What We Forgot About Derek Jeter

This whole Derek Jeter thing is complicated. He's retiring this year after a career unlike any other: he was immediately successful and outrageously and unjustifiably canonized, only to see a slow and increasingly vocal backlash mount against him. Jeter did many things as well as—or as badly as—many other players in less flooded markets, and for it he was made the face of Major League Baseball. But while accepting universal praise for unquantifiable things like his team-first leadership abilities, he sabotaged the best player on his team, and the team itself, out of pettiness and pride. I hated him for a long time for that.

But I didn't always hate him, and I don't hate him now. Jeter did a lot of crazy shit in big games and played a major role in the formative years of many baseball fans. That he's not as good as the descendants of Grantland Rice made him out to be doesn't change anything. The Flip was one of the most unexpected plays anybody has ever seen in a baseball game. But that play, like Jeter, became a symbol for something more.

Baseball has this bizarre need to catalogue everything, and label it as historical or especially important. That play wasn't just a wonderful play to preserve a 1-0 lead in the seventh inning of a playoff game; it was immediately bronzed, another line already being written onto Jeter's Cooperstown plaque. Even a home run due to fan interference is now laughed off as another whimsical notch, instead of a blown call and lucky break; the kind of weird you-can't-predict-baseball play that happens all the time. Instead, the Ghosts of Yankee Stadium rose and Jeets was leading the seance or whatever. This is what happens when a man becomes a myth.

Yankees fans enjoyed this angle, no doubt, and who could blame us? Wouldn't you love to see your favorite player beloved for doing cool shit as your favorite team won World Series after World Series? And to not only see it happen, but to be told it was because of something special, something other players in other cities were incapable of? Of course you would buy into that, it's part of the reason some people hate Jeter and the Yankees. He was granted mystical powers while other, better players went unappreciated or just plain ignored.

That Jeter myth making was not only embarrassing, but destructive, too. For a whole generation of sports writers who grew up watching and reading about the majesty of Joltin' Joe, he became their Captain Clutch. Jeter stopped being a baseball player you grew up watching and became a Got Rings? shirt. The things he did lost real meaning in the face of what they meant in the grand scheme.

People are unwilling, for some reason, to accept that Jeter was only a baseball player. Jeter didn't just make the flip play, there had to be something intrinsically better about Derek Jeter that allowed him to make that play, separating him from the other guy who wouldn't have had the testicular fortitude to pull it off. If you think about this for even one second, you realize it's as primitive as explaining thunder by imagining a bearded guy in white robes throwing lightning bolts from the clouds. It's as if the only way to explain something is to make it inexplicable.

I'm a Yankees fan and this drives me nuts. It made it impossible to disagree with the obvious and steady backlash as slap doubles morphed into rolled-over grounders, and the intangibles of the narrative fell apart to reveal just another 40-year-old shortstop. But that's the great con of how we consume sports: there is no grand scheme. There's not even a scheme, there's just the games and the plays that comprise them.

Pretending that there is some higher meaning can really screw up your expectations, too. I was angry at Derek Jeter because he didn't live up to his myth. I hated that The Captain wouldn't take some of the heat off A-Rod. Or that A-Rod was an obviously better player but was the postseason goat because he wasn't there in '96, while Jeter remained beyond reproach. I hated having to admit that, yes, Derek Jeter was vastly overrated and I'm sorry you had to hear about Mr. November all the time, Kansas City. What stupid reasons to start resenting a baseball player. And it's sort of funny—sad-funny, not ha-ha funny—that the guy who spent his entire career being praised as an all-time great is now going out to a chorus of "over-rated."

The Jeter Story is the best case against trying to fit random baseball games into sweeping narratives. He's retiring after this season and it's not sad because he was an immortal figure in a phony construct of Sports History. It's sad because he was once a very good baseball player and he won't ever be that again, and we won't ever get the chance to watch him be that. Sometimes, things just are and we don't need a reason above and beyond their actual happening to make them great or worth appreciating. Sometimes, a very good closer blows a save and a guy gets the same exact hit he's always gotten, and there are runners in scoring position, and it just so happens to be in his final at-bat at Yankee Stadium. That's worth appreciating, but it's not worth more than that.