Yankees: Jeter Gets Wish To Own A Team – It’s Time To Say Good Bye

The Yankees or anyone else couldn’t have written a better baseball story for their shortstop of twenty years. And the hits just seem to keep on coming as a new chapter is about to unfold in Florida and another is about to die in New York.

The Yankees will be closing the door on a chapter of their history in a few weeks when Derek Jeter steps on the field at Yankee Stadium to be honored on Mother’s Day. His Number 2 will be retired, and cheers will echo throughout River Avenue and beyond all thru the afternoon.

All of his former teammates will be there and bear hugs will be exchanged. They’ll all be introduced to the assembled crowd, who have willingly taken on the extravagant expense to be present for the game, and each will be welcomed with cheers, and maybe a couple of ovations even when Mariano Rivera and Bernie Williams are introduced.

But after a time, the crowd will silence itself as Jeter steps to the microphone. And Jeter will say all the right things that he learned to say when he was young and malleable. And he’ll turn around and specifically point to “Mr. Torre”, as he fondly called his manager, Joe Torre, to say thank you for guiding him through those early years in the mid-1990’s.

Sorry, But Jeter’s Head  Is In Miami Now

This is brand new territory for Derek Jeter and it has absolutely nothing to do with the New York Yankees anymore.

But the fact is that Derek Jeter’s head will be nearly two-thousand miles away from Yankee Stadium on that day. His mind will be closer to sprawling home in Tampa where his wife and soon to be born child is on the way.

And further south even lies the city of Miami where Jeter is set to begin a chapter in his life that couldn’t be further from the Bronx unless you took a boat to Cuba.

Jeter To Yankees: Please Release Me, Let Me Go

Derek Jeter is done as a New York Yankee. He has moved on, even though the Yankees might wish he has not. The Yankees would, in all likelihood, like to carry this thing on forever, and they just might try to do that. After all, there’s still a monument they haven’t given Jeter.

From Jeter’s perspective, though, if IBM isn’t for sale, you buy Xerox. I get that. And if the Steinbrenners were in a position where they wanted to sell the team, he might have stepped in accomplishing what he has with the Marlins, which is to form a partnership with Jeb Bush to buy the team for a, reportedly, $1.3 billion.

He might have stepped in, but don’t take that as a given. Jeter wore the Yankees Pinstripes for twenty long and grueling seasons. He was the face of the Yankees, their team captain, and he never shied away from that responsibility. But the Yankees way is the hard way and, for some, it has proven to be a deathtrap.

And as I wrote two weeks ago, the weight of this thing called “Yankees Tradition” is becoming a bit much. Jeter carried the weight, and he should be admired for having done so, but we shouldn’t automatically think that he did so willingly.

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The opportunity in Miami is the chance for Jeter to completely be himself. No one knows what that will turn out to be, but a good guess would be that he has no intention of running his team in the mirror image of the Yankees.

Jeter will not be the Principal Owner as Hal Steinbrenner is with the Yankees. That position goes to Jeb Bush based on the proportion of monies contributed to the eventual sale, which by the way will need the approval of MLB before it becomes final.

But the natural assumption is that Jeb Bush realizes he has a baseball man on his team with unparalleled acumen and he’ll let Jeter run the day-to-day operations of the Marlins.

And you have to think that Jeter, who never hid intentions to own a team even when he was playing, has a plan for what he intends to do with the Marlins as an organization. In short, he’s been thinking about an opportunity like this for a long time.

Video Courtesy of Sports Illustrated

He is not going to be the kind of owner who stops in once in awhile, shakes a few hands, gives a pat on the butt of a player or two, and then disappears into his box to comfortably watch the game with his family and a few friends before quietly leaving during the seventh inning stretch to escape the traffic.

That ain’t gonna happen with Jeter.

Yankees Aaron Judge and the Sound of Real Power

Yankees Aaron Judge is different. His swings produce many of the same sounds. But they can signal very different outcomes.

We’ll see what does happen as events unfold with Jeter at the helm. But in the meantime, Yankees fans should begin preparations to say goodbye to Derek Jeter, because Mother’s Day, even though the Yankees didn’t plan it that way,  has a special significance this year.

Because, from that day forward, Derek Jeter will no longer belong to the Yankees. And for many of us, we’ll need to accept the fact that he attended only kindergarten at Yankee Stadium, and that he’s now on to bigger things in his life.

The good news is, though, that Jeter will be tucked away in the National League and we’ll only have to face him and his team in a World Series. And, wouldn’t that be something?