kiner, and Kirby Puckett, and even then, those were Sort of Obvious That They Couldn't Keep Playing.

The game’s actuarial tables don’t generally put a 40-year-old shortstop in the starting lineup on Opening Day for any contender, so he already enters this season as an anomaly.

Doug Glanville is lying.  Jeter will actually be 39 when he's in the starting lineup on Opening Day.  But why care about the truth when you're trying to sanctify the holiest shortstop ever to play the Game? 

Yet no player can completely control the ending. Happenstance is one of baseball’s great gifts and curses. When you are playing 162 games in a season, nearly every single day, anything can happen.

Anything can happen is our only hope.  Maybe Jeter's ankle will completely disintegrate on Opening Day and we will be spared the Jeter Parade of 2014.

Jeter never gave up until he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was over, and even then, he winked.

1. Never gave up.  BINGO.

2.What the hell?    He winked? Was Jeter trying to be coy?  Or did he have some of the good old grit in his eye?

 He is pragmatic and knows the risk of entering a season at this stage in his career without a plan: it’s an invitation to chaos. 

But he has a plan: waltz around the country, get lots of attention and gifts, help the Yankees to a first-round exit, and distribute gift baskets all along!  omg. Best.  Summer.  Ever.

There would be the inevitable questions about a slow bat or an unhealed ankle, the distractions and self-doubts that come with a slump at 40 versus a slump at 25.

In many ways, Jeter’s declaration not only provided parameters for himself, it spared his teammates and his manager. They will not have to explain his future struggles, they will not have to consider joining a conversation that suggests he think about retirement.

He spared them that! How noble! And then he courageously and generously and nobly invited them to 30 different Jeter Day parties.   I bet by the end of the season Brendan Ryan's face will be permanently distorted from 162 postgame interviews of fake smiling and he will just lose it if he has to tell one more reporter about the Honor of Backing Up Jeter.

Truth is, he does not know how this year will unfold. We can imagine the impossible — like a standing ovation in his honor at Fenway Park or a game-winning home run in Game 7 of the World Series — because all along he played for something bigger than rivalry and organizational pride. 

Oh god, what a nightmare. That's worse than my recurring nightmare about flunking out of graduate school, my wife leaving me and being sent to a gulag while my leprosy spreads over the just-healed gangrene. Please god by all that is good and ho do not let this happen.

Those priorities earn the respect of anyone who loves the game and cares about its future. Jeter transcended tried-and-true constructs, and it would be fitting if his transition from the game were transcendent.

IS IT ANY COINCIDENCE THAT JETER STARTS WITH JE-?

But even though Jeter’s baseball legacy will be there for all time, the world changes, and how that legacy is interpreted will change with it. This is what is so hard. Even if we end on our terms, we still can’t know how we will be remembered.

That's not hard.  That's normal. In fact, I' m looking forward to seeing how history will look back on Jeter as an excellent Hall of Fame shortstop who did not transcend anything.  Nothing about this will be hard.

We hope there is something immutable about our effort. That we are somehow timeless and forever.

Good god, this overblown prose is worse than Rick Reilly.

 But we have to wait and see, and clarity still might not come in our lifetime. As Jeter stated in his letter to his fans, “Now it is time for a new chapter. I have new dreams and aspirations, and I want new challenges.”

Because playing baseball has become too challenging.

His greatest challenge may be those first steps without the pinstripes, without the packed stadium, without the opponent 60 feet 6 inches away.

A fifth of a billion dollars, the adulation of the biggest city in the country and worldwide fame might help him navigate that.

 It might arise while he’s sitting on the couch, opening up baseball’s history and seeing his entry complete, with nothing more to be added.

And saying, YEAH JEETS while pounding his chest.

And now for the dramatic ending, where Doug has saved the worst for last:

But the good news, as baseball turns to the next chapter, is that it’s a game that looks forward and backward equally, and something tells me that Derek Jeter will be that rarity who will find a way to travel through time and stand in both the past and in the future.

There it is, people! Doug Glanville thinks that Jeter will be able to travel through time.

That's it, folks.  I can't do any more Jeter Month™.  Unless someone else takes up the torch, I'm done.  Next post will come sometime this week where I will discus how ESPN is digging up good old fashioned racism and decorating it with the facade of statistics!  Believe me, it's putrid.

Jeter Month Continues

Well, it's still Jeter month, and the spectre of the Jeter love that will be spilling all over baseball this season is enough to make fans of the actual game of baseball somewhat ill. This one comes from Anthony Castrovince, an MLB.com reporter. I know, I know, MLB.com is just a mouthpiece for happy puff pieces, but this one takes the cake.

Jeter stays stoic in face of impending farewell tour

Gag. The headline makes it seem like he's facing chemotherapy or something, instead of a season of thousands of people kissing his high butt.

We don't really know Derek Jeter.

I can only imagine that some poor parent had to deal with that problem as some impressionable ten-year old who stumbled across the New York Post.

"Hey mom, why does Derek Jeter give away autographed baseballs to those ladies?" '

"I don't know, son, we don't really know Derek Jeter".

We know his feats and his impressive lack of public foibles. We know all about the World Series rings, the stats that will make him a first-ballot Hall of Famer and the moments that will make up whatever highlight reel serves as the standard.

Is Jeter's lack of public foibles all that impressive? I know he has played under close scrutiny in New York over all these years, so maybe it is. Then again, maybe after being on several World Series winning teams as a young player gave him the status in the city to have his foibles conveniently left out of the press.

We know that nobody who has played with or against him has even a harmlessly unflattering word to say about him. We know he's got a huge waterfront home down here with an annual real estate tax bill likely larger than your total mortgage, and, yes, we know he's dated or otherwise befriended some gorgeous girls over the course of two decades on the big league stage.
"Mom, what does or otherwise befriended mean?"

"I don't know, son, we really don't know Derek Jeter"

Even in an era of unfathomable finances and TMZ and 24/7, well, everything, 

&*&% the heck? What are unfathomable finances? Is Mr. Castrovince really so flummoxed by the state of the world in 2014 that he calls it an era of 24/7, everything? You'd think a man paid to write words could look a little harder for them.

he's been one guy you can feel pretty good about your kids adoring and emulating. That's legacy enough.

There are plenty of other players who you can feel pretty good about. In fact, I'd venture to say there are more players you can feel pretty good about your kids adoring and emulating than ones you feel bad about. It's just that the bad ones get notice. I bet on most MLB teams, 23 or 24 of the guys you can feel pretty good about. There are a dozen Sean Caseys for every Milton Bradley.

But we don't really know the man, and that certainly wasn't going to change Wednesday morning, in a big room full of reporters and cameras and teammates and 27 minutes' worth of questions and something resembling answers.

Good job linking the specific details to your thesis, Anthony!

"I still have a season to play," Jeter told us
Wow!

Even that phrase -- "press conference" -- was not to be embraced.

Why the passive voice here? Who is doing this not-embracing?

"Media availability" was the preferred terminology, because that's something Jeter is annually accustomed to on the position-player report date, and no Facebook retirement announcement was going to change that.
Sounds like a good old fashioned euphemism to me. It would sound arrogant of Jeter to go to a press conference to talk about himself, so instead he went to a place where he would be available to the media to talk about himself. I don't mean to criticize Jeter here. I'm sure he has to do it. But it sure smells of spin.

And so they poked and prodded him with queries about any emotions that might be bubbling beneath the surface here on the eve of his final season in pinstripes. But nobody honestly or realistically expected the curtain to suddenly be pulled back and the inner "Bachelor" contestant -- the tears, the fears, the sneers -- to be revealed.

No, but that would've been awesome.

"I have feelings," Jeter said, believably. "I'm not emotionally stunted. There's feelings there. I just think I've been pretty good at trying to hide my emotions over the years."

"I have feelings," Jeter said, believably. Ostensibly Mr. Castrovince is an actual paid sportswriter who gets paid actual money to write about how Jeter talked so believably about an utterly banal statement true of every single human being ever except maybe Jeffrey Dahmer and even he probably had feelings they were just really messed up feelings.

An understatement if ever there was one, and that's probably what makes Jeter's particular exit strategy so surprising.

Here's where this article is about to go off the rails: Castrovince's utter naivete / hero worship is going to shoot through the roof. Hold on to your hats, people.

"I was shocked he was doing it on Facebook," teammate Ichiro Suzuki said through an interpreter.

Well, sure, that's part of the intrigue. Who knew Jeter had a Facebook page, for one? It's not like he's going to use the medium to show us vacation photos or share his "feeling" status, with accompanying emoticons.

But we know Jeter has feelings. He said so, believably. Can you believe Jeter doesn't post a Facebook status about his emotions? Of course he doesn't/ His Facebook page is almost exclusively about his charity work. It has tons of pictures of the smiling children that are benefitting from his millions. I'm sure, like most players, he doesn't write a word of it. It's just a way to polish his image.

But what's most shocking of all, perhaps, is that Jeter is willingly subjecting himself to the Mariano Rivera-like farewell tour and all the attention, glad-handing, marketing ("Captain's Final Voyage" seems to be the working title), and, yes, the gifts it's sure to contain.
How torturous! Can you believe Jeter is willingly subjecting himself to more praise and Corvettes? The media crap is already out there preparing for the tour. It's just shocking that Jeter would do this. Shocking.

All Jeter has ever wanted is a career free of undue distractions from his annual goal of winning a World Series,

Well, he's sure going to be spending a lot of 2014 dealing with the undue distraction of every team giving him a Rolex or something and celebrating him for playing a lot of baseball games. Obviously Jeter's retirement announcement (or speculation about it, if he didn't announce it), no matter how he handled it, would have caused some distraction, but it hardly seems like the method he chose was anywhere close to minimizing the distraction.

and that's why he was so adamant at controlling the tone and tenor of this -- ahem -- media availability. The reason he used Facebook as his parting platform, he said, was to have his message heeded in full and his charitable foundation highlighted, two worthy goals.

His letter only included one word about the charity foundation, but the letter was spread out over tons of pages of Jeter helping kids and stuff.

But there will be so many elements of this endeavor that are sure to be out of Jeter's scope of comfort,

I like how the opening statement We don't really know Jeter has been abandoned here, since we know for sure that all this attention is just going to make old Derek uncomfortable, since he really is a small-town boy who doesn't like any kind of attention at all.

because, as you might have noticed, we tend to like to overdo things here in the land of the free and the home of the Super Bowl.
I submit this encomium as evidence.

"I can't comment yet [on what the farewell tour will be like]," said Jeter, "because I don't know what that means. I don't know what's going to happen. I really don't know."

Astonishing of Jeter to not know about what's going to happen on the farewell tour as he was announcing his retirement. But that's not a big deal. No doubt Mr. Castrovince had to include a certain number of quotations from Jeter himself in this article, and he probably only had blandness to choose from. But get yourself ready for some really miserable buttkissing:

We should thank him, then, for the opportunity to say thank you and providing the heads-up that 2014 would be an awfully good time to come to the yard and see No. 2, if you haven't already.

I'm just going to highlight that bit:

We should thank him, then, for the opportunity to say thank you
We should thank him, then, for the opportunity to say thank you
We should thank him, then, for the opportunity to say thank you

Listen people, you can start thanking Jeter now for being so kind as to subject us to a season full of Jeter's last Tuesday-afternoon appearance in the Rogers Centre on deck circle updates. Otherwise what would we talk about? Actual baseball?

Reading that paragraph made me feel like I was witnessing a middle-school team statistician kissing the butt of the star of the team.

And it's not like anyone who hasn't already come out to watch the Yankees is going to be telling their children, "I almost missed it, but I'm sure glad I got to see a kind of over the hill Jeter play!" If they haven't come to see the Yankees in the last 20 years, I don't see the point in coming out to watch Jeter now that he's far past his prime.

Now for some writing that isn't so much overly sentimental but is just poorly executed:

For the Yankees, though, it's a situation that is not without its potential pitfalls. The prevailing pleasantry about Jeter's adieu

Holy alliteration! Holy synonyms!

has been that he's "going out on his terms," but that's a little on the presumptive side. His physical condition will dictate the terms, and that condition is a constant concern for the rare animal that is the 40-year-old shortstop.

Animal? I suppose it is a stock phrase, but is there any reason to think of Jeter like a zoo specimen?

There will be days when Joe Girardi rests him for the betterment of the bottom line,
Doesn't that phrase usually refer to money? I'm confused.

and some kid in the stands who has never seen Jeter in action will be robbed of that pleasure.

An allusion to DiMaggio's famous comment about playing hard for that kid? Only Joe D retired at 36, and actually retired on his terms.

Backup shortstop Brendan Ryan has said he's already preparing to "embrace the boos" that will come with his job.

I wonder what Brendan Ryan is doing to prepare himself to embrace the boos. Does he ask his family and friends to practice booing him, then setting a steely face? Does he watch old videos of him striking out or making errors? Does he keep a picture of the high school crush who turned him down for a date in his locker?

"[Jeter] has always made my job difficult when you want to give him a day off," Girardi said. "I remember him always yelling at Mr. [Joe] Torre when he wanted to take him out of games and [asking] how was he ever going to break Cal's [Ripken] record if Torre kept pulling him out of games. We want him in the lineup as much as possible. But we also have to make sure he's productive."

I'm not going to argue with this too much. Jeter will most likely end up playing the second most games at shortstop in MLB history. But this article suggests that Jeter's attitude was a lot less grindy than Girardi claims here. And of course Jeter should've stopped playing shortstop in 2004 anyways. But he did play a lot of games and that's no mean feat.

It says here that Jeter has been blessed with too charmed a life to run out of good mojo now.

@#$% the heck again? What "here" is Castrovince referring to? Is he holding an imaginary conversation with a midget in his head?

Maybe his career won't end with another World Series trophy in hand, because there are far too many variables at play.

MAYBE.

But all any of us can reasonably hope is that the final ride is free of physical potholes.
I don't know. I wouldn't go so far as to wish misfortune on Jeter, but if he hurt himself tomorrow and was out all season and never played another game, I wouldn't feel too bad for him.

He's earned at least that and probably much more.

PROBABLY

Jeter has also, whether he wants to embrace it or not, earned all the applause and adulation and alms and awards sure to come his way over the next seven-plus months.

No he hasn't. He hasn't even earned all of the applause and adulation that sportswriters gave him in the first seven days after his announcement.

At some point, there will be a farewell speech, there will be a final tip of the cap, there might even be a few tears from the otherwise stoic shortstop.

How stoic.

For now, though, all we know is that Jeter will soon venture into a life after baseball centered on his foundation's work and his hope of starting a family (no, we don't know with whom). And we know, most importantly, that he still has one more season in him, which is why, on a dais reserved for him and him alone, and on a day assumed to serve as celebration of all that was and all he is, Jeter paused mid-availability, pointed to his teammates assembled on one side of the room and said this:

Seven commas in one sentence: generally not a good idea if you're trying for any semblance of clarity.

"If these guys got to go to work, go work."

That doesn't make any sense.

We don't really know Jeter. But we do know that's what's most important to him

Gift baskets for one night stands, only playing one position at the expense of his team, and being celebrated and applauded on every road trip this season?