A hundred times — a thousand times — he had limped into a clubhouse, or a training room, or a dugout, nursing a sprain or a strain, hiding a bruise, camouflaging a limp. There always was a scratch or a scar somewhere, ugly enough that his managers would ask, “Are you OK to play?”
Always — always — he gave the same answer.
“I’m great,” Derek Jeter would say. “Let’s go.”
Joe Girardi, his current manager, couldn’t escape that familiar mantra as he saw Jeter writhing on the infield dirt. He couldn’t stop thinking about it as he saw Jeter carried off the field. Long before he would hear the cruel diagnosis — fractured ankle, three months recovery time, season over — he knew how bad it was.
“I knew,” Girardi said, “that I wasn’t going to hear those words from him.”
Downstairs, in the trainer’s room, Jeter’s old manager, Joe Torre, was standing next to the table when the doctors came in with the evidence, the thin line evident on the X-ray. They gave him the news, but Torre knew they had to put it in straight black-and-white because of who the patient was. He made the doctors say the words:
“Your season is over.”
The Yankees lost a baseball game last night, yes, a hard-to-believe 6-4 killer to the Tigers in Game 1 of the ALCS. They spooked Detroit with every trick hidden in their pinstriped frocks, with a four-run ninth inning comeback, with Ichiro Suzuki’s first-ever postseason home run and Raul Ibanez’ fifth season-saving homer in the last three weeks.
They already had given back the lead, Nick Swisher losing a ball in the lights, and even though it seems like a violation of federal law to lose a game as dramatic as this one, it happens. The Lakers lost the game in the ’70 Finals when Jerry West drained his famous halfcourt shot, after all. The Mets lost the game when Endy Chavez reached over a Shea Stadium fence and pulled back the 2006 season with his glove.
Losing the game would have been devastating enough.
Losing the Captain?
“When you see Derek Jeter being carried off the field,” Swisher said inside a funereal Yankees clubhouse, “you know that can’t be good. He would never agree to be carried unless that was the only way he could do it.”
Said Ibanez, who enjoyed one more 90-minute run as an improbably heroic combination of Ruth, Mantle and DiMaggio before Jeter stabbed at a Jhonny Petralta grounder, fell, and stayed fallen: “If he’s on the ground, something bad has happened.”
The team’s leadership immediately did what it is paid to do, immediately tried to buoy their baseball team, general manager Brian Cashman saying: “The best way to honor Derek is to do a great job in his absence.”
And Girardi said: “Some people left us for dead when [Mariano Rivera] went down [in April] and here we are in the ALCS.”
Girardi managed a thin smile.
“Jete is going to tell u ‘let’s go,’ ” Girardi said. “That’s what he’s going to tell us.”
What actually happens will be fascinating to see. Inside the stadium — so alive, so vibrant, so full of bulletproof swagger just over an hour before, after Ibanez’s latest moonshot miracle — there were thousands of fans aping the famous words of the great Jack Buck when they saw the ball disappear: I can’t believe what I just saw.
Now, watching the Captain rolling in the dust, they said the same thing, quietly, to themselves, maybe with a few salty, angry adverbs thrown in. It was deathly quiet to the final out. The Yankees? Most of them avoided the money word that Derek Lowe chose — “crushing” — but their eyes told you they agreed with him 100 percent.
Can they survive this? Well, they need the hitting artist formerly known as Robinson Cano — now 0-for-his-last-22 – to snap out of it. They could use Nick Swisher — now a defensive liability in addition to a lineup drag — to play better. And the daily agonistes of Alex Rodriguez have to end now: leave him in the lineup, let him either fight his way out or go down swinging.
And they need to heed the words of their Captain who, if he could, would throw his crutches on the ground today, say, “I’m great, let’s go.” He can’t do that anymore. So the rest of them have to.