TAMPA — Derek Jeter stopped, practically mid-sentence, during his retirement press conference and looked at manager Joe Girardi, who was sitting with just about every Yankee in camp.
“Hold on. … If these guys got to go to work …” Jeter said.
The manager responded: “Work’s over.”
Unlike his surprising announcement on Facebook last week that 2014 would be his last season, Wednesday’s press conference went just about how most would have anticipated.
“The way he told us to go to work, that’s the way Derek is,” Mark Teixeira said. “It’s one of the reasons he’s been so good for so long.”
Jeter spoke at the pavilion outside George M. Steinbrenner Field for nearly half an hour and the prevailing feeling among those in the audience was he didn’t seem like he was ready to fade into the sunset.
“He sounds like a guy that’s ready to play,” CC Sabathia said. “He looks good, looks healthy. … It’s obviously tough to talk about him retiring, but I think he wants to play the season out and try to win.”
He made that clear repeatedly Wednesday after his Feb. 12 bombshell.
It turns out he tried to contact team owner Hal Steinbrenner the evening of Feb. 11, but Steinbrenner missed his call and didn’t get in touch with Jeter until the next day.
“I didn’t recognize the area code,” Steinbrenner said. “So I didn’t check the voicemail until the next day. It’s some crazy area code. My bad. … It was a surprise. I figured he was calling to talk about the team and what improvements we needed to make still.”
Jeter’s health will likely impact what needs the Yankees may have and Teixeira was optimistic the shortstop’s retirement wouldn’t be the only subject he would have to talk about.
“Hopefully a lot of the questions are about the team and the two hits he got and the nice play he made at short and not about his retirement,” Teixeira said. “He just proved he’s not going to give you a lot.”
Jeter said he would like to keep the subject “under the radar.”
Those around him know that’s not possible, as he is likely to be the subject of a farewell tour similar to the one Mariano Rivera received a year ago.
“I don’t know if he’s asking for that, but it’s certainly coming,” general manager Brian Cashman said.
And while many parallels figure to exist between Rivera’s send-off from a year ago and the one Jeter is about to experience, the Yankees would like one significant difference.
“It would be nice to send him off in a great way,” Sabathia said after the Yankees missed the playoffs last season. “He always got the fairy-tale ending, so hopefully this will be a good one.”