Baseball has this uncanny ability to break your heart, even as it lifts it. It was amazing to watch the most fitting ending possible (short of making it to the playoffs) to Derek Jeters 20 years of playing at Yankee Stadium, but it was a celebration tinged with melancholy and sadness, like so much that is beautiful and enduring about the sport. He was one for the ages. Spending his entire career--20 years--with the same team. A clutch player with plenty of ice-water in his veins when he needed it. I dont want to make him out to be a saint--Im sure hes not-- but he has proven himself to be an upstanding human about whom no one has anything horribly salacious to say (and you KNOW that if there were, the NY Post or others would have found it and printed it). Seeing him step off the field tonight is truly the end of an era for the team, and also for me. As I kid, I watched Willie Randolph, Bucky Dent, Thurman Munson, Mickey Rivers, etc. with joy in my heart, but without fully understanding the deeper resonance of the game. Then we hit the wasted years of the 80s and early 90s, where the only bright spot for me was my hero, Don Mattingly, who slogged through with Jeter-like grace and professionalism. You just figured it was some kind of karmic rebalancing for all of those decades of Yankee success. But then we began to see young players emerge like Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte, and, oh yeah, this kid that everyone talked about named Jeter. After enduring the embarrassment of Steve Howe, Rickey Henderson, and Stump Merrills less-than-storied managerial career, here finally was a team largely made up of players who not only promised greatness on the field, but knew how to carry themselves with dignity off of it as well. People you could be proud to root for. I remember being in the right-field stands for Game 6 of the World Series in 1996, when the Yankees beat the Braves and won the World Series for the first time in 18 years. Dancing and screaming our heads off underneath the elevated subway tracks outside, high-fiving complete strangers, cops on horseback, tchotchke vendors. Emerging from the subway and rising up to the streets near Times Square to the electricity of that night, car horns blaring, a city jubilant. And now, the last of that core team is stepping off this great stage. I cannot help but weep, and its not because this successful and ultra-rich man is retiring. Its just that Im so sick of a year that has been so much about endings. And yet baseball, which has always been the best sport for metaphor, reminds me that endings, too, are part of life. That even as you have tears in your eyes, you can recognize that you are watching a thing of beauty, living a moment, creating a memory. That even as you say goodbye to the moments of your own youth, you still retain the memories and emotions you felt as you lived them. Goodbye, Derek. Its been lovely. Look forward to remembering you again in the future when Im older and grayer. Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.-- Roger Angell Baseball, because of its continuity over the space of America and the time of America, is a place where memory gathers. -- Donald Hall
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 03:23:30 +0000
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