The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Let’s get this show on the road

Derek Jeter: Mr. 3000 himself. Also Mr. 3001, 3002, and 3003. Had a good day. And you knew it would happen: all the assholes are coming out of the woodwork, dusting off their absurd hagiographies, and shitting them all over the internet. Gotta start somewhere, so it may as well be my new best friend Les Carpenter!

A few years back, maybe five or six as Derek Jeter remembers, the shortstop sat in a spring training clubhouse examining a New York Yankees media guide with a few teammates. As they scrolled through the records section they noticed something startling: Never in the great, glorious history of the franchise had there been a player who had 3,000 hits as a Yankee.

Whoa, no fooling? You’ve done it again, Les: I absolutely had not heard this amazing fact ever in my life! Especially I have not heard it sixteen or seventeen times every day for the last three months.

Not Babe Ruth. Not Lou Gehrig. Not Joe DiMaggio.

Not Paul O’Neill. Not Scott Brosius. Not Lou Piniella.

And right there Jeter had to understand the legacy he could own on a franchise loaded with legends, several of whom were considered better players than he.

Pff. Can you believe it? Some people consider these players better than Derek Jeter! The audacity! Who is this Babe Ruth asshole to think he’s better than the Intangible Captain McGee?

The Yankees might have a garden of monuments dedicated to home run champions and triple crown winners, but none had 3,000 Yankee hits.

Chokers. Head-cases.

That distinction alone would belong to Jeter as long as he stayed healthy.

Actually, he didn’t stay healthy and he got it anyhow. But hey.

Of course he would never admit to such a realization. That wouldn’t be Jeter, forever careful to avoid seeming presumptuous or boastful in public. When he was asked about that spring day on Thursday afternoon he shook his head and quickly looked down.

(at his notes)

"I try to focus on the present," he said, just hours before getting his 2,998th hit Thursday night in a 5-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays. "I don’t like to think about the future. You may have an opportunity to play long enough but you don’t look too far ahead."

If you were hitting .257 / .321 / .329 (!), you wouldn’t think about the future either.

It was such a Jeter thing to say, offering a tiny window into his life – albeit with a humorous un-Jeter like stumble as he tried vainly to come up with the words "media guide," calling it a "little Yankee pamphlet" – then quickly shutting off the glimpse inside.

No, it’s a totally generic athlete quote. The sort of shit they say when they don’t want to say anything.

"That’s why you guys in the media always hated him," said Don Zimmer, a special assistant for the Rays who sat beside Joe Torre as the Yankees bench coach for the first eight full seasons of Jeter’s career.

What

I mean… am I reading this right? Did Don Zimmer — fucking Don Zimmer — just say that the media hates — and has always hated — Derek fucking Sanderson fucking Jeter? Am I still reading the same article? We’re talking about Derek Jeter and how much the media hates him? Great.

Like Jeter, Zimmer went years without knowing a Yankee player hadn’t gotten 3,000 hits until someone told him a couple of years ago.

And subsequently he heard it day-in and day-out for the rest of his life just like I have, yeah?

And as it did for Jeter and the players gathered on that spring day a few years ago, the fact shocked Zimmer. Surely on the franchise of Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle and Don Mattingly, there had been someone with 3,000 hits.

The franchise of Bubba Crosby, Joe Pepitone, and Don Mat–

Wait, what? Did you say Don Mattingly? Like, for-reals? ‘Cause I was going to say Don Mattingly as a joke, like making fun of goofball names you might say. You realise that Donnie Baseball retired at 34, right? Played 14 seasons? He only had 7003 AB — sucker would have had to hit .428 for his career to have 3000 hits.

But the closest one was Gehrig, who was the franchise leader with 2,721 for seven decades until Jeter passed him two years ago.

Oh, did that happen? I don’t think I heard about it.

A 3,000th hit is a milestone. But given the long lists of things dominated by the Yankees, including 27 World Series titles, Jeter becoming the only Yankee with 3,000 hits is indeed a record of sorts.

Uh, yes, it is a record "of sorts." If you’re interested in the specific "sort" of record it is, it is the record for most hits. Do you see?

There really seems little chance anyone else will accomplish this, certainly not in the next 1½ decades, which is what it has taken Jeter to get to this point, pecking away with nearly 200 hits a season. The only player on the roster with a chance is second baseman Robinson Cano, but Cano is already 28 and it’s hard to believe he could keep a steady pace of 200 hits deep into his 30s.

If Robinson Cano got 200 hits/year for the next fifteen years, he’d be at 4274 hits and would be the all-time hits leader by 18. So, no, he’s probably not going to do that. Getting to 3000 will be way easier. Let’s check:

Currently, Cano has 1174 hits. He’s on pace this year for just about bang-on 200, so let’s just say he gets it to make the math easier. So that means he finishes the year with 1275. To reach 300, he need 1725 more hits. If we assume he plays for just ten more years and then calls it quits, he’ll need to average 172.5 hits/year to reach 3000. Cano’s 162-game average is 194. Barring catastrophic injury or sudden inexplicable collapse, he’ll get 3000 hits, and he’ll get them at just about exactly the same age Jeter did.

Since the Yankees feel they must always produce a contender, they never go through the kind of youth movement other franchises do.

"Never?" You mean including 1996, when they brought Derek Jeter up?

It’s hard to imagine someone currently in the system rising to the same lifetime Yankee star status as Jeter.

Robinson Cano’s been doing okay for himself. Remember him? You seemed to know who he was a few paragraphs ago. He’s the best second baseman in baseball. I don’t think the Yankees consider him trade bait particularly.

In fact, were it not for a suspension to Yankees owner George Steinbrenner in the early 1990s followed by a commitment to a core of young players, Jeter might never have had a shot with the Yankees, something Jeter alluded to Thursday.

George Steinbrenner is dead. Robinson Cano plays second base for the Yankees every single day. This is not a weird phenomenon requiring an alignment of stars and a blessing from an elfin priestess.

We may never see another group of players like Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera in New York again.

Or maybe we will. Who can say? Of the Cano / Joba / Hughes / Wang group that came up not long ago, three of them seem to have stuck, yeah?

That’s what will make Jeter’s 3,000th hit so remarkable. Who would have imagined a player sticking around long enough to accomplish this in the Steinbrenner era. No one will probably have the opportunity to be Derek Jeter again.

Jorge Posada and Mariano Rivera are still on the team. Bernie Williams stuck around until he literally could not play baseball anymore. Robbie Cano’s going noplace in a hurry. Really, it looks like Yankee lifers aren’t more rare than lifers on any other team; if anything, it kind of seems like they’re more common. I mean, the Yankees were so attached to Williams and Posada that they kept paying them and kept putting them out there on the field long after they were totally cooked. Jeter’s probably headed that way himself.

The long line of Yankee lifetime legends might well end with him.

Sure. It might. But I doubt it!

How fitting he should be the one to get more hits than any of them.

… Or at least until 2023, when Robbie Cano passes him.


July 9th, 2011 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

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