Derek Jeter’s All-Star Blessing

A lot of the folk are hemming and hawing over Derek Jeter's withdrawal from the All-Star Game. But nobody seems to catch onto his withdrawal as an inadvertent blessing upon it.

Plausibly enough, Jeter has claimed mental as well as physical exhaustion from the hunt for that 3,000th hit, in terms of both the pursuit of the milestone and the scrutiny under which the hunt fell, given his striking performance decline since the opening of the 2010 season.

What we ought to examine regarding his all-star withdrawal is what Jeter hasn't said and is probably too proud to say. Except to himself, perhaps.

Jeter had no business making this season's American League all-star team in the first place. He was elected to his sixth straight all-star starting lineup (it would have been his twelfth all-star selection lifetime), and if your opinion is that the All-Star Game is the place for the season's best and brightest, the absolute best players in baseball this season, then Jeter clearly didn't belong.

Everyone in baseball, not just Yankee fans and observers, has been more sympathetic than scorning of Jeter's plight. There's probably no more respected player in the game, there's probably been no more respected such player for the length of his career. But even on the threshold of a career milestone — his struggles since last season to one side, there wasn’t a soul in or near baseball who suggested he wouldn't reach it — it was just a little difficult to accept that the man earned an all-star berth at all, never mind in the starting lineup.

As of the Fourth of July, Jeter was 6 hits from becoming the only man to reach 3,000 hits at all, never mind getting every last one of them, in a Yankee uniform. But before he went to the disabled list with a strained right calf, like it or not, Jeter had become a pronounced liability to his team who could barely hit and who couldn't hold his own in the field with his former authority. You can only imagine how that weighed on a scandal-free man who performed so long, so brilliantly, in baseball's most festering pressure cooker.

As of the Fourth, the Yankees in Jeter's absence went 14-4 without him. Stories even abounded that the Yankee clubhouse was a little "looser" without him, without the weight of his decline to trouble it. Wasn't that once the unthinkable?

With one or two exceptions otherwise, the talk was whether Jeter was finished at long enough last, and how the Yankees — who’d spent last offseason in difficult if not contentious contract negotiations with their franchise face — would go about shepherding Jeter off the field, even slowly, considering the two and a half years remaining on the contract, not to mention young Eduardo Nunez’s performance stepping into the injury breach, and assuming the Yankees actually had the real stomach for it.

And now Jeter was an all-star starter?

Well, a lot of people like to think of the All-Star Game as a partial lifetime achievement award, of course. Jeter wasn't the first man going to the starting lineup as a legacy candidate, and he won't be the last, but usually it happens when a longtime star is known to be on the threshold of retirement. (Sometimes it happens when a longtime star has retired. See Mike Schmidt, 1989.)

Jeter got his votes because of who he was for so long, not who he is now. So what if he's been a shadow of his formerly formidable self? his voters seemed to be saying. He's Derek Freaking Jeter! He's been the Yankees all these years! He's going to get that three freaking thousandth freaking hit! Maybe within a week or so. By Gawd that makes him...

A Hall of Famer in waiting. Not a valid 2011 all-star starter.

Then the Yankees opened a set with the Tampa Bay Rays to close out the season's first half, on the same day Jeter announced his withdrawal from the All-Star Game. Two days later, Jeter needed two hits for the milestone, and David Price — one of the American League's best pitchers, who won't be going to the Game, either — awaited him.

As if according to some surrealistic script, written from the fifth dimension of Yankee imagination, Jeter in the leadoff slot opened his and the Yankees' afternoon with a full-count bounder into left for a single. Two innings later, again with a full count, he measured a Price hook and, somehow, hooked it into the second tier of the left field bleachers.

Every fan in Yankee Stadium, and no few fans around the country who normally think of the Yankees the way they think of irritable bowel syndrome, though they may (and often do) respect individual Yankees, saw Jeter's entire career dance before their eyes as he broke out of the batter's box.

This was the sweep down the infield and the back flipped ball to bag Jeremy Giambi at the plate. This was Mr. November taking Byung-Hyun Kim over the fence to win Game Four in 2001. This was catching the foul against the Red Sox, and not flinching as his running momentum took him over the rail, over the photographers' box, and three rows into the stands and onto his face just after he caught the ball.

Every arm in the Yankee dugout jerked toward the heavens, clenched fists exclaiming, as Jeter trotted around the bases. The ball landed as he rounded first. He crossed the plate into a bear hug from Jorge Posada, another distinguished Yankee veteran worn down by time, as the dugout and the bullpen poured out to congratulate him, and the Rays applauded him.

The best part was that the one-out bomb tied the game. Curtis Granderson followed with a full-count walk, Mark Teixiera singled him to second, and — after Robinson Cano swished on 2-2 Russell Martin singled home Granderson, giving the Yankees a 2-1 lead before Posada looked at strike three for the side.

Jeter wasn’t even close to being finished, though. With the Rays up 3-2, thanks to B.J. Upton’s two-run bomb in the fourth, Jeter led off the Yankee fifth with a first-pitch double to left and scored promptly enough on Granderson’s single. Teixiera singled Granderson to third and Cano scored him on a sacrifice fly to left. Jeter did his best to produce something in the Yankee sixth, too, his two-out single to right moving Brett Gardner (walk) to second, then joining Gardner for a double steal to set up second and third for Granderson, who struck out off Tampa Bay reliever Brandon Gomes for the side.

The frisky Rays got a little friskier tying it up at four in the eighth, when erstwhile Yankee (and Red Sox) Johnny Damon led off with a triple to the back of the yard and scored on Ben Zobrist’s followup single. And Jeter, the aging captain, saw and raised in the bottom of the inning, against another Rays reliever, Joel Peralta, singling home his heir apparent Nunez (leadoff double), with one out and a 1-2 count. The only spoiler was Jeter himself getting arrested for attempted grand theft second base for the side on a strike 'em out-throw 'em out double play.

Naturally, the 5-4 Yankee lead signaled The Mariano for the ninth. Just like the old days, he fed the frenzy in the manner to which Yankee fans and opponents alike have been only too long accustomed, more or less. He may be just a little more human of late; he may have his moments of vulnerability enough; but he is still The Mariano, and he is still not a man to be taken with a grain of ninth inning salt. Not when he opens with a pounding swishout of Sean Rodriguez. Not when he recovers from falling 2-1 on Kelly Shoppach to get the Rays late-game pinch-hitter and catcher to fly out to center. Not when he lures Justin Ruggiano to ground out to third for the game.

Who else comes into a game staring a milestone in the face, in the middle of a second season in the private hell of baseball aging before his public’s very eyes, and then reaches history on his second hit of an afternoon on which he’s going 5-for-5? And now, because he pulled out a couple of days before that surreal Saturday, you want to make Jeter, who didn't really belong there in the first place, the face of everything that's wrong with the All-Star Game?

You want to blame Jeter for all the other big pullouts? For The Mariano and Alex Rodriguez being hurt? For half the pitchers who might have made it having pitched Sunday? For the like of Albert Pujols, Joe Mauer, and Ichiro Suzuki not making the all-star team at all? For Andrew McCutchen's unconscionable snub in the fan voting? (He had to make the team as a substitute for another pullout/injury.) For the Game having been contorted into a Little League-like all-in, while being made concurrently to "count" for home-field advantage in the postseason, meaning the postseason's home field advantage, in theory, could have turned on some heretofore undistinguished Kansas City Royal or Houston Astro driving in or stopping the potential winning runs?

(Relax. Not only did the National League win the game, 5-1, but the home-field advantage was provided not by some barely-beyond-non-entity but by Prince Fielder sending a C.J. Wilson service over the left center field fence in the fourth, with Carlos Beltran and Matt Kemp aboard, overthrowing a 1-0 American League lead — on an Adrian Gonzalez bomb off Cliff Lee — for keeps.)

Paul Konerko, the Chicago White Sox first baseman, elected as the final man in a fan vote (as was Philadelphia outfielder Shane Victorino), would agree that Jeter has enough on his plate without being spanked for that:

"Look at the man’s record as far as respecting the game. He’s been there for the All-Star Game, for the game of baseball at all times. He’s played in that city, played that position, and been that guy and he’s never dropped the ball. And I’m not saying he dropped the ball this time. He’s been getting after 3,000 hits, which no one could imagine other than the 27 other guys who have 3,000 hits. And they didn’t do it in that city. The way I look at it is, cut him some slack. If there’s ever been a guy who’s bought a rain check for one of these, he’s the one. Let’s just move on and not make such a big deal out of it."

Unless you want to decide that one transdimensional afternoon that summoned up the best of his past — on which he became the first Yankee to make 3,000 hits and went 5-for-5 with two scored and two driven in in the bargain, equals all-star worthiness — Jeter really had no legitimate place in the picture this year. We should quit making him the scapegoat for what's wrong with the All-Star Game and make him, instead, the guy who struck an inadvertent but profound blow for what's left of its integrity.