Derek Jeter is well into his ninth year of retirement. Derek Jeter is 49 years old. Derek Jeter has been a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame for three years. Every few years we have been reminded — those of us lucky enough to have seen his first game on May 29, 1995, and his last one on Sept. 28, 2014 — of something Jeter’s old manager, Joe Torre, once said.
“Age,” Torre said, “is undefeated.”
So it isn’t necessarily jarring to hear, officially announced Monday, that Jeter will be attending his first Old-Timers’ Day on Sept. 9 at Yankee Stadium. That is a rite of passage, after all, for all great Yankees, and it is a wistful reminder that the man who inspired the first such gathering of past greats — Lou Gehrig — never himself got to attend one, once they became an official part of the Yankee calendar beginning in 1947.
Still: Derek Jeter, old-timer?
It takes some getting used to.
“The problem is, the first time somebody calls you an old-timer your first instinct is to punch them in the face,” Mickey Mantle mused in 1974, as he enjoyed his fifth Old-Timers’ Day, the first one in the Yankees’ temporary quarters at Shea Stadium. “But then you go out on the field and you huff and puff and afterward you’re sore all over, and you recognize pretty quickly: the term applies.”
And Mantle had actually had some success in those Old-Timers’ games. A year earlier, he’d delighted one of the last huge crowds at the old Yankee Stadium by taking his old pal and running partner Whitey Ford deep, and as he rounded the bases 46,293 nostalgia-fueled witnesses let out the last great thunderous roar in the doomed baseball basilica.
Joe DiMaggio was there that day. DiMaggio attended his first Old Timers’ Day in 1952, less than a year after he retired, and he came to each one from then until 1998, missing only in 1988 because he was recovering from an operation. And at first, he played in the games that used to be the highlight of the day. In 1965 he hit a grand slam. In 1962 he clobbered a pitch to the 461 sign in left-center and legged out a home run.
Afterward, he joked: “Maybe that’s a good one to retire on for a second time.”
He kept playing for a while but as each year passed DiMaggio would confide in friends that he was less and less comfortable having his 45- and 50- and 55-year-old self try to play a game that he’d once played so masterfully in his 20s and 30s. In 1972 he told Dick Schaap: “I hate that this is the way people might remember me.”
He stopped playing soon thereafter. And by the 1980s, when a photographer took a picture of him changing into his No. 5 jersey and DiMaggio realized — maybe for the first time — what a 70-year-old man in a baseball uniform looks like, he swapped his uniform for a suit and a double-handed wave, letting the scoreboard highlights of his 1941 self satisfy the masses.
Jeter will not have to face such a dilemma, because for the second straight year the Yankees have chosen to do away with the game. That’s irked a segment of fans, and some of the lesser participants, because it really was one of the fun hours or so of every summer. In truth, though, most of those games devolve into equal parts slapstick and an eternal hope that nobody sprains, strains or snaps anything.
That, ultimately, is what DiMaggio could no longer tolerate.
And you suspect that Jeter — who his entire career drew comparisons with DiMaggio for his demeanor, his makeup, his transcendent celebrity status — would have a hard time yukking it up as David Cone, the primary Good Sport of so many recent Old-Timers’ Games, served up a room-service 65 mph BP fastball.
It’s good that Jeter will be there, good that he will share a fine afternoon of retrospective banter and fellowship with his fellow members of the 125-win ’98 Yankees, good that if nothing else, Yankees fans who’ve endured this difficult summer will have one day when they can remember why they fell in love with the team in the first place, will see and salute Jeter — the man who unlocked the inner baseball fan inside so many of them.
And better that their last memory of him will be the hits that capped off his career as a Yankee in 2014, the game-winner at home against the Orioles, the infield single in his last at bat at Fenway Park a few days later. That’s as it should be. That’s the way No. 5 would’ve wanted it, so you have to believe No. 2 is on board, too.
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