From the perspective of the New York Yankees’ marketing department, it is lucky that Alex Rodriguez spent the final season of teammate Derek Jeter’s career suspended for his role in a steroid scandal. Though it was a bad year on the field for Jeter and a mediocre one for the team, the prohibition of A-Rod ensured that the press treated the end of Jeter’s career as a pure celebration, and not as the final stage of a grim transition from an era of excellence–when, in the late 1990s and 2000, the Yankees won four championships in five seasons–to one of slow decline. Since the Yankees acquired Rodriguez from the Texas Rangers in 2004, they have won the World Series only once.
Jeter and Rodriguez have been compared for their whole careers for obvious reasons: They are superstars of about the same age who were both promoted to the Major Leagues in the mid-1990s, and who both originally played shortstop. Yet the ways their careers have been portrayed could not be more different. Though, upon joining the Yankees, A-Rod moved to third-base so that Jeter could stay at short, it is Jeter who has always been perceived as the consummate team player. And though A-Rod’s statistics always outshone Jeter’s, it is Jeter who has the reputation for producing when it mattered most. And, most importantly, before A-Rod’s arrival in New York, the Yankees experienced one of the most successful stretches by a sports team in the modern era.
Jeter, who played for the Yankees for 20 years, was not only the last player left from those teams, he was also their star and chief representative: a player of exceptionally good, but not superstar talent who avoided trouble off the field. A-Rod’s absence this season may have inhibited sportswriters from reflecting on Jeter’s symbolic place in that glorious era, for the contrast between it and A-Rod’s ignominious place in Yankee mythology more completely reveals why Jeter mattered so much to Yankee fans.
Instead, in the context of criticizing or praising Jeter, the media have noted many individual points of contrast between the two players. On Tuesday, Keith Olbermann supported his case that “Derek Jeter is not the greatest person in human history” with an array of statistics: Jeter trails a number of Yankees, including A-Rod, in yearly Wins Above Replacement. By the same token, an article on Gawker, entitled “Derek Jeter Was OK,” reminded readers that, when all three were healthy, Jeter’s stats were the third-best of the three great shortstops of his generation, the other two being Nomar Garciaparra of the Red Sox and, of course, A-Rod.
Furthermore, where A-Rod was constantly mired in scandal, Jeter deftly navigated the fearsome New York media. As a result, his public persona impressed many of his admirers at least as much as his game. There is a certain self-congratulatory (or perhaps self-hating) circularity to media praise of Jeter for successfully evading their usual ruthlessness. As Chris Smith wrote in a September 21 profile in New York magazine:
[D]espite the regular appearances at charity events and a social life that seems to have included dating three-quarters of the Maxim Hot 100, [Jeter has] always felt just out of reach, available for all to adore but somehow still protected by an impenetrable, cannily constructed bubble of privacy.
A Sports Illustrated retrospective on Jeter’s career compliments him for having “rarely said anything particularly revealing” when talking to reporters. On Saturday, a story in The New York Times noted that, unlike A-Rod, Jeter was never caught in a strip club with a “former exotic dancer” or “spotted at a swingers club in Dallas.” The piece further lauded Jeter for “catching every controversial question thrown to him and tossing it aside as if it were a scuffed ball unsuitable for play.” It’s as if journalists are looking on in awe, wondering how a person who has dated the likes of Mariah Carey and Scarlett Johansson managed to slip by them unscathed.
An additional common point of comparison between Jeter and A-Rod–clutch hitting–comes slightly closer to illustrating the crux of Jeter’s legend. As his walk-off hit in his last game at Yankee Stadium would suggest, Jeter has always seemed to peak when the pressure is greatest. Almost every writer to reflect positively on his career has recalled two moments from the 2001 playoffs, which Yankee fans refer to in shorthand, as “The Flip” and the “Mr. November” home run. Sabermetric statistics conclusively debunk the widely held belief that Jeter was an unprecedentedly extraordinary hitter in high-stakes scenarios; he was, as FiveThirtyEight’s Neil Paine explains, approximately as good in “clutch situations” as he was in others (which was still terrific). But if the headlines on ABC and MLB.com after Jeter’s final home game were any indication, the legend of “Captain Clutch” will endure.
Jeter’s place on the Yankee dynasty teams with which he won his first four championships–in 1996, ’98, ’99, and 2000–is primarily responsible for this legend. Those Yankee teams were characterized by very good, but (other than Jeter and Mariano Rivera, the closer) not historically great players. Occasionally spectacular, reliably stellar players like Bernie Williams, Tino Martinez, Paul O’Neill, Jorge Posada, Scott Brosius, Andy Pettitte, and David Cone comprised the meat of the roster. The scandalous and the controversial, embodied by the fat metal-head David Wells and the raging steroid-abuser Roger Clemens, were not absent, but they were the exceptions.
Both in terms of his personality and his game, Jeter was a perfect emblem for this group. Because he kept his private life private, never publicly tripping over his penis, he didn’t create off-field drama that risked distracting from the team. While he had some remarkable statistical seasons, there were always players, including at the shortstop position, like A-Rod, Garciaparra, and, later, Oakland’s Miguel Tejada, whose numbers dwarfed his. Thus, Yankee fans revere Jeter for precisely the reason A-Rod famously criticized him in 2001: He was not so much an anchor of the Yankee lineup as a cog among cogs.
By the time A-Rod joined the Yankees in 2004, things had changed. He was the latest and biggest superstar on a team stocked with them. A-Rod, meanwhile, was entering the fourth year of a record 10-year contract worth $252 million. The Yankees’ league-leading payroll, which had been just under $93 million in 2000, had ballooned to more than $184 million by 2004. But the Yankees hadn’t won the World Series in three years. To their spoiled faithful, that was an eternity. (They’d have to wait five more years for satisfaction.)
In the 2004 American League Championship Series, the Yankees became the first team in baseball history to blow a 3-0 playoff series lead. A-Rod provided the iconic moment of humiliation, illegally smacking the ball out of Boston pitcher Bronson Arroyo’s hand in a play that would go down in infamy as “The Slap.”
Jeter was on that team too, but Yankee fans did not dream of attributing the loss to him. Jeter is, and always will be, a symbol of a bygone era of unrelenting excellence and team cohesion, when anything less than a World Series victory was a disappointment. Despite his magnificence during the team’s 2009 championship run, A-Rod is, and always will be, a symbol of that era’s demise.
Now, Jeter is gone and, as media reports this week reminded us, A-Rod is coming back. The illusion of innocence, temporarily regained, is fading fast.
Christopher Massie is a CJR contributing editor.