Derek Jeter endured public humiliation Tuesday night. It was his finest moment since becoming the face of the Marlins.
For it was a bit of a baseball miracle that Jeter played for two decades as the highest-profile star in the biggest city and never incurred — forget scandal — but even much tsk-tsking.
He handled his fame remarkably well. He had a sixth sense for what could be embarrassing or endangering to his reputation and shunned it like a slider off the plate. Jeter mastered controlling familiar forums — consistently available in front of his locker, for example, and expert at avoiding the controversial or self-aggrandizing. He spoke consistently and forgettably, just as he planned. His reputation and marketability mattered, being Churchill did not.
When it came to his baseball life, however, that will now be remembered as the easy part, as difficult as it may have seemed in real time. Jeter is learning that any chance of being a successful overlord of a baseball team — especially one as dysfunctional as the Marlins club he helped purchase — will force him to venture into areas of discomfort that he could evade as a player, will necessitate doing and saying the unpopular, will demand his wading into forums of which he has less control.
That is how he ended up at a town hall event Tuesday night at Marlins Park. He orchestrated the event, but not the bitter tone. There may not be many Marlin fans, but those that attended the 90-minute-ish session did not kowtow much to his standings as a great player. That was with the Yankees. To these people, he was just the latest soulless suit crying poor, plundering their team’s roster and promising a better tomorrow as he razed today.
Jeter took the verbal body blows, notably participating in the discomfiting tango of having to listen to and respond to a shameless self-promoter who goes by Marlins Man replete in his full orange finery.
Jeter’s Marlins problem to date has not been what he has done (notably trading Giancarlo Stanton, Marcell Ozuna and Dee Gordon) it is how he went about it — with too much a sense of royalty and rigidity.
Some of those fans Tuesday bludgeoned him for tearing down rather than adding two pitchers and going for it with a strong positional core. But even if you put Jake Arrieta and Yu Darvish on these Marlins, they were maybe wild-card contenders, what with their overall lack of pitching depth and shortage of farm talent to counteract that.
The Marlins needed to move the expensive pieces, try to get their financial house in order, attempt to refuel that horrible prospect base. But the missteps along the way, notably by Jeter, projected uncaring novices at work.
The Rays, for example, traded away the face of their franchise by keeping Evan Longoria updated regularly on the process, and the best player in their history did not even have a no-trade clause. Jeter said he would talk to Stanton when it was necessary, letting president of baseball operations, Michael Hill, play bad cop.
But Jeter needed to make a call the day he took over and tell Stanton that he would fly to talk face-to-face. He is Derek Jeter – a great player with clout. This was the biggest issue facing this franchise, maybe ever. Maybe Stanton never says yes to the Cardinals or Giants no matter what. But he did have a no-trade clause, and Jeter needed to say some version of “we love you, we wish we could build around you, but that is not possible for us, so get with your family and people and tell us where you would like to go and we will make it happen.”
You can act like the players are the hired help, but that is 1950s thinking. Jeter wouldn’t have liked being treated that way as a star player. And he should have looked at this as practice for when he might (in a better day) be trying to sell a player on coming rather than going. In this way there is still not much growth because he again is saying he will talk to J.T. Realmuto and Christian Yelich — the most marketable players left on the roster — when he has something to say.
But he should have something to say to them now, about the team’s future and theirs. You can’t talk to Marlins Man, and not actual, valuable Marlins men. His voice matters.
Jeter did not understand that about the Winter Meetings, which he did not attend in Orlando, Fla., though he was in Miami, infamously shown in a Dolphins suite on the same day Hill was explaining why Stanton was traded. But that is not the only place his voice would have mattered.
The Winter Meetings assembles just about every vital person in your organization. So Jeter could have seen how the wheel works to better understand this key event going forward. But he also could have taken the whole group out to dinner and tried some Churchill, told them these are the dark days for the Marlins, but that the gathered group is what is going to bring the light sooner than later.
The most valuable skills for the new Marlins’ leader were arguably to inspire and love baseball. I am not sure either is in Jeter’s wheelhouse — remember, he persistently said he did not like watching baseball as a player. Now, he has to convince folks to pay to watch what might look Triple-A-ish for a while.
He tried to sell why people should come at that town hall, and let’s just say those in attendance were not enthralled. But good for Jeter to understand he has to get out of that sense of royalty and rigidity. He bought into this horror show. The initial talk about maybe not trading Stanton or not accepting that losing was on the immediate docket was either delusional or disingenuous, neither a good thing.
Jeter is the face of this. For a while that means putting himself in the kind of places like that town hall he excelled in escaping as a Yankee. There is no hiding now.