Bomber Bites With Jumping Joe–The Jeter Era Finally Ends

Ever since Derek Jeter announced that he would be retiring after this season in March, today has been circled on the calendars of Yankee fans everywhere.  Today is the final home game for the Yankee Captain.  Rain is in the forecast for tonight’s game, but MLB will make every effort to get tonight’s game in, so fans should be prepared for a lengthy rain delay.  But wouldn’t a rain out with no makeup be the ultimate anticlimactic finish to the Jeter retirement saga?  Jeter has had a down season, on a team that was eliminated from the playoffs yesterday for the second year in a row.  The last time the Yankees missed the postseason two years in a row, the Blue Jays were winning back-to-back World Series titles and George H. W. Bush was handing off the Presidency to Bill Clinton.

Derek Jeter’s career has never been one that really glorified the individual, the team always came first.  After all, it was team success that Jeter enjoyed most of all in his early formative baseball years.  He played in the postseason in 17 of his 20 major league seasons.  He played in 17 American League Division Series, 9 American League Championship Series, and 7 World Series.  He has played in more playoff games and had more postseason hits than any man in the history of baseball.  Yet his career will end in a meaningless regular season game against Boston, between two non-playoff teams, in a game in which he will likely not even participate.  Today is likely the last time Derek Jeter plays a professional baseball game.

Mandatory Credit: Chad R. MacDonald.

Derek Jeter is to millennials what Mickey Mantle was to the Baby Bombers and Joe DiMaggio was to the Greatest Generation.  Millions of Americans will have a piece of their childhood fade away with Jeter’s retirement.  I am also included in that category.  I was just a wide eyed eleven-year-old boy when Jeter broke into the majors in 1995.  I confess I hated Derek Jeter in Junior High because all the girls loved him.  Yet here I stand 20 years later, a 30-year-old man with a wife and son, and there is no doubt that childhood is long past.

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But nonetheless, one can still feel a certain finality in the last great sports hero of my childhood retiring.  Across all sports, my favorite athletic heroes have long since left the game, Don Mattingly, John Starks, Patrick Ewing, Charles Oakley, Mark Messier, Adam Graves, Brian Leetch, Curtis Martin, Mariano Rivera, David Cone, Tino Martinez, Paul O’Neill, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, Mike Mussina, Bernie Williams and many others.  Yet as long as one remains, one can still clearly see the hope and youth that sports illustrates in America.

However, that hope is not perpetually extinguished.  The torch is simply passed to the next generation.  Baseball is and always will be the game of fathers and sons.  The same way that my grandfather passed his childhood icon of Mickey Mantle on to my father, he passed on the likes of Thurman Munson and Reggie Jackson on to me.  I loved Mattingly, but only saw the tail end of his career before Jeter took over.  My son has seen the final season of Jeter and will have his own heroes in a few years, which he will watch prosper in pinstripes.  I have no idea who they will be.  They may be better or worse than Jeter, Mantle, DiMaggio, Mattingly or Jackson.  But they will be his.  And once again the eternal torch of baseball passes from father to son.