The king of millennial baseball will leave the building

In a season, marred by injury and abysmally decimated by outfield deficiencies and inconsistency in pitching, two teams have in all truth, suspended their rivalry to bid farewell to a baseball legend.

Derek Jeter has played baseball for two decades, serving as a constant figure of physical, statistical and moral stability all from his beloved position, straddling the baseline between second and third. He does so while garnering the delirious cheers of fans who simply adore him.

It is that admiration by not only Yankees fans but baseball fans of teams around the world that makes Jeter great. That admiration and the reasons for it make Jeter the king of an era in baseball that has been one of the sport’s darkest.

Jeter made his debut in the summer of 1995, roughly three years before the famed Barry Bonds/Mark McGuire/Sammy Sosa race for the 1998 home run title that was ultimately tainted by allegations of drug use against all three of them. As Bonds churned out his historic lashings of baseballs into the outfield bleachers in San Francisco, Jeter quietly bounced ground ball doubles and omnipresent singles out of the star sodden infield of the old Yankee Stadium.

In that 1998 season, the generally agreed upon start to the steroid era, a clean blooded Jeter hit 19 home runs, 84 RBI’s and clocked a batting average of .370. Over the next 5 seasons, Jeter’s home run totals never dipped below 15 while his batting average stayed within the low to mid 300’s. When Jason Giambi was busted in the BALCO Scandal back in 2003, Jeter had been in baseball for 9 years, making the All-Star game in 6 of those seasons while pinning himself in as a permanent fixture in the Yankees roster.

He never touched the PED’s that ran rampant through his sport.

More so, he managed to keep out of the substance abuse pressure that was as omnipresent in his own locker-room as were bats and pinstripes. Playing just a few feet, for the latter half of his career, from a man who took a path opposite of his, Jeter managed to balance his allegiance and affection for that man as a teammate with his moral code that forbade such an act of cheating as that that man committed.

That man, Alex Rodriguez first became Jeter’s teammate in 2004 when the Yankees traded cash to the Rangers for his playing rights. Rodriguez had been caught up in the same BALCO Scandal as Giambi was a year before and came to New York hoping to gain some popularity within the city and reassert himself as the baseball great he was right out of high school.

Gain popularity he did, but regain Cooperstown’s respect, he did not.

Rodriguez brought steroids into the Yankees locker room on a level that had not been seen before. But Jeter never used. As Rodriguez’s popularity soared in direct synchronicity with his statistics, his arrogance increased, lifting his self-guided persona of poor sportsmanship to a whole new level. But Jeter never followed.

Though the baseball world, still calming down from the fireworks show that was baseball in the early 2000’s, still treated A-Rod as a player worth some shred of respect, Jeter, mature and right minded, knew better than to cheat. He knew better than to insult reporters or slap Bronson Arroyo’s glove as Rodriguez did late in the 2004 ALDS against Boston. Therefore, Jeter retained his fans’ admiration and gave opponents reason to respect him rather than detest him.

10 years after the Rodriguez/Jeter clash of styles and 20 years after Jeter’s career began; it is evident how things played out. Rodriguez has sat out 2014, living as a disgraced wreck of his former baseball self. Rodriguez may never play again simply because nobody will let him. Jeter will never play again but his departure from baseball was decided within his own mind, not Bud Selig’s. This is because it was also within Jeter’s own mind that he chose to stay clean.

But furthermore, as he has slowly bid the MLB goodbye this season, his exit has shown to be one of fanfare and hall of fame quality fandom.

Much like Mariano Rivera last season, Jeter has been presented with gifts and moments of recognition in each “finale” or final game played against a given team. Earlier this month, the Tampa Bay Rays handed Jeter a commemorative kayak. In July, Jeter was congratulated with a boot and a handshake from former President George Bush while in his final game against the Indians, long time Red Sox coach Terry Franconia presented Jeter with a pinstriped electric guitar. Almost every team has also made quadruple digit donations to his charity – the Turn 2 Foundation.

Then there are the Red Sox who, due to their deeper connection to Jeter than any other team take his tribute to a whole new level.

Following Jeter’s walk off hit in his final at bat at Yankee Stadium Thursday night, the Red Sox sounded off in giddy praise back in Boston.

 "Wow. That's him. Perfect," David Ortiz said Thursday night. Oh. My. God. Dude, we were watching that game. Man, not if you plan it will it come out that good. That game," David Ortiz said "is going to be in the history of the game. F---ing unbelievable."

"Everybody was talking about it in the ninth inning," said Sox third-base coach Brian Butterfield, a former coach of Jeter "I'm going back now [to the coaches room] to see it on YES Network. Unbelievable. You can't script that."

Another think you cannot script: the climactic ending to Jeter’s days against the Red Sox. With the MLB season ending for both the Sox and Yankees on Sunday, the two will play their final games of respective lost years against each other with grace and national attention. This is simply because of Jeter who will, and already has transcended the boundaries of such a rivalry as the one between New York and Boston.

But this transcendence is nothing new. From day one he has been more than just a Yankee. He is a student of baseball a perfect example of a breed of balling role model that has all but died out. David Ortiz recognizes a level of care for the star on both sides of this rivalry.

“I remember the game he dove into the stands against us. He was going full speed and the ball was a step before the fans, but he couldn’t stop to keep himself from flying through it. When he got up, we saw him bleeding and stuff. You don’t want to see someone bleed. It doesn’t matter how much of a rivalry we have with them because when you saw that you just wondered if he was OK. He gives his all when he plays.” He said.

Furthermore, the current Sox DH and legend in his own right uttered a near demand for Red Sox Nation celebration of Jeter on Sunday.

“I’m 100 percent sure the game is going to miss him a lot. I’m going to miss competing against him and watching him do his thing. I said to him during our series with them in August the night he hit the home run that he should play a couple of more years. He said, 'It’s over.’ I expect the Fenway fans to give him a big ovation that last game.“ He said.

“It’s over,” Jeter said. “It’s over,” Jeter decided.

Decisive as always, Derek Jeter will leave baseball on Sunday to thunderous cheers made almost unearthly in their magnitude by the fact that said cheers will be sent forth by Red Sox fans for a man on the Yankee roster.

You simply cannot hate Jeter. Though his career has encompassed the entire MLB steroid era to date, Jeter has done what very few millennial greats have done; never crossed the line. In playing next to A-Rod and all his antics, Jeter proved that poor sportsmanship and flat out cheating are not contagious. Jeter proved that to be a great, to be a baseball legend in this modern era of social media and competitive fraudulence it no longer takes just the raw skill of say Babe Ruth or Ted Williams. No, now, with sports as much an institution of (sometimes unwarranted) amiability and a platform for the development of role models as they are, a great must show his humanity, not cheat and refuse to hate or slyly manipulate inaccuracy in rules.

How many baseball players have combined those off field aspects of greatness that Jeter’s personality has created with the on field statistics and flash that he has also brought to this new chapter of baseball’s story?

I can only count one; and that is the shortstop whose days in baseball will end this weekend.

Sunday night in Fenway, Derek Jeter will leave baseball as a humble monarch, excluded from the burnt heap of tarnished reputations and asterisk tainted record books that the past 20 years have sometimes seemed to have reduced baseball to.  

So we stand and behold the king of baseball’s millennium. As he leaves, we must appreciate his final games for once he is gone, it could be a long time before we see another worthy coronation.