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 23: vs. Kansas City
Some kid named "Will Smith" made his big-league debut against us tonight. Now, I know what you're thinking: That kid has the same name as Will Smith, a very big Hollywood actor who's starred in all kinds of huge hits, like that movie about the magic seven-pound heart, and it must have been a big struggle to get through the minors with everyone calling you "Fresh Prince" and "Hitch" and "Six Degrees of Separation" or whatever. I'm sure it was. And it probably didn't help matters that before the game, the real Will Smith, who's a very close personal friend, called me up and said he was suing this kid for trademark infringement unless he changed his name to "Bart Johnson." (I have no idea why he picked "Bart Johnson," but I assume he has his reasons — he's a very deliberate guy.) But in this league, no matter how many movie stars with the same name are threatening to have their lawyers take your per diem and light it on fire in front of your children, you still have to go out there and get the job done. Anyway, we lit that kid up pretty good at the Stadium, in front of his parents, and you feel bad for him, but you also sort of don't. The thing you'd probably feel bad about would be if you called up your movie star friend after the game to tell him "finish him off" and he said, "I'm going to be the nightmare he never wakes up from" and then laughs that very famous laugh. If you did it, which maybe you didn't. The whole competition thing can get pretty dark sometimes, or so people tell me.
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 16: at Toronto
Girardi gave me the night off. This is how that conversation always goes when I see I'm not on the lineup card:
DJ2: Hey, Skip, I think you forgot to pencil me in for tonight. Joe: Let's give you the night off, Captain. Rest those knees. DJ2: I've got a pencil right here, I can just erase this Jayson Nix name and put mine on there. Is there even a Jayson Nix on the team? There's definitely a Derek Jeter on the team. Joe: Take a breather. We'll get you out there tomorrow. We're playing 16 in a row, gotta keep you fresh, Jetes. DJ2: I think The Binder says I should be playing. Take another look. Joe: [Opens The Binder and finds $50,000 inside. Hands me back the money and just walks away.]
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 9: vs. Tampa Bay
I don't want to talk about the game. Suffice it to say, it didn't go our way. Robertson loaded the bases in the ninth with nobody out, gave up four runs, and blew his first save as our new closer. Yeah, we can all talk about how much we're going to miss Mo, but D-Rob hadn't given up a run since last September. (I know this because every reporter at my locker mentioned it. Guess that was a "thing" in the press box tonight.) Is pitching the ninth really that much harder than the eighth? I'm not a reliever, I actually play baseball for a living full time, so maybe I'm not the best person to speak to that difference in the alleged "closer mentality." Anyway, Davey Robby be fine. He's the guy. Or maybe Sori. Let's not get too wedded to one "the guy." We're deep in the pen, it's more about finishing games we're winning than labels.
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 2: vs. Baltimore
If it seems like I'm always writing how I'm worried about how badly X player (Phil Hughes) or Y player (probably also Phil Hughes, but sometimes Freddy Garcia) is performing, it's because this is a private space to record my secret thoughts, and it's healthy for me to have a safe place to share. You can't really approach a guy in the clubhouse and say, "Wow, you really freaking stink right now. Please stop stinking. You're making me uneasy with your failure." That's just not positive, and positivity is probably the most important element of being an effective Captain, even if it's insincere. So to get out the negativity, you write the truth in your diary, or you roll up the windows on the Rolls on the drive home and scream until your eyes throb, or maybe you take a black crayon and do like crude little sketches of the people who are interfering with your peace, then you take the red crayon and you scratch them out real violently. It's not voodoo, it's therapy, please don't dismiss a healthy process endorsed by a licensed therapist as black magic, that's close-minded. I guess this is where I should mention Ivan Nova's 15-game winning streak ended. Against Baltimore. You hate to dismiss Baltimore just because it is Baltimore, but at the end of the day, it is Baltimore.
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.
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 18: vs. Minnesota
April baseball is always a little rough. The spring training rust isn't totally gone, and nobody's really ready to perform at their optimal level, but everything still counts. Yeah, I'm hitting .378 coming into the game and .389 after according to Scotty the ball boy — his name is actually Brian, but come on, he's Scotty — but that's not what I care about, so I had that kid scrub my locker with a Stay-at-Home Barbie Swiffer for telling me my batting average. I only pay attention to stats that begin and end with a capital W. And don't tell me there's some new nerd stat like WxRFSW or something like that. I'll make you circle every "Hatteberg" in Moneyball. (I'm not even kidding.)
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.
Tuesday, April 10: at Baltimore
The first week of the season is always exciting. Except when you drop three in Tampa and then find yourself in Baltimore. Baltimore, right? Nice stadium, but there's a reason they set The Wire here. The Wire guy didn't just throw a dart at a map and say, "That's where I'll set my story about the systemic failure of an American city." If he did that, Omar (how cool is he, you know? Indeed!) could've been robbing dealers in San Antonio. Bigger dart target, a lot closer to the middle, only a crazy person would try to hit a tiny dot in the Mid-Atlantic region. Anyway.
