Derek Jeter – Mister November

Derek Jeter – Mister November

[paypal_donation_button]Derek Jeter – Mr. November

He never won an MVP. That’s a weird way to start an article about Derek Jeter, but it’s true. There aren’t a ton of things he never did. Weirdly, that’s one of them.

He finished 10th in MVP voting in 2000, 10th in 2001, 10th again in 2005, 7th in 20012 (at the age of 38!), 6th in 1999, 3rd in 1998, and 3rd in 2009. The closest he ever game to hoisting the trophy was in 2006, when he finished 2nd to an excellent-but-not-quite-THAT-excellent Justin Morneau.

The fact that he never claimed the trophy won’t tarnish his legacy. He put up MVP-caliber numbers in Pinstripes for a decade in the heart of the steroid era, when MVPs were bought and sold cheaply. In any other era, his offensive numbers would’ve been superlative, instead of merely consistently excellent.
He did just about everything for the New York Yankees. He had 3000 hits, then he added almost 500 more for good measure. Let’s talk about that 3000th hit, though. It was a home run off David Price, in Yankee Stadium. When asked how he came up with such a hit (his fifth of the day) on such a pressure-packed occasion, he nonchalantly responded: ‘I didn’t want to hit a slow roller to third base and have it be replayed forever.”

Jeter was never the rangiest player, but he made the most of the range he did have, and won five Gold Gloves for his trouble. Critics say that he made the average play look spectacular, but if he’d worn any other uniform, he would have been showered with praise for hustling to the very edge of his ability.
He never hit 30 home runs in a season, but he finished his career with a more-than-modest 260 round trippers. He also never faced any allegations about cheating or PED use. It might sound like I’m damning the man with faint praise. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Instead of swinging for the fences, Jeter put the ball in play, relentlessly, and to the tune of eight 200-hit seasons. That’s a lot. As of 2015, it’s more than everyone not named Pete Rose, Ichiro Suzuki, Ty Cobb, and Lou Gehrig.

Jeter wasn’t just Mr. Reliable, either. That would sell him short. He was Mr. November. In addition to all the numbers, and all the brilliant consistency, Derek Jeter had something else: a flair for the dramatic.

Many new-school baseball thinkers will tell you that ‘clutch players’ don’t exist. They’ll show you charts and stats that have seemingly been invented for just this occasion, and they’ll make a compelling case. They’ll boil the numbers down, until the great game has been reduced to a flavorless paste—and they’ll make some really good points. There is a tremendous amount of “noise” in baseball statistics. Clutch hitting is too clever to be caught out in the open on a stat sheet, though. It hides between the numbers, in the recesses of our minds. You can catch glimpses of it, in the wild, where they actually play ballgames.
You can catch glimpses of it in awards like All-Star Game MVP and World Series MVP, and in nicknames like Mr. November.

You can scent it in stats like the .371 Jeter hit while down 0-2 in 1999. How crazy-difficult to hit .371 while down 0-2? The next year, in 2000, Major Leaguers hit .187 in all 2-strike counts combined. So, if you take the average Major-League ballplayer, put him in a less difficult situation than Derek Jeter was in, and then DOUBLE his batting average, he’ll hit almost exactly the same as Jeter did in those 0-2 counts.

He earned his nickname four-minutes after midnight on November 1st, with a 10th-inning walk-off blast in Game 4 of the 2001 World Series. This was the first November at-bat in the history of Major-League baseball, and it did not go to waste. That the Yankees ended up losing that series barely feels relevant: a blip in their dynasty.

That Jeter is remembered for that perfect moment feels? That feels very relevant indeed.