They were uncomfortable co-conspirators with history, both of them, one the iconic face of the dynastic Yankees of recent vintage, the other a man whose career is only starting to be recognized as one of the great baseball runs of all time, any position, any era.
“I’m not that comfortable with all this attention, I’ll be very honest about that,” Derek Jeter said on the Fourth of July, less than a week before he would become the first career Yankee to join the 3,000-hit club.
“It isn’t about me,” Mariano Rivera said on Labor Day, about a week and half before he would collect career save No. 602, surpassing Trevor Hoffman as the career leader in that category. “It’s never been about me, not once, not ever.”
From the time Jeter was a kid, assembling four championships in his first five years (and coming achingly close to five out of six), he made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t nearly as interested in 3,000 hits, or a lifetime .300 average, or a mantel full of MVP trophies, or a shelf stuffed with Gold Gloves, as he was in one record that obsessed him as soon as he learned of its existence.
“The only record I care about,” he said in 2000, “is Yogi’s.”
That would be Yogi Berra, who played on 10 World Series champions, the most of any man in history, a record that was believed to be as unassailable as Cy Young’s 511 wins or Ty Cobb’s lifetime .366 batting average but on the day Jeter stated it as a goal — at age 25 — suddenly seemed far less fanciful.
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Jeter’s pace would slow down considerably, and while he did get halfway to Yogi two years ago, it’ll take a stunning late-career push to get there.
Still … you can’t get to 10 until you get to six first. And six championships has a nice ring to it as well. Six is the total Michael Jordan amassed. Six is the number Kobe Bryant craves. Mark Messier was a part of six Stanley Cup champions. Jack Nicklaus won six Masters.
Six is the number Jeter and Rivera will be stalking across the next few weeks, as they try to collect the 11 wins that’ll make that possible.
After a year of celebration, when they took their rightful places alongside the greats of the game with their own individual achievements, Jeter, Rivera, and their 23 teammates now get after an even greater and grander number, the one Joe Girardi defiantly slaps on his back so the world will make no mistake what the baseline standard is around here.
Twenty-eight.
“I think Derek and I know how fortunate we have been to take part in so many great seasons, play on so many great teams,” Rivera said on the night the Yankees wrapped up the AL East, the 12th time the two of them have finished in first place across a full 162 games since 1996. “And we also appreciate every time we have a chance to win a championship.”
“It’s the only thing that matters,” Jeter said a few days later, before slowing his syntax for extra emphasis: “The only thing that matters.”
It has become a common part of the job description for new Yankees, the notion that anything short of a championship is considered a failed season, and once in a while it’s right to remember how much Jeter and Rivera have had to do with that. When the two of them showed up for keeps in 1996 — joined a year later, for good, by Jorge Posada — the Yankees were selling lots of history and tortured tributes to tradition.
But the fact is, they’d become just another team over the previous 18 years.
At the dawn of ‘96, Yankees fans spent a lot more time talking about yesterday’s Yankees than today’s, because yesterday was where most of the glory and all of the excellence resided. That changed in 1996. You can credit a lot of things for that, but it has to start with this: Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera began answering destiny’s call that year, and they’ve each had hotline connections ever since, even if they’d both minimized their part in all of that.
Thing is, the Yankees did, too, starting in ‘96, and both Jeter and Rivera gladly will expound upon that. Starting tonight, they also try to add to it.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com