MLB

Betting against Yankees’ Jeter never wise, but Father Time holds all the cards

Derek Jeter

Derek Jeter (AP)

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DETROIT — At first glance, this is what Derek Jeter is surely thinking: You really think it’s going to take me five months to recover from this? Five months? That’s like taunting a gambler with a tempting point spread.

Five months?

Bet the under.

That’s who Jeter is. That’s who he always has been. That is certainly what he’ll be now that he has a tangible challenge to overcome. After all, in the minutes after he broke his left ankle on Saturday, Joe Torre — who knows him better than anyone outside of his immediate family — suggested the doctor and the trainers make it perfectly clear to him that his season was over. No wiggle room. No maybe. No if.

But then you start to think about exactly what Jeter is facing now. Yesterday’s announcement Jeter will have surgery on the ankle Saturday in Charlotte at the hand of Dr. Robert Anderson came with corresponding news: that the recovery, said to be three months at first, is now more likely to be 4-5 months.

“I just think they want to be conservative with it,” Yankees GM Brian Cashman said yesterday before the Yankees went out to save their season in Game 4 of the American League Championship Series against the Tigers. “My understanding is that it’s possible he will be ready earlier, but it is best to at least put out there four, five months as a safer bet.”

Still there is this to consider: his birth certificate.

Jeter is 38 years old. He had one of the remarkable bounce-back years you will ever see given the struggles he endured at the beginning of 2011, and he performed at a higher level than he had in years. So revived did he look all year that the notion of Pete Rose’s all-time hits record became a part of the narrative around Jeter, so much so that Rose himself had to recently weigh in on the subject (he doesn’t think Jeter will do it).

But he is 38. It was already going to be a fascinating thing to see if he could replicate this at age 39, which he’ll turn next year. And this injury makes it that much more of a complicated question. Jeter’s fellow Core Four stalwart, Andy Pettitte, suffered a fractured leg this year and wound up enduring a few setbacks at age 40 that he almost certainly wouldn’t have had to deal with at 30.

Jeter? The time added to his recovery period possibly indicates that the doctors expect there to be some ligament damage as well. Remember all the gym teachers and basketball coaches who would tell you when you’d sprain your ankle that it might’ve been better if you’d broken it? This is why. Bones heal cleanly. Ligaments are trickier.

“It’s a little more difficult to repair ligaments as well as the fracture,” Dr. David Geier, Director of Sports Medicine at the Medical University of South Carolina, told the Post’s Dan Martin yesterday. “And there’s a lot of work afterwards to recover range of motion and balance, especially as you get older. If that’s the case, he’d still be able to come back and play, but the concern would be if he is going to be the same player.”

Jeter’s defensive range has always been an issue, and even as he made his offensive renaissance this year — and even as he still is among the best at his position at making the plays he’s supposed to make — his range remains an issue. The biggest topic, of course, is what the Yankees will do if Jeter’s recovery imperils Opening Day — or more.

Cashman insisted he wasn’t worried enough to seek a more experienced backup than Eduardo Nunez or Jayson Nix just yet. And one of the amazing things about how this postseason has played out for the Yankees is, even missing their captain and signature player, there are probably a half-dozen issues far more pressing for them right now.

Still, the birth certificate doesn’t lie. Maybe this is one more time Jeter can coldly stare at a diagnosis and say: Bet the under. But Pettitte probably did that, too. His birth certificate didn’t fib, either.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com