BOSTON — One of the great chestnuts of recent Yankees lore goes something like this: In Don Mattingly’s final spring training with the club, still the reigning captain, he and Derek Jeter were on a back lot at Fort Lauderdale Stadium when the day’s workout came to an end. Jeter started walking back to the clubhouse. Mattingly sidled up next to him.
“Let’s jog it back,” Mattingly said. “You never know who’s watching.”
Together they double-stepped it back to the clubhouse, and into Yankees legend, the once and future captains side by side, stride by stride …
(Fast-forward a year or two from now, spring training at Jupiter’s Roger Dean Stadium, a back lot, end of practice, Marlins manager Don Mattingly is picking up some batting-practice baseballs and thinking about taking the long, easy walk back to the clubhouse, maybe hopping in a golf cart, until he hears the boss’ voice …
“Hey Donnie, jog it back,” Derek Jeter yells, channeling another old Boss the two men used to have in common. “I’M watching …”)
OK, OK, maybe that won’t happen quite that way. But it sure looks like it could happen, especially since it appears Jeter is going to be part of the ownership group — led by Jeb Bush — that is going to finally, mercifully, rid baseball of the carnival barker known as Jeffrey Loria.
Jeter had talked about owning a baseball team for years when he was actually playing baseball, and it made sense because that was one of the few ways you could ever actually imagine Jeter remaining involved in the game. As opposed to, say, his frenemy Alex Rodriguez — who loves baseball so much, it would surprise exactly nobody if he admitted he was presently involved in five different fantasy leagues — Jeter never made any pretense about the game owning his heart or all that much of his attention span off the field.
“I like playing, buddy,” he said one time, when he was asked if he had seen a particularly interesting West Coast game. “I don’t like watching.”
So yes: Derek Jeter, owner? It makes sense.
“For one thing,” CC Sabathia, pragmatist, said Tuesday, “he’s old.”
Even if Derek Jeter, owner of the Miami Marlins, sounds about as improbable as, say, Billy Joel, hip-hop composer?
“The Yankees weren’t available, far as I know,” Brett Gardner said.
“The Yankees weren’t coming up for sale anytime soon,” Joe Girardi said.
If the thought of Jeter trading in pinstripes for neon orange and teal is getting you down, remember: Joe DiMaggio spent a few years wearing the garish green and gold of the Athletics when they first moved to Oakland, across the bay from DiMaggio’s beloved San Francisco. Yogi Berra not only wore a Mets uniform for parts of 11 seasons, he was an Astros coach for a couple of years, too, slapping his No. 8 on the back of Houston’s old acid-trip uniforms of the 1980s.
Hey, Billy Martin — whose headstone reads, “I may not have been the greatest Yankee to put on a uniform, but I was the proudest” — also wore the uniforms of the Athletics (both in Kansas City and Oakland), Indians, Reds, Braves, Twins, Tigers and Rangers in between stints proudly wearing No. 1.So, no: Nobody is ever going to confuse where Jeter hung his hat and left his heart as a ballplayer — at least nobody with any common sense — which will all be climaxed when the Yankees retire No. 2 on Mother’s Day in a few weeks. It’s just time for him to do something he always wanted to do. It’s time to be a boss.
(Of course, he already IS a boss, the editor of the Players’ Tribune, and you can imagine him raging Tuesday in his suspenders and his bow tie and in his best Ben Bradlee/Jason Robards voice when he saw that Bloomberg’s Scott Soshnick had broken the news: “HOW DID WE GET BEAT ON THIS STORY?!?!?” It had to be a tough day for Matt Harvey, the Trib’s New York bureau chief …)
“This is something he wanted to do,” Sabathia said. “I think he’ll be good at it.”
Is owning a club something Sabathia has thought about, too?
“I’m too lazy,” CC said, laughing. “I like to just hang out and watch sports.”
There is nothing Jeter liked less than that, actually — just hanging out, just watching sports — and not even the people who hate him most, here in Boston, would ever dare call him “lazy,” which would be the worst of all the things they ever had called him.
No, this was a good day. Good for him, good for the Marlins. Good for baseball. He already had spent too much time away. It’s time for him to jog it back.