Derek Jeter Day

The Yankees retire number two tonight, and you can watch on ESPN at 6:30 PM. Mike Vaccaro remembers other fond farewells. On Don Mattingly Day:

Jeter was there, and he watched it all before he would play the 305th game of his career. In the clubhouse that day, he was asked about Mattingly and he had given a simple answer: “Donnie is the perfect Yankee.” Then he would listen to Mattingly’s voice bounce all around the ballpark, the way the acoustics at the old place used to.

“I’ve tried to give you all a hundred percent of myself every time I walked out on the field,” Mattingly told his ex-teammates, his family, his friends, and 55,707 people who had jammed the old yard good. “I tried to keep it pure, I tried to keep it simple, and just play great baseball for you over the years. I hope you appreciated it.”

The roars that followed tell you they had. The chants — “Donn-nee Baseball!” — that began, then and lasted throughout the Yankees’ subsequent 3-2 win over the Montreal Expos, backed up the sentiment. And the manner with which Jeter played that day — dashing home on a wild pitch to score the game’s first run — and in each of his 2,442 games thereafter, tells you nobody paid attention more closely than Jeter.

Sunday night, someone will be listening. Aaron Judge? Gary Sanchez? Didi Gregorius? Someone will hear Jeter as he tries to summarize this spectacular baseball life into a five-minute speech, and he will carry it with him. He will learn what it means to be a forever Yankee, maybe create a vision of another night like this one 15, 20 years from now.

Like Mattingly, Jeter was grounded, he never appeared to let his fame and the glitz of New York go to his head. I believe both came from strong family. Here is Mattingly on his father:

”I grew up in a family that didn’t criticize a lot. We were told when we did something wrong, but we got a lot of praise. I remember once at a wedding reception, when I was 8 years old, and my father told me that he was proud of the way I handled myself. I wasn’t sure what I did, but I tried to do it again because of what he said.”

Jeter’s parents were fixtures at games. He father, a doctor, and his mother, a nurse were successful on their own, and raised a respectful, intelligent son. Jeter’s extemporaneous speech after the last game of the old Yankee Stadium was a perfect example of that.

“Although things are going to change next year, we’re going to move across the street, there are a few things with the New York Yankees that never change — it’s pride, it’s tradition, and most of all, we have the greatest fans in the world.”

None of this, of course, talks about how great he was at the plate. Even though I complained about his fielding for many years, he still made two plays that stick in my mind; his relay toss against the Athletics and his dive into the stands against the Red Sox.

Congratulations to Derek Jeter on joining the great Yankees in monument park.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2qfER9X