TAMPA – This was early last week, just after Derek Jeter moved his stuff into his familiar locker by the back wall inside the home clubhouse at George M. Steinbrenner Field. He had taken a few bats to the indoor cage, started stretching a bit before taking his first few hacks, and he felt an odd sensation wash over him.
Was it nostalgia? Jeter isn’t much for nostalgia, not yet.
“When I’m retired, I’ll be retired a long time,” he says, smiling. “There’ll be plenty of time to look back and sort through memories then.”
Was it wistfulness? The Yankees captain doesn’t fall into those waters either, not much, not with a career still in its prime and a life he still says “comes right out of a dream,” not with so many innings still left in his legs.But it was something, and Jeter couldn’t quite shake it. At 34, he is far from an old man but also far from a kid.
Against the Blue Jays today in Dunedin, Fla., Jeter will trot out to shortstop to begin his 14th consecutive season in possession of the shortstop job for the Yankees, the team he grew up rooting for, the team whose cap he’ll eventually wear for eternity in Cooperstown.
In the cage that day, it finally dawned on him. The Yankees’ first spring in Tampa was 1996, and Jeter was here. He had been to a couple of big league camps before, in 1993 and ’94, when the Yankees were still based in Fort Lauderdale, but his arrival coincided with the ballyard formerly known as Legends Field, which also coincided with the Yankees’ re-emergence as the sport’s dominant power.
“Maybe that’s why it seems like I’ve been here forever,” he says. “Sometimes it feels like 15 years, and sometimes it feels like 15 minutes, and I think in a lot of ways both feelings are accurate. I don’t feel old, but I’ve been here for a lot of years already. How many swings have I taken in that same cage? Thousands?”
He shakes his head, smiles.
“But I’m not going anywhere,” he says. “I won’t be going away anytime soon.”
The years are relentless on baseball, on our memories, on the game’s icons. Fifteen minutes ago, Jeter was a rookie, impressing the hell out of his new teammates, especially the fireplug catcher acquired for that ’96 season. Joe Girardi was only 31 years old that year, in the middle of his playing career. Somehow he is 44 now, already in his third year as a manager.
“He was such a relaxed kid,” Girardi says, recalling the Jeter of ’96, the one who took the Yankees and the city by storm. “Everything he did was so natural, and he’s still the same person, the same player in a lot of ways, a leader, same as he’s been his whole life.”
A generation of baseball-playing kids in New York has grown up emulating Jeter’s batting stance, his throwing motion, the way he tosses his bat after making contact, the way he runs the bases. It’s something Jeter himself has noticed, plenty, driving around, seeing kids with those familiar idiosyncrasies. And it’s something that flatters him, amazes him and still fills him with wonder.
“I was like that, growing up, in my grandmother’s backyard in New Jersey,” Jeter says. “I swung the bat just like Dave Winfield in those days.”
Just like he grew up, became a big leaguer and a part of the Yankees pantheon, there are thousands of kids who have taken their Jeter swings through Little League, through high school ball, Legion ball and college ball, maybe beyond.
“And some of those kids,” Jeter is told, “are retired now, too.”
“Easy, now,” he says, shaking his head.
But he knows: Even he isn’t immune from the relentless march of time, from the way years blend so quickly together, the way decades seem to evaporate, the way the calendar clicks ever forward. You wake up one day and you’re a 20-year-old kid who people still need a program to identify. Wake up the next day, you’re the most famous face in a city stuffed with them.
Wake up the day after that.
“We’ll worry about that day,” Jeter says, “when it comes.”