by Michael Sokolove
Derek Jeter, the Yankee captain, as we are often reminded, emerged from the visitors’ dugout about two hours before a game last month at Baltimore’s Camden Yards and into late-afternoon sunshine. “Derek!” a middle-aged man in a Yankees cap called out from the first row of seats.
Derek Jeter, the Yankee captain, as we are often reminded, emerged from the visitors’ dugout about two hours before a game last month at Baltimore’s Camden Yards and into late-afternoon sunshine. “Derek!” a middle-aged man in a Yankees cap called out from the first row of seats.
“Hey, buddy, how you doin’?” Jeter said, giving a glance over his shoulder but not breaking stride. He continued on toward home plate, where several Orioles players stepped away from their pregame batting practice to shake his hand.Jeter is his era’s DiMaggio. Admired. Diffident. By all outward appearances, charmed. He became the Yankees’ full-time shortstop in 1996, at age 21, and only once since then has his team failed to qualify for the playoffs. (His 599 postseason at-bats amount to just about an extra season’s worth of swings.) The Yankees have reached the World Series seven times during Jeter’s tenure and prevailed in five of them. Jeter is just 6 hits from becoming the 28th player in baseball history to reach 3,000 hits (a quest that was delayed when he was placed on the disabled list with a calf strain on June 14). His baseball earnings have surpassed $200 million — not counting the three-year, $51-million contract that he signed before this season. The tabloids track his romances with one glamorous woman after another — the latest being the actress Minka Kelly, Esquire’s “Sexiest Woman Alive” in 2010. He is building a house in Tampa, Fla., a waterfront paradise so massive, at 30,875 square feet, that locals have dubbed it St. Jetersburg.
Just one thing has reduced Jeter to human scale, and it is not surprising what it is: age. On June 26 he turns 37, which makes Jeter a decade older than Einstein was when he published the general theory of relativity, a decade older than Lindbergh when he set the Spirit of St. Louis down in Paris and 15 years older than Ted Williams when he batted .406 in 1941. Even more to the point, Jeter is a dozen years past the best baseball version of himself — the 25-year-old who in 1999 played a sprightly shortstop and also functioned as a slugger, hitting 24 home runs, to go with 102 runs batted in and a batting average of .349.
The night I watched him in Baltimore was like most games for Jeter these days, only more so, because it went on for 15 innings. He came to bat seven times, and in six of those he hit ground balls — two of which squirted through the infield for base hits. He struck out in his other plate appearance. He leads all of baseball, by a wide margin, in his ratio of ground balls to balls lifted in the air, an arcane but telling statistic. Jeter can no longer consistently bring the bat through the hitting zone at the proper moment, and with enough authority, to hit line drives into the outfield gaps or fly balls that clear the fences. (Think of that classic advice to Little League hitters: Swing the bat as if you’re mad at the ball! Jeter swings as if he’s mad at the ground, with an abbreviated, downward stroke that pounds ball after ball into the turf.) In his best season, he had 70 extra-base hits. He is on pace for just 30 extra-base hits this season, meaning that about once a week he gets something more than a single.
We’re fascinated by sports partly because in physical matters, elite athletes set the outer limits. They do what we wish we could: hit a baseball 400 feet, dunk a basketball, sprint 100 meters in less than 10 seconds. Their feats look so pleasurable in the doing that some of us, long past our best playing days, dream at night we are in their realm — say, for example, patrolling the expanse of a big-league center field, or digging our cleats into the batter’s box as a pitcher goes into his windup. (Or firing a slapshot at a goalie, as one of my dreams went not too long ago, even though I have never played ice hockey in my life and don’t even follow the sport.)
But the careers of elite athletes, enviable as they may be, are foreshortened versions of a human lifespan. Physical decline — in specific ways that affect what they do and who they are — begins for them before it does for normal people. The athletes themselves rarely see the beginnings of this process, or if they do, either do not acknowledge it or try to fight it off like just another inside fastball. They alter their training routines. Eat more chicken and fish, less red meat. They try to get “smarter” at their sport.
A great many of us, their fans, live in our own version of denial — even in this age of super-slow-motion replay and ever more granular statistical data. We want to think our favorite players have good years left, great accomplishments ahead of them, just as we would hope the same for ourselves. The writer Susan Jacoby, who happens to be a devoted baseball fan, is the author of “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age.” “Fans don’t like to watch aging in these relatively young guys,” she told me. “It makes us uncomfortable. We think, If it happens to them, what the hell is going to happen to us?” Jacoby, a self-described insomniac who listens to sports-talk radio in the middle of the night, said she has been appalled at the “venom” she sometimes hears directed at Jeter. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘The hero is not performing.’ Well, he’s gotten older.”
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