THE Yankees are tied to the railroad tracks, the train only 157 games away.
They may have a truckful of recognized championship parts, but around these parts, a good panic is as much of the early routine as brushing one’s teeth. The Yankees have dropped the first two of the 65 games they will lose this season, a double dosage of this unthinkable reality being reinforced in the first couple games of the season’s second series by the Blue Jays.
Sure, it’s still turtleneck weather, but for The Boss all weather is turtleneck weather, the better to keep the heat rising under his collar. So, it is in the nick of time that, blowing in from Tampa more coolly than he will regard his next invitation to an A-Rod testimonial dinner, comes Derek Jeter.
“He peeked his head in during the eighth inning [Friday night],” Joe Torre said yesterday morning.
Jeter sighting! Then, the shortstop left the building, like Elvis, to build suspense that peaked yesterday when he swung at a 2-2 Billy Koch cutter with the tying and winning runs on and two outs in the ninth.
There it was, another moment for which Jeter was born. Shoeless Joe Jackson would soon appear through the hedge in center field, just to watch. Jeter, blood oozing from a gunshot wound in the right quadriceps, was preparing to loft one into light bulbs above the upper deck in right field.
“What he’s done here for five years makes you think, sure,” said Joe Torre.
Hey, after managing four World Champions in five years, you probably would believe you are a character in a movie, too. Alas, Koch mixed up his pitches even better than we mixed our flicks, getting Jeter swinging with a cutter that, with or without the benefit of 90 spring at-bats, the superduperstar says he wouldn’t have hit anyway.
“It takes time and hopefully it won’t take a long time,” said Jeter. “But even if I played a full spring training, he made a good pitch.”
Jeter wound up 1-for-5, putting his cranky quadriceps to a 47-degree test by beating out a bleeder in the sixth. Sorry, you don’t want to use the term bleeder around recently-injured persons, even those pronouncing themselves good as new.
Torre congratulated himself for his caution and also for going 3-1 without his best player, easy enough to say when in three games your starters walk one batter. The manager uttered these words even after first callback auditions for a fifth place in the rotation became a quick hook for Christian Parker. And before 95 pitches by Orlando Hernandez, who also missed practically all of spring training, turned into five walks and two gopher balls in 41/3 innings yesterday.
Both of the last two days begged the question of how long it will take the shortstop to get up to speed, which is the full gallop by which the Yankees have run away from baseball since Jeter joined them.
“Our careers are interesting. It took me about 100 years to get to the World Series and he won it the first year,” said Torre. “That’s a good way to get spoiled.”
In fact, it is almost as good a way as having a two-hole hitter averaging 199 hits a year. Sure, depth of pitching has, at the end of the day, been the difference, but the only way to the end of the day is everyday, which are the only days when Jeter excels. Without him, the Yankee axis was as off-kilter as a water cooler following a Paul O’Neill called third strike.
They wouldn’t think of opening the season while The Babe’s monument was off under repair, would they? You pay to see the living, breathing, monument to this Yankee era standing at shortstop. And, after missing an average of only seven games a season in his first five, Jeter himself has every expectation of being there, too.
“I think every player has had this nightmare about waking up one day, thinking you have a night game and it’s a day game on TV,” he said. “That’s what it felt like. I should have been there but I wasn’t.”
Thus did Jeter reveal he actually suffers nightmares. Few are as sweat-inducing as Torre’s worst – his shortstop lost for months, for example – but it raises the morale of us remaining imperfect creatures on this planet to note Jeter has anxieties, too.
“I’m not the most patient person,” he said.
Five years after his arrival, such makes Jeter the quintessential New Yorker. That and 1,009 hits, 78 homers, 414 RBIs, 605 runs and at least one base reached safely in an incredible 56 of 61 postseason games.
It was the longest, hardest, easy three victories in four days imaginable without him. And even with yesterday’s loss, a monumental win just to get him back.
