CLEVELAND – The thing that always separated Derek Jeter from his peers, all across these past 151⁄2 seasons, was this: His Nikes never found a stray banana peel. He never misstepped, never misspoke.
Spike Lee hasn’t yet written a movie about Jeter but he did provide a forever description for the Yankee captain: Do the right thing. That’s been Jeter’s mantra. That’s been his credo. And so when Jeter knocked on Joe Girardi’s door late Tuesday night and asked the boss for a few moments before asking in last night’s batting order, he was only doing precisely as he’s always done.
This was the right thing. Could he have assembled four hits, and spoiled whichever gathering of 49,000 or so will be in Yankee Stadium whenever he reaches 3,000? Sure. Maybe. But there’s one thing he’s insisted from the moment this journey to 3K commenced, and it was a theme he hit upon last night again.
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“If I’m hitting, all that really does is help us win,” he said. This was after he’d cut off at the pass a theoretical problem: What if he starts a game 3-for-3? To this he put up his hands, a goalie fighting off a wrist shot.
Yes, in this curious setting the prospect of starting a game 3-for-3 can actually invite angst.
The Right Thing can cut angst off at the pass every time, however. And so Jeter had asked Girardi to re-think his decision to sit him. Girardi’s thought process, like Jeter’s, isn’t contained to the commerce of the 3,000-hit moment; he wants to make sure he doesn’t abuse Jeter, especially after a three-week stint on the DL.
“I’ll sleep on it,” the manager said.
He did that. And when he awoke, and after he consulted with trainer Gene Monahan, he did something you’ll rarely see: He changed his mind. He called Jeter, let him know. He called Brian Cashman, let him know. He came to the ballpark, typed Jeter’s name into his computer’s keyboard, printed out the lineup, posted it.
And did the Right Thing.
“He made a convincing argument,” Girardi said.
As always, the argument went this way: What gives us the best chance to win tonight? Even Jeter knows it isn’t as easy as that, and Justin Masterson proved why, throwing eight brilliant innings at the Yankees, energizing this 5-3 Indians win that closed out a pedestrian 3-3 road swing and also sliced the Yanks’ lead in the AL East to a razor-thin half game.
But it also produced two perks that felt like ethereal rewards for respecting the game properly. For one, Jeter did manage a hit off Masterson, an eighth-inning double that brought his career total to 2,997, sharply increasing the likelihood of him reaching 3K at home in the next four days.
“Just from talking to him I got a sense that he’s thinking about it and he wants to get this done with so he can go on and be Derek Jeter, not ‘Derek Jeter pursuing 3,000 hits,’ “ Girardi said.
But playing him also satisfied every molecule of who both Girardi and Jeter are, though. Nobody can accuse the Yankees of trying to orchestrate when and where he gets his 3,000. The Yankees have spent a century preaching team over individual, wins over records, and Jeter and Girardi have both been acolytes of this common creed for years.
And so Girardi said yes. And now Yankees fans will get to glimpse the pursuit of history up close and, for a lucky 49,000 on one of the next four days, perhaps even the making of it.
Not a bad parlay. Jeter, of course, has always had a fine power of persuasion. You surely recall the evening, going on 10 years ago now, when he walked in on the leader of the free world warming up his right arm in the bowels of the old Yankee Stadium.
“Where are you going to throw it from?” Derek Jeter asked George W. Bush, about to throw out a first pitch. Bush told him the front of the mound. Jeter frowned.
“Throw it from the top,” he advised. “If you throw it from the front, they’ll boo you.”
Bush heeded the advice, threw a waist-high fastball a few moments later, and received the kind of ovation inside the Stadium that Jeter had already grown quite familiar with.
One he’ll hear plenty this weekend, no matter when 3K arrives.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com