What do you do for an encore if you’ve just hit a walk-off game winner during your last at-bat in your home park, surrounded by adoring, cheering fans? If you’re New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, you end your career where you’ve been booed more often than maybe any other baseball player in history.
Jeter’s last at-bat at Yankee Stadium ended in dramatic fashion on Thursday night, when he hit a walk-off single off of the Baltimore Orioles’ Evan Meek in the bottom of the ninth inning to drive in the winning run. It was such a perfect ending, an instantly iconic moment, that many assumed it would be the retiring shortstop’s final moment in the major leagues.
Well, it was Jeter’s last moment as a shortstop, but the game was barely over before Jeter announced he would play in the season’s final series, at Fenway Park as the Yankees’ designated hitter. Jeter sat out the first game against the Boston Red Sox on Friday but returned to the lineup for a 10-4 Yankees loss on Saturday, going 1-2 with an infield single – perhaps the most fitting way to get the final hit of his career.
He is, however, scheduled to make his last appearance as a MLB player on Sunday afternoon, the final day of the regular season, after one more ceremony held in his honor.
Why would Jeter be OK with ending his storied career in Boston, a city filled with fans who have hated and booed him his entire career? A city where selling shirts making fun of him, and his team, can be a viable career option. A city where a good percentage of the sports-watching population will admit Jeter’s Thursday night game-winner was great and everything but will never top Ted Williams when it comes to dramatic moments in a player’s final at-bat at home?
Jeter had an answer on Thursday night, after that last home stand:
You know, out of respect for the [Boston] Red Sox, their fans and the rivalry, I’m going to DH … I hope people can respect my decision for that.
Jeter is saying the right things, which is fitting because maybe his rarest gift in these sports-media saturated times has been his ability to always say the right thing.
He isn’t being entirely frank, however. While he may have decided to play his final final game at Fenway Park, to satisfy the fans in attendance, it’s not Red Sox fans he’s really there to appease. Although plenty of Sox fans have shown up at the ballpark partly to see Jeter’s final games, it’s obvious that there have been more Yankees fans in the Fenway stands than at any other time in recent memory, and many of them have been paid ridiculous prices to see Derek Jeter for the last, or last-ish, time ever.
How much is this about the Red Sox, then? Maybe a little. It would look a tad rude, for instance, if Jeter were to sit out the whole series knowing the Sox were planning his final final retirement ceremony.
Maybe he’s playing more as a service to MLB than the Red Sox or the fans. Both the Sox and Yankees were out of playoff contention heading into the season’s final three games, making this October the first MLB postseason not including one of these two teams since 1993. Without the somewhat media-created drama of “when will be Derek Jeter’s final at-bat?” there would have been absolutely nothing at stake.
Still, it’s hard to doubt Jeter is being sincere when he says his appearance is partly out of respect for the Red Sox/Yankees rivalry. Sunday’s series finale might be as much about the closing chapter in one of the greatest and most well-established rivalries in US sports history as it will be about the end of Jeter’s career.
Believe it or not, it has been a decade since the Yankees and Red Sox last met in the postseason – in the 2004 American League Championship Series. It’s almost startling to realize it’s been that long since the Red Sox beat the Yankees after falling behind 0-3 in the seven game series, still a singular event in playoffs history. It was almost an anticlimax that the Sox went on to beat the St Louis Cardinals in a four-game sweep, to win a first World Series in 86 years.
That of course was a rematch of the 2003 ALCS, when then-Boston manager Grady Little left tiring starting pitcher Pedro Martinez in too long in a winner-take-all Game 7 at Yankee Stadium, allowing New York to tie the game. Light-hitting infielder Aaron Boone hit a home run in the extra innings and, well, New York took all. It was the most devastating home run against the Red Sox since light-hitting infielder Bucky Dent effectively ended a once-promising season with one in 1978. This of course, was the 1970s, when the rivalry was heated enough that it could break out into serious violence. Before that …
Well it would take a rather long book to delve into its entire history, but the Boston/New York rivalry has been going on a long time. The supposed inciting event occurred in 1919, when Boston sold Babe Ruth, perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time, to New York. The Red Sox did not win another World Series until 2004. By that point, the Yankees had won 26.
That 2004 ALCS changed the nature of the rivalry. The coyote had finally captured the roadrunner – what could have possibly topped that? It didn’t help that even as the games between the two teams became longer, duller and less meaningful, the networks kept committing to air as many of them as possible to a national audience, hoping for another epic season like 2003 or 2004, a move which resulted in diminishing returns.
When Jeter makes his final curtain call, the only other player on either team’s roster who was part of that 2004 postseason will be Boston DH David Ortiz, who will soon be facing his own baseball mortality. There is going to be a melancholy air to this final game for Boston fans, which won’t be so much about Jeter’s retirement than the passage of time, a reminder of what this rivalry used to be in the late 1990s and much of the 2000s.
(OK, yes this view of this series leaves out the currently suspended Alex Rodriguez, the goat of that 2004 ALCS who will most likely return to the Yankees next season. Let’s just say that for a variety of reasons there won’t be much of an emotional response, beyond relief, when Rodriguez leaves Major League Baseball.)
So, over the last few days, the snarky jokes about the media lovefest that surrounds Jeter, his overrated and quite often just plain terrible defense and his high-profile dating life have briefly died down. Instead Jeter has been receiving ovations at Fenway, gushing tributes from local media members and, as this writer can attest, song dedications from local college rock stations.
It’s not just about him, it’s about the fact that the sun is setting on a baseball era.
So, yes, Jeter’s walk-off hit was the climax of his season-long retirement tour, the dramatic scene that will cap the inevitable movie version of his baseball life. In the context of his career, his final weekend at Fenway is something of a coda. In the larger picture, because no player is bigger than the game – not even Derek Jeter – Sunday marks the end of a chapter in the Yankees/Red Sox rivalry.
In a press conference before the series began, Jeter acknowledged that if it the season had ended in a road trip to any other city, he probably wouldn’t be playing:
If there’s anywhere to play besides New York, I guess it’s only fitting that it’s here in Boston because of all the games that I’ve played here, the rivalry between the Red Sox and Yankees [stands out]. If you can’t do it in New York, this is the next-best place.
It has been a great rivalry, and it almost certainly will be again, but even Boston fans, deep down, know it won’t be the same without Derek Jeter.
Just don’t expect us to admit it publicly.
