Peter Gammons on Derek Jeter and his importance to the Game

Peter Gammons: What Derek Jeter means to the game of baseball

July 16, 2014 by Peter Gammons 0 Comments

Derek Jeter finished taking his ground balls as he always takes them, his feet balanced and positioned, his glove inside his left foot. That is how he prepares. Several years ago, I asked him if he ever fooled around and one-handed a ball in those monotonous minutes that coaches hit ball after ball off their fungoes. “I made 56 errors once,” he brusquely replied, “and I can do it again.”
Tuesday he had finished his routine and come in to the batting cage for batting practice, and approached Red Sox coach and infield teaching professor Brian Butterfield. “Why didn’t you hit me ground balls, Butter?” Jeter asked.
“There are a lot of coaches hitting balls, a lot of infielders,” Butterfield replied.
“No one is like you,” Jeter replied. “On the last day of the season, before my last game, you have to hit me ground balls with a Yankee cap on your head. You have to make up for today.”
Back when Jeter was a colt and he’d made 56 errors in A ball, he went to the Instructional League to be tutored by Butterfield, then a young manager and coach in the Yankee organization. “I broke a bone, couldn’t hit and couldn’t play in games,” Jeter recounted. “But Butter had me out there at seven every morning, killing me.” The next season, Butterfield was Jeter’s manager, and as Jeter has told many folks over the years, he helped make him a gold glove shortstop.
Then when Jeter left last night’s game and went down the line in the dugout, exchanging embraces, near the end of the line he reached Butterfield. The two embraced, and the Fox microphone picked up Jeter saying, “I love you Butter.”
Because Derek never forgets. He never forgets. Not family; when he was called “Mr. Jeter” yesterday, he said, “the important Mr. Jeter is my father.” Not people who helped him, like Butterfield, people who treated him with respect through the years. On a night when the entire game became Derek Jeter Day, the message of this week was louder than ever, that, in the end, the respect you take is equal to the respect you make.
Adam Wainwright, the National League starting pitcher who carried that kind of respectful presence when he was an 18-year old at a Georgia Tech recruiting dinner, took off his glove, applauded Jeter, tipped his cap, then as the entire crowd rose for Jeter’s announcement and he stepped into the box, stepped back off the mound. “I thought it was his moment,” Wainwright said afterwards. “I wanted to stay as far away as I could.”
There was no silly gimmicky “this game matters stuff.” Baseball matters, and what Jeter means to the sport matters. On Sunday, Sept. 28, Jeter’s last game will be the most nationally watched final game in the sport’s history. But in Target Field, the best of the game could express what Jeter has meant to competitiveness and integrity and character. Yasiel Puig weeks ago asked Don Mattingly, who was Jeter’s role model when he got to the big leagues in 1995, what he could do to earn the kind of respect Jeter has earned. Adam Jones and Jon Lester, Giancarlo Stanton, Brian Dozier and…hey, everyone…expressed some form of awe for what Derek Jeter has done to make their game better.
It is appropriate that it was Mike Trout who tripled in Jeter in the first inning and with a fifth inning RBI double became the game’s MVP. Trout is the best player in the land right now, 22 years old, someone who, like Jeter, treats people and the game and its integrity with similar respect. If there comes a day when baseball cool is playing hard, Jeter and Trout will be on its billboards. Remember, when Trout was a high school senior in 2009 and Damon Oppenheimer and his Yankee scouts went to the Trout house for a pre-draft interview, Trout’s mother fed them two Yankee cakes from a local bakery whose owner was a Yankee fan. Like the Trouts, a Jeter fan.
While baseball still suffers from steroid hysteria—despite the strongest testing plan in sports—the celebrations for Mariano Rivera and now Jeter have focused attention on what is good. So have the emergence of Trout and Stanton as the best players in each league.
Which makes it even more important that the Commissioner’s Office respect the rage of the Players Association, do a thorough investigation of the Astros’ alleged manipulation of the drat slot money system, and deal accordingly. The Astros wanted to sign Brady Aiken, the first pick in the country, as well as give $1.5M to lower picks Jacob Nix and Mac Marshall. They originally agreed to a $6.5M deal with Aiken, then claimed Aiken’s physical showed severe elbow ligament damage and told him to take far less than the $6.5M so they could use the cash with other players.
They agreed to a $1.5M deal with Nix, then voided the deal.
Now, teams that had pre-draft medical information do not agree there was a problem, which it turns out is simply the fact that the ligament in the left elbow is slightly different than in the right elbow. If, indeed, the Astros medical report is frivolous, then all the integrity Jeter and Trout bring to the game is smudged by the Aiken and Nix dealings. Major League Baseball sides with ownership 99.8 per cent of the time, but this is a serious issue. If guilty, Aiken should be made a free agent and the Astros should not get the compensatory pick at the top of next year’s draft. And they should also lose all the slot money for the first pick.
Voiding an agreement with an 18-year old kid? Nice message about what the Astros stand for. One AL scouting director always says, “there is no such thing as a clean MRI when it comes to pitchers,” and if the Astros cannot prove that they are trying to smear and intimidate an 18-year old raises ethical questions that cannot be ignored.
Major League Baseball will rightfully ride the Jeter Wave right through to September 29, when he will leave the game far better than when he found it, a year after The Strike. But MLB also cannot ignore what could and may be an unseemly scandal. Brady Aiken may not be a visible symbol of a billion dollar business, but he shares one inalienable fact of life with Jeter.
Aiken, like Jeter, is a human being, deserving of honesty and respect.