Baseball’s Love Affair with Derek Jeter (article)

Derek Jeter has been one of my all-time favorite athletes since his stellar qualities became apparent during his first full year as the Yankee shortstop in 1996 when he was selected as Rookie of the Year. His remarkable athletic abilities and consistent play led to him getting more hits than all but five other men in the history of baseball in his two decade long Yankee career. He was famous for his extraordinary fielding and hitting when it was most necessary, which in baseball is called a clutch hitter. This is partly why he is often hailed as “Mr. September,” “Mr. October,” and even “Mr. November” for at the very end of the season or post-season he got crucial hits that greatly contributed to the Yankees becoming such a winning team during most of his tenure.

Jeter was celebrated, along with his former teammate Mariano Rivera, as much for his extraordinary performance as for how he represented excellence and character in an age of self-celebration and steroids. He embodied the older ideal of the team comes first and self-restraint in professional sports in an era when a player celebrates a good play by “showboating”—getting the cameras to focus on him through narcissistic celebrations of going into a dance or another eye catching action. In an earlier period this would have been considered disrespectful of opponents. Similarly, failure is increasingly expressed by succumbing to childlike expressions of emotions in the smashing of water coolers or other objects. In contrast Jeter and Rivera stood out though their self-restraint and hard work.

Upon becoming Yankee captain in 2003, Jeter led by example. More than his considerable abilities as a hitter and fielder are his qualities as a clean-living, consistent, uncomplaining player in an era of prima donnas and highly paid athletes who spend much of their time on the injury list. He made his career as a singles hitter who “sets the table” for those who hit doubles and home runs. His teammates report his uncomplainingly playing while hurt. Injuries finally caught up to Jeter last year, causing him to miss most of the season and to announce that he would be retiring at the end of this,

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his 20^th year as the shortstop for the Yankee.

Although Jeter is clearly my favorite player, as I watched game after game I became increasingly annoyed that Yankee and other announcers ignored the details of the game itself and focused on his impending retirement. As a psychohistorian interested in group phenomena I’m puzzled by the incredible focus on Jeter throughout baseball as well as among Yankee fans. Wherever Derek Jeter has played in the latter part of this season he was heralded in the stadiums of opposing teams with large checks being written to his Turn 2 Foundation, which seeks to motivate young people to turn from alcohol and drugs to a healthy life style. The commissioner of baseball recently called him the “face of baseball” and gave a check for $22,222.22 (the 2s to honor Jeter’s number 2) to the Foundation. In baseball, Jeter is far from alone in having such a foundation.

I joked that if the messiah of all humankind should come and be recognized as such, then there couldn’t be much more fanfare than that which has been given to Derek Jeter, especially in the latter part of the baseball season. Why? When Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Hank Greenberg, and Joe DiMaggio retired there was fanfare, but nothing like this. It is true that so many of us remember Lou Gehrig’s famous “The luckiest man on the face of the earth” speech on July 4^th, 1939 made famous by the movie The Pride of the Yankees (1942). However, there was the drama in Gehrig’s case that this superb athlete was losing control of his body due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which is popularly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. There has never been a send-off like Jeter’s in major league baseball. Indeed, on the night of his final Yankee home game, Jeter said that it partly felt like he was at his own funeral because of the way people were speaking of him in such idealized terms.

Jeter illustrated his clutch hitting in his final game at Yankee stadium. This was despite the fact that he was so nervous he almost asked his manager to take him out of the game since he feared he would not be able to perform and told reporters that he made several mental mistakes that fortunately did not affect his performance. Despite his enormous anxiety he got two hits, including one in the bottom of the ninth inning that drove in the winning run.

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This sent the fans, his teammates, and many of his retired teammates who had come to honor him, into an even greater frenzy of appreciation. After the game, instead of rushing for the exits to beat the traffic home, most of the packed Yankee stadium crowd stood in awed appreciation, waiting for a final look at their hero, who walked around the stadium acknowledging them with a wave.

Nostalgia is certainly a major force in this idealization of an excellent baseball player who has served among many other fine baseball players. Jeter has always been incredibly respectful of the sport he has loved and played since he was four or five years old. He respects teammates, managers, owners, opponents, the media, and his fans, and has been unwavering in carrying out his responsibilities to one and all. Jeter would speak to the reporters even when he had a terrible day on the field by striking out consistently, making errors, and hitting into double plays (causing two of the three outs allowed in an inning). He always assumed responsibility for what he did not do well and for losses. This is very unusual in a game in which the best hitters are likely to fail 70 percent of the time. When A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez), an ego-driven prima donna teammate whom he had called a friend, betrayed him, Jeter quietly removed himself from that relationship as best he could. To the frustration of the media, who love open conflict, he avoided the subject as he went about doing his job.

In addition to lauding his qualities as a player and human being, this idealization of their retiring shortstop may also represent nostalgia for the glory days of victory when the Yankees went to the playoff every year and won the World Series five times during his service. To a lesser degree, an unprecedented focus on a retiring player began last year with the retirement of the great Yankee pitcher, Mariano Rivera, who closed out games. These were the only two years that Jeter played that the Yankees did not win enough games to go to the playoffs. Could nostalgia be a distraction from the game, resulting in a poorer performance, or be a substitute for victory?

To Jeter, playing the game is what it has always been about, not the hoopla of modern sports. He represents the values of the old time baseball player from when the sport was so much less commercialized and it was mostly about the game, rather than the

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personality of the player. He was unusual in staying on the same team and playing the same position throughout his entire career. His traditionalism was shown by always being announced at bat in Yankee stadium by the dignified voice of Yankee announcer (from 1951-2007) Bob Sheppard.

Jeter represents the middle-American player, in his case raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Although he has never married or had children (saying it would be irresponsible to have children when he was away from home so much as an active player) and kept his private life quite private, Jeter symbolized both the clean-cut all-American boy grown to responsible manhood and racial harmony. His Caucasian mother, African-American father, African-American-appearing sister and nephew would watch him play game after game, enthusiastically cheering him on as the family always had since he was a boy in Little League.

Derek’s success in baseball was a family affair. As a skinny little green-eyed eight-year-old with “twigs for arms and legs,” he fell in love with baseball and dreamed of becoming the shortstop on the New York Yankees. This dream was not treated casually by his family. His parents had met in the U.S. Army in Germany and their parenting stressed setting and achieving goals through hard work and self-discipline. Jeter reports that “they were relentless about their involvement in their children’s lives and in what we dreamed of doing with ourselves” (Derek Jeter with Jack Curry, The Life You Imagine: Life Lessons for Achieving Your Dreams, 2000, 9). His father is a substance abuse counselor, psychotherapist, and a professor of sociology with a master’s degree in social work and a PhD in sociology. He idealizes his father, who he describes as “soft yet stern as a dad, but…tough when it was time to compete” and said that, “I knew that my parents would give me positive and honest feedback” (Life You Imagine, 7-8). The family made contracts with their son, holding him to high standards of performance and not letting him take playing ball for granted. “Can’t” was not an acceptable word in his family. Jeter played shortstop, as his father had in college, and refused to move to the less physically taxing outfield, where Yankee management wanted him to move because they thought that would extend his career.

Growing up in a biracial family put a spotlight on him and

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proper middle class standards had to be maintained. Unlike Barack Obama, who starting at age 12 didn’t want his mom to come around when he was playing basketball with the other kids because he would face the complexity of having to explain a white mother, Jeter’s biracial family has been a consistent presence. His closest friends appear to be diverse: black, Hispanic, and white.

Even during his final Yankee Stadium game, Jeter had a great ability to keep playing and proving himself on the field even when he felt a “weird range of emotions.” This probably evoked feelings he had as a child when parents stared and kids used the “N-word” due to their discomfort around a seemingly white child with biracial parents. While Barack Obama’s mother taught him to just keep walking when kids in Indonesia used racial slurs and threw rocks at him, the Jeters taught their son to just keep playing the game he so loved when confronted with America’s racial ambivalence and hatred. In his last game at Yankee Stadium when it felt “like an out of body experience,” he just kept playing and drove in both the first and the winning run. He always seemed to know his own emotions but he was most comfortable speaking with his glove, bat, and accurate throws to first base.

Dignity. In a sport where the reporters, including women, get to go into the locker rooms, the players are denied the opportunity to simply unwind and express their sense of glee or frustrations to their teammates and friends unobserved. Before the cameras, the sport has become less and less dignified. During the postgame Yankee Stadium interview of the game’s star, teammates sneak up and hit him with a pie in the face or, more recently, empty a huge tub of Gatorade on the hero of the game. Jeter’s teammates knew not to do this to their captain since it would be a betrayal of the dignity in which he held himself and the game. However, on the last evening Jeter played, he was given the Gatorade shower—with knowledge beforehand that it would happen.

As the fever pitch of “Derek Jeter Mania” heightened, it seemed stranger and stranger to the boy from Kalamazoo. “With everyone chanting thank you Derek, I am thinking for what? I’m just doing my job! These last few weeks have gotten tougher and tougher.” He was so afraid “I would breakdown [cry],” that “This was my last game at shortstop,” it brought forth “a weird range of

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emotions….” “This year was special, at times difficult, almost like watching a funeral like you are about to die. I appreciate it [the fans’ honoring of him]” but it “feels like a part of you is dying. The baseball side.” Clearly, Jeter is somewhat psychologically attuned, causing me to wonder if his psychotherapist father, who he so respects, had encouraged him to go into therapy to deal with the pressures of being a celebrity.

In his final New York City game, Jeter not only struggled mightily to control most of his emotions that were not associated with doing his job as well as possible, but he even spoke about his suppressing them, reporting that “I almost started crying driving here today which is what the announcers were looking for. I think I did a pretty good job of hiding my emotions. Like when I’d be hurt. A couple times I almost broke down [cried today]. I’m just doing my job.” He questioned why everyone is making so much of his retirement and implicitly why they may want to see him cry for their own reasons, but he’s here about baseball and he keeps his emotions private and within his family. He repeatedly referred to his “tricking” himself so that he would not break down, cry, or express emotions he did not see as dignified for the game. Playing “was a lot of fun. These guys are like brothers. Mr. T. [Joe Torre, his longest serving manager] was like a father.” He then in his talk congratulated the Baltimore Orioles, declaring “They should win [the pennant and the World Series]. They deserve it.”

Baseball has been displaced by the much more violent game of football as America’s favorite sport. However, football is torn by the scandal of managerial cover ups of players beating their wives and children precisely at the time when there is such adoration of the Yankee shortstop who has never been involved in scandal. Jeter symbolizes the American ego ideal of yesterday, as the country looks for imperfections and the Achilles heels in those it raises to stardom.

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