JUST STRANDING AROUND:Derek Jeter (left) and Alex Rodriguez watch from the dugout on a night the Yankees left 15 runners on base in their 4-3, 11-inning loss to the Royals. (N.Y. Post: Charles Wenzelberg)
They sell history relent lessly, on their telecasts, on their broadcasts, on their video scoreboard. And yet, if it’s history you want from the Yankees, you’ll find all you need at shortstop.
And at the top of the order.
For an athlete who has made it his business to be as vanilla as possible, Derek Jeter has evolved into a polarizing figure. For a ballplayer whose aura is independent of statistical achievement, Jeter’s career is now as much defined by numbers as anyone’s in the majors.
And in an era in which it is almost universally about what an individual has done for us lately because it is just too darn expensive to buy tickets to a game and then escape into sentiment (any individual, any game, any sport), Jeter quite clearly has not done enough to escape being put under the microscope like any garden-variety particulate.
He is evaluated by the day, evaluated by the at-bat, and evaluated with such urgency — wait, he’s stepping forward; wait, he’s tapping his foot in the box; wait, he’s doing the hokey-pokey! — that you often get the impression that the mighty Yankees cannot survive even another week or two with the 36-year-old captain leading off.
That’s how you would feel if you evaluated Jeter off last night’s 0-for-6, during which he left six runners on and failed to get down an eighth-inning bunt to move Brett Gardner into scoring position with what would have been the winning run in the Yankees’ eventual 4-3, 11-inning defeat to the Royals.
But the fourth 0-for-6 of Jeter’s career (and first since 1997) followed a seven-game stretch in which he had provided a 13-for-32 ray of light that included a couple of homers and an authoritative double to elevate his average to .283 after a month’s worth of groundballs became a drumbeat of doom.
Fact is manager Joe Girardi isn’t rushing to judgment by distilling 16 Jeter big-league seasons into snapshots before the middle of May. Fact is the manager isn’t going to rush to judgment at all.
“I think you just let the season play out,” Girardi said before the defeat in which the Yankees stranded 15 runners. “I don’t think you evaluate after 40 at-bats, 50 at-bats or 100 at-bats. You want to see a guy in the minor leagues get 1,500 at-bats before you start to evaluate him, so [with Jeter], you let the season play out.
“Derek had a good September, an OK April and his May has been outstanding. Which guy you’re going to get all year, none of us truly knows.
“But starting with Detroit, he has looked like the Derek we’re accustomed to seeing.”
Lost in a maze of mathematics that defines Jeter as a black hole as a leadoff man, there is the city’s most iconic baseball player since Mantle being bum-rushed to the bottom of the order.
Get this: In 1951, when Joe DiMaggio hobbled through a farewell season in which he batted .263 with 12 homers and 71 RBI, the Clipper batted cleanup in 108 of the 113 games he started, and fifth in the other five. Somehow the Yankees survived without flipping DiMaggio in the order with Jerry Coleman.
Back then, though, there was still time to smell the coffee.
It’s true. You don’t win games on credit any more than you claim a lineup spot that way. But there is history to be honored here beyond the sort the Yankees try to sell you — the operative word being, sell — from the moment you walk into the Stadium until the moment you depart.
And with prices as they are, it’s not unreasonable for fans to worry about Jeter’s place in and impact on the order as much as they do about whether their porterhouse was cooked to perfection in the outfield steakhouse. It’s about now.
But now does not exist in a vacuum and Jeter, 38 hits shy of a career 3,000, is not an exhibit in a museum. If he represents history, it is history in the making.
Sometimes, it’s worth remembering that.
Always, it’s worth remembering that.
Even when history goes 0-for-6.