The hardest part, always, is sticking the landing. That’s what Derek Jeter has before him. That’s the opportunity that awaits across the final 68 games of this, his final season. If he isn’t the player at 40 he was at 35, or at 25, he still approximates that player. That’s a good thing for him.
And a better thing for those who have watched him all these years.
“When you get older,” Reggie Jackson said a few months ago, “the hardest thing is that you still remember what you were able to do when you were young. In your mind, you can still do all of those things. But your body doesn’t always agree.”
In many ways, that’s been the gift of this season, which has been something of a mulligan for Jeter, a chance to put distance between who he is and who he was last year, a hobbled, hobbling hostage to a bum ankle and weary legs that kept betraying him, time and again, robbing him of a precious year of a finite career, stuffing too many images of Jeter the humbled athlete in our personal archives.
Maybe Jeter’s numbers mock the superstar he once was — his slash line is .272/.324/.322; in what was probably his best year (2006) it was .343/.417/.483 and for his career it’s .311/.379/.443 — but even when his numbers were pristine, Jeter’s prime value was in the day-to-day and in the overall, in his reliability. And other than Brett Gardner, who has been a more reliable Yankee in 2014, day to day, than Jeter?
And who would have believed that, after 2013?
So you can understand the words he shared with his American League teammates inside the home-team clubhouse at Target Field the other day, before the All-Star Game, simple words that included one especially poignant — and relevant — four-word observation that every ballplayer comes to understand at some point.
“It goes by quickly.”
This year, more than any other, 94 games have passed in an eyeblink, with 68 to come (barring October) that will zip along faster than anyone, most of all Jeter, is ready to see them fly.
Sixty-eight games to stick the landing.
You don’t have to wander very far to know how challenging that can be. Mickey Mantle long regretted how it ended for him, a 1968 season in which he could barely walk, in which he hit .237 and knocked four points off his career average, leaving him at .298. Joe DiMaggio flailed away in ’51, hitting .263 (27 points below his next-lowest average, which came in the rusty-from-the-Army year of 1946) and enduring a Dodgers scouting report leaked to Life magazine in advance of the World Series that said, in part, he “could not stop quickly and throw hard,” and runners “can take an extra base on him … he can’t run … and his reflexes are very slow.”
And while Jeter’s professional role model, Don Mattingly, had a spectacular October in 1995, his only taste of the postseason, in a 46-game stretch from mid-July to mid-September that nearly sunk the Yankees’ season, he hit an enfeebled .241/.276/.318 that practically had even his army of acolytes peeking away from the TV screen every time he stepped to the plate for fear that this was how they’d be forced to remember him.
Jeter, of course, is equipped with certain unique elements that will steel him from such problems. For one thing, he would have to go 0-for-428 to drop his career average to .2994. So that’s safe. He has long been exposed to unflattering reports — whether from statheads or a vocal anti-Yankees faction that has forever targeted him as overrated and overvalued — that would make what the Brooklyn scout said of DiMaggio read like a Hallmark card. That won’t affect him.
Could he have a skid like the one that nearly obliterated Mattingly’s last go-round? He could. He’s had stretches of ineffectiveness this year. But again, when you’ve watched Jeter as long as you have, you understand something: There’s no way he will allow himself to become a burden. It seems he’s come to peace with who he is at age 40: a contributor, a leader, a captain, a player you’d certainly rather have on your team than not, a star by reputation rather than repetition. Reliably reliable.
That probably explains why he knew this year would be it, because that’s not a function he could long be comfortable with. But it allows an image far more satisfying than the one we would’ve been left with this time last year – or the one we’d likely have this time next year. He has a chance to stick the landing. Who’s betting that he won’t?