Copyright © New York Post, Ltd.: Reprinted with permission from the Oct. 31, 2014 edition of the New York Post. All rights reserved.
“No,” Derek Jeter said. “I haven’t changed my mind.”
This was about an hour after what will forever be known as The Inside-Out Heard ’Round The World, an hour after the Yankees had won the 28th World Series in their history and the sixth with Jeter as shortstop, an hour after he’d found a patch of grass in short right-center field with a flare that scored Albert Pujols with the tying run and Jacoby Ellsbury with the winning run and gave the Yankees a 4-3 win over the Dodgers in Game 7.
It was eight months ago Jeter announced on Facebook that 2014 would be his final season, and in that time he’d accepted an armload of farewell gifts and heard a litany of Hosannas from opponents, he’d flirted with .400 and with Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, he’d been propositioned by every one of the remaining 17 women on Maxim’s Hot 100 list he hadn’t already dated.
And now this.
“I don’t know how you top this, buddy,” Jeter said. “So I’m not going to try.”
You knew from the start we were watching a season unlike any other, at the end of a career like few others. You knew when Jeter started the season 28-for-30 that he couldn’t possibly keep that up and he didn’t: By July 1, he was already all the way down to .525.
You knew when the hitting streak reached 30 and then 40 and then 44 and then 50 that those last seven games would be the hardest of all and they were: When he finally went 0-for-6 in a 14-inning game at Tampa on Aug. 17 in Game 52, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Mr. DiMaggio should have that record forever,” and he refused to go along with reporters who wanted him to second-guess Joe Girardi’s decision to have him sacrifice in the top of the 14th.
“Did we win the game or not?” he asked with a sly grin.
Pujols could see there was something special brewing in The Bronx, which is why on Feb. 13 he said of Jeter, “On and off the field, he’s the way you want your kids to grow up. Only Jesus is perfect, but he’s pretty close to that guy.”
Pujols, of course, had a season that began as something far less than perfect, and by Aug. 23 he was hitting .054 and the Angels made the shocking move of releasing him and eating the approximately $200 million left on his contract, even after Jack Clark insisted to ESPN that Pujols was actually born on Jan. 16, 1963.
The Yankees were the only team that showed interest in Pujols, and a funny thing happened once he walked into the visiting clubhouse at Comerica Park on Aug. 26 and shook Jeter’s hand: In the Yankees’ final 32 games, he hit 30 home runs and had a 2.034 OPS. By then, Jeter’s average had settled in at .392 and the Yankees had completed their remarkable late-season push, surging from 10 games back of the Red Sox to five games ahead on the season’s final day.
Boston’s gift to him that day — one copy each of every Jeter-themed T-shirt sold on Yawkey Way going back to 1997 — was given a mixed reception in the Yankees clubhouse, but Jeter smiled and said, “When they hate you this much, buddy, that means they really like you.”
That capped a season in which the gifts to Jeter were plentiful and eclectic, though few compared to the gesture Jeff Wilpon made before Jeter’s final game at Citi Field on May 15, when the Mets announced they would retire Jeter’s No. 2 in a pregame ceremony.
“Marv Throneberry was the first Met to wear that number,” Wilpon said. “Who better to be the last?”
Nevertheless, as memorable as the rest of the year was, it couldn’t have ended more perfectly. The Dodgers were one strike away when Kenley Jansen tried to fool Jeter with a slider. Some teams this year had gone with the “Jeter Shift,” positioning the right fielder, center fielder, left fielder, shortstop and second basemen all within a 50-square foot section of shallow right field, but Dodgers manager Don Mattingly wouldn’t do that to his former protégé, to whom he once advised after one spring training workout: “Let’s run it in. You never know who’s watching.”
“Maybe,” Mattingly muttered, in the quiet of the losing clubhouse, “I should’ve just had the damn kid jog.”