Derek Jeter, generally an opponent of scene-making, surprised some veteran Captain observers Wednesday by announcing his retirement, a full season ahead of time, on Facebook. With this action, the shortstop said yes to ceremony, yes to fuss-making, yes to endless questions about his feelings and innermost thoughts and all that junk.
Good for him. You’d think it would give him a healthy mixture of relief and excitement, and Yankees fans surely will appreciate the heads-up to enjoy his final year.
And now comes the next challenge for Jeter: For his farewell tour, he has a road map to follow, a high bar to meet. A very recent memory to honor.
His goal should be to match Mariano Rivera’s victory lap from last year — and then top it with one more October.
Rivera returned from the most serious injury of his career (a torn ACL in his right knee), performed like an All-Star and used his impending departure as a vehicle to connect with scores of fans and club employees around the majors.
Jeter, too, is coming back from the most serious injury of his career, the fractured left ankle from October 2012 that limited him to 17 games last year. Because of the nature of the injuries, the timelines back onto the field and the relative demands of the jobs, more skepticism surrounds Jeter’s climb back to greatness than did Rivera’s. The Yankees took on a major risk by giving Jeter his old job back with a Plan B of Brendan Ryan.
That Rivera put together a characteristic 2013 season as closer made for a great comeback story. That he treated his retirement as a group celebration and catharsis enhanced considerably his already golden legacy. The closer’s stadium stops, during which he’d dialogue with veteran occupants and patrons, were transcendent and rewarding and memorable for those who took part. And his last work shift on the Yankee Stadium mound, which concluded with a tearful collapse into Andy Pettitte’s arms (with Jeter standing next to Pettitte) will go down as an all-time Yankees moment, this even though the 2013 Yankees missed the postseason.
Jeter isn’t as naturally open with his emotions as Rivera, and you’d guess he won’t want to copycat Rivera’s strategy with the ballpark tour. Yet Jeter possesses the sort of smooth interpersonal skills that should allow him to make everyone feel like part of the process.
That last image? Jeter obviously would prefer one in which he’s raising his arms during a World Series-clinching celebration. Whether he’ll get that will depend significantly on how much he has left in his tank.
Barring a change of heart from Jeter — and that would be far more uncharacteristic than the announcement he just made — the Core Four will be all gone at the conclusion of this 2014 season. Jeter, Rivera, Pettitte and Jorge Posada have provided their teammates, superiors and fans with more scrapbook memories than any such quartet anywhere, in any sport. They made largely brilliant entrances and great exits, too (although Posada’s goodbye got pretty hairy) and their middles were the best part of all.
Jeter, the greatest of the Core Four, now has a chance to author the best exit yet. It’s going to be awful difficult for the soon-to-be-40-year-old to look anything like his prime self, and the Yankees are hardly favored to win it all.
Yet as Jeter wrote on his Facebook post, the people of New York “have high expectations and are anxious to see them met.” You want to bet against Jeter meeting those high expectations one last time, emulating Rivera? Do so knowing that few have done well betting against Jeter.