The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Thursday, May 9: at Colorado Rockies
When I'm in the starting lineup, which has been almost every day of the season since 1996, I think about nothing other than the game I'm playing, or the preparation for the next game. That probably goes without saying, but you have to say it, because otherwise people might form their own, mistaken impressions about how you spend your time. But when you're apart from the team for physical rehab, you have a little bit more time than you otherwise would to think about the big issues affecting the sport. Not much more time, because during the rehab itself you should be dedicating every spare thought to visualization exercises involving your triumphant, way-ahead-of-any-reasonable-schedule return to the field, the ensuing 15-game winning streak it will spark, and the unstoppable three-month march to the World Series made possible by the momentum-inspiring electricity of a Captain's return to a temporarily rudderless organization. That kind of mental focus is crucial to your recovery program.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, May 1: vs. Houston Astros
When you take two of three from Houston, it's hard not say "We should've taken three of three from Houston" because they're basically a minor league team, but one of those minor league teams that doesn't have any legitimate prospects, and will occasionally sign a Jose Canseco or a duck that can run the bases to sell a few extra tickets. Yeah, it's funny to watch them waddle around and listen to the noises they make, but you're not really there for the baseball. You're there for a sideshow. Call me a traditionalist, but I think base-stealing ducks and aging Cansecos have no place on a ballfield. You have to respect the game and put a credible product out there.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, April 24: at Tampa Bay Rays
I don't want to dwell on the game. It is what it is. Or was what it was. It didn't go our way. I wasn't there. That's not an excuse — I still take full responsibility. It's the Captain's job to be there for his team, and even when he can't be there physically, it's his job to provide leadership and inspiration remotely. All you can do is individually text every guy on the roster with words of encouragement, or words of mysterious depth, or words of subtle intimidation. You have to know what motivates each player and press his particular buttons. There's an art to it you learn over time. Not everybody's a positive reinforcement guy. Some guys like the fist bump, the friendly tap on the top of the helmet. But some guys you've got to reach other ways, like showing them a photo of an empty locker in the Scranton clubhouse with their name on it, or by refusing to talk to them for an entire month because they missed a cutoff man. One time somebody woke up bound and gagged inside an equipment bag on the Grand Concourse sidewalk.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, April 17: vs. Arizona Diamondbacks
I'm not gonna lie. I'm disappointed that the medical staff has decided to scale back my rehab. But you just have to trust that they know best about some things. Not everything, but some things. They have their MRIs and their CAT scans and their X-rays, and as far as you know, the machines are telling the truth, they're not programmed by the Red Sox or Orioles to slow down your recovery. Still, you always think you know yourself better than anybody else. When you're a professional athlete, you have to be in perfect tune with your body, to listen to whatever it's trying to tell you. Sometimes you're going through your warm-up, and your hammies might whisper, "We're a little tight today." Or your ribs say, "That last swing wasn't great, might want to be careful." Or maybe your ankle, the one that cost you and the team the postseason, the one that's keeping you from rejoining the guys as fast as possible, goes Hey, slow it down a little. Things aren't optimal down here. Better safe than sorry.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, April 10: at Cleveland Indians (Rainout)
When you're on the DL, every day feels like a rainout. You try not to dwell on what a depressing thought that is because no one's rehabilitation was ever sped up by negative thinking, but sometimes it's hard not to let the inky storm clouds of despair roll over you and wash away all hope that you'll ever play another big league game. Yeah, I know that was a very dark thought. But my journaling coach tells me that it's OK to embrace the darkness every once in a while, that's it good to get those thoughts on paper. They have to go somewhere. Better into your diary than into your life. Words on a page are so much easier to deal with than emotions in the real world. This is a safe place. No one's going to read them but you. You can say whatever you want here.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Monday, April 1: vs. Red Sox, Opening Day
Opening Day. At the Stadium. Versus the Red Sox.
CC on the mound. Pettitte in the dugout. Mo in the bullpen.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Thursday, October 18: at Detroit Tigers (ALCS Game 4)
I don't even know the final score. But I do know this: There is winning, and there is misery. A wise man said that.
But that doesn't quite capture the whole truth, does it? You hate to be presumptuous enough to think you can improve on something as great as that, but under the circumstances, you have no choice but to try. The only way out is through. (A different wise man said that one, I'm assuming. Two all-time sayings seem like a lot for a person to accomplish in a single lifetime, unless that person is Yogi Berra, and neither of these sounds very Yogi.)
There is winning, and there is the total death of happiness.
By Mark Lisanti at
Robert Sabo/NY Daily News/Getty Images
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, October 10: vs. Baltimore Orioles (ALDS Game 3)
Games like tonight's are why you play baseball: to compete at the highest level, against the best competition, with everything on the line.
To be a part of the game's incredible history, and to see history being made right in front of your eyes.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, October 3: vs. Boston Red Sox
If you're not careful, it's easy to let yourself start believing narratives. The Orioles are a Team of Destiny. The Yankees are a dedicated bunch of experienced, professional, fairly compensated superstars who are "too dependent on the home run" and occasionally have some difficulty getting the "big hit with runners in scoring position." The Red Sox "tanked their entire year, which involved hiring the worst possible fit for a manager and trading away virtually every big name on the roster, just to have the opportunity to hold the Yankees' fate in their hands on the last day of the season and exact revenge for Tampa's impossible comeback in Game 162." You hear these things over and over again as September bleeds into October, repeated by every media member, fan, and suggestible player who spends too much time reading sports blogs. And pretty soon, everyone comes to believe these stories by sheer repetition, especially that last one, which Mark Teixeira wouldn't shut up about for weeks. You guess a guy starts to get paranoid when a calf strain puts him on the bench for the most important games of his career.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, September 26: at Minnesota Twins
It's been a crazy month. Baltimore has been relentless. You keep waiting for them to go away, but then you ask somebody on the team who's watching the standings if they've fallen back to a safe distance yet, and they kind of just shake their head and get a glazed look in their eye, like you just asked them to go check the basement and they're totally convinced there are ghosts down there. The whole thing starts to feel more like an exorcism than a pennant race, especially when you consider that there's compelling evidence that Buck Showalter is dabbling in dark forces he can't control. And then there are the stories the guys tell you about how they heard Camden Yards has been receiving regular shipments of live goats since late August, or that Peter Angelos has been aging in reverse all season, or that in some translations of the Bible it was actually an oriole, and not a snake, that led to the fall from Eden. At some point, as Captain, you just have to tell everybody to stop worrying about that stuff and just go out there and play to win, even when you know there's probably a lot of truth to the paranoid whispers. That's not lying. It's leadership. There's no point in pulling back the curtain to reveal the man in the orange-and-black robes mixing pine tar with fresh chicken blood. That just spooks people.
At the end of the day, they're just another baseball team. Even if they're getting a little extra help to keep things interesting.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, September 19: vs. Toronto Blue Jays
Let's play two! There's really nothing better than a doubleheader. Sure, you never get to play them anymore because the owners and Bud Selig don't want to sacrifice the revenue, and the Players Association rightly protects its members from this kind of reckless, dangerous overwork, but in theory there's nothing more fun and satisfying than an 18-inning day of baseball. Well, some of the others guys got to play two. Girardi rested me in the first game because he wanted to be careful about my ankle, a decision which, if you know anything about me, I was 100 percent against, because I am not dead, nor even paralyzed from the waist down. My philosophy has always been: If you're well enough to breathe without extraordinary measures, you're well enough to play. I wouldn't even have objected to playing short in Game 1 while seated inside a wheelbarrow pushed by Eduardo Nunez. Sometimes you've got to think outside the box in these situations. There's no page in The Binder that's going to produce radical wheelbarrow-based solutions like this, I promise you. All that being said, I'm more than willing to take a seat on the bench when it's in the best interests of the team, which is statistically almost never.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, September 12: at Boston Red Sox
When you've reached this late point in the schedule, everyone's banged up. It's just a part of the six-month war of attrition that is baseball season. There's not a player out there who isn't nursing some kind of nagging hurt. Just going around the clubhouse, here are some of the health issues the team is dealing with, which you otherwise wouldn't hear about because we never make excuses about injuries:
Robbie Cano: vertigo with runners in scoring position
Alex Rodriguez: still recovering from a broken hand; pathological narcissism
Russell Martin: partial swing paralysis from right side of the plate
Nick Swisher: seasonal affective disorder
Ichiro: mild homesickness
Curtis Granderson: extreme empathy
CC Sabathia: 35 pounds underweight; obviously hiding full rotator cuff tear
Phil Hughes: total loss of feeling in pitching hand when gripping curveball
Freddy Garcia: toxic night-sweats
Cody Eppley: inability to pitch well in big situations since the All-Star break
Boone Logan: preoccupying fetish for YouTube videos where people in yellow squirrel costumes ride Sit-N-Spins until they vomit.
Rafael Soriano: just don't like the way he looks at people
And that's only 11 players. We've got a 40-man roster in September. Imagine the things that must be bothering the part-timers that the starters don't have time to acknowledge because we're too busy trying to win an uncomfortably close pennant race. Not that I'm looking at the standings yet, because I'm not.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, September 5: at Tampa Bay Rays
Writing a diary virtually every day during a 162-game season can be a really difficult undertaking, even when you've got Hall of Fame–caliber self-discipline. On a fundamental level, it shouldn't be that different than getting your pre- and postgame hacks in the cage, or taking infield practice, or running through your three daily hours of Total Excellence Visualization Exercises. But in practice it is a different thing, drawing from a skill set that isn't as automatic to call upon as your patented inside-out swing or jump-throw from the hole. And so there are many times — more than you'd like to admit — where you sit down before the blank page and just stare at it for a while, frustrated, wondering if you should just get up, flip on the TV, and see if you can finally clear some of those Gallery Girls episodes off the DVR. These are the nights when having a journaling coach on retainer really pays off. And so when I found it harder than usual to get going on tonight's entry, even after a much-needed pick-me-up in Tampa, I called him in New York, where he used to teach a Learning Annex class called "Unleashing the Diary Power Within" before I locked him down privately.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, August 29: vs. Toronto Blue Jays
Baseball is a truly global game, uniting both players and fans across countries, across continents, across the entire world. (Can you say the same about football? You can't. No one outside of Wisconsin really cares that much about it.) Today, we got a special visit from the Ugandan Little Leaguers, the first team from Africa to make the Little League World Series. The kids watched BP from the dugout — it must have been a thrill for them to see Andruw Jones smoke one into the second deck in left field, then sit down at home plate for a couple of minutes and take a few bites of an Almond Joy to build up his energy for his next swing. Not a lot of people get to see those kinds of "inside baseball" moments up close. But more exciting still was the clubhouse tour Joe Girardi gave the team. These are young players from very modest circumstances, so the opportunity to splash around in the Evian whirlpool while ordering custom-flavored Gatorade from the robo-clubbie had to have been a great time. And inspiring: They learned that if you believe in yourself, and work hard every day like all the major leaguers they met besides all the bullpen guys, you can one day be good enough at baseball to possibly avoid conscription in one of those awful child armies you see people talking about on YouTube all the time. They sky's the limit for these kids. If I can survive living in New Jersey for the first four years of my life, anything is possible.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, August 18: at Chicago White Sox
I've always had a pretty friendly relationship with the media. After each game, good or bad, I've been willing to meet them in front of my locker and answer every last question. I never cut the sessions short to hit the showers until the last reporter has walked away with all the sound bites he requires regarding my thoughts on always giving your best effort, the importance of winning, and trying to play the sport the right way. Some nights I'll say those things 10, 20, 30 times. Do you hear me complaining? You don't, because complaining's not a part of the job. But answering the same questions over and over again for 17-plus seasons is. So you take it one microphone at a time, and at the end of the day, you hope that the quotes are there.
