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Keidel: Jeter's Retirement Will Mark The End Of The Yankees As We Knew Them

By Jason Keidel
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Normally, a New York team in repose would play before small, muted crowds. Like the Yankees, who are enduring a hollow block of games before autumn puts a frosty lid on their 2014 coffin.

But their house was oddly packed on Friday, like the subway cars churning behind the outfield walls every inning. We all know why by now. So forgive the pseudo-diary, the risk of redundancy. But we are, love or loathe the Yankees, archiving an epic bottleneck of years in New York City.

I was there, one more time, to see him, of course, but also to say goodbye to what he represents -- the Joe Torre dynasty, to the 1990s, to my 20s, to the time when I thought the good times were eternal.

That's because Derek Jeter's decorated life in pinstripes is about to end. And more than a few New Yorkers want a picture and a piece of him before he jogs into the dugout for the final time.

When I got there I was relaxed and pleased to watch a baseball game. The weather was perfect, the night a clear, chilly precursor to the playoff baseball we've become so accustomed to under Jeter's command.

As the innings flipped forward, an adolescent glee came over the audience as we cheered every move. When Jeter just made a perfunctory play, snagged a grounder, clipped a ball foul, or just huffed out a pop up, we clapped and stomped as though he hit that first November homer in the World Series.

Every gesture is now iconic. Like the eye-watering commercial that just aired, with Jeter strollng River Avenue to grip and grin with fans for the final time, Frank Sinatra glazing the ad with his flawless baritone, the last 10 days of his career will be made into a montage, a sad, baseball sonnet taped to our scrapbooks.

Jeter has that kind of visceral impact on us, his lore preceding every routine movement. It's hyperbolic and cartoonish, like all things New Yorkers romanticize. But it's okay. Jeter deserves even the distorted applause. And it's earned, unlike the love we heap upon pretenders like Carmelo Anthony or Rex Ryan, to whom we've attached similar sentiment, though they haven't a fraction of Jeter's traction.

The game actually began rather ominously, with Toronto jumping out to a 2-0 lead. Ironically, Jose Reyes played a role much of the night, the former Met scurrying around the bases, vexing Yankee pitchers who bent their necks back every few seconds to glance at his lead.

The Yanks came back, and even Jeter swatted a flare over the first baseman, his classic inside-out swing fighting off a pitch. As always, he played a role in a Yankees rally. When he ended his epic 0-for-28 slide in Tampa, I said he had one more trick up his pinstriped sleeve. And, of course, he made me prophetic, belting a homer the next day at home.

The Yankees won, 5-3, but the result was incidental. We came to see him, to thank him, to revive and relive a few memories, to metabolize the twin deaths of his career and our youth. And, maybe, to wince before the cold winter and even colder prospect of 2015, which represents the return of Alex Rodriguez, the anti-Jeter.

If Jeter is hot dogs and apple pie, then A-Rod is the intestinal mess mashed into the meat we eat. Like those delicious but disgusting batons of pork we gobble at the corner and the ball game, we don't want to know what went into making A-Rod a great player. We just wanted to watch without the stain of his sins on our psyche. Jeter was low-calorie, low-risk idolatry, nary a bone in his closet.

I'm not even a Jeter fan, at least not in the expected, drooling refrain of the average Jeter devotee. I'm a Yankees fan, and to be a Yankees fan is to buy into the mythology, the idea that we somehow inherited the history, that Ruth passed the baton to Gehrig, who passed it to DiMaggio, who passed it to Mantle, who passed it to Munson, who passed it to Mattingly, who passed it to Bernie, who passed it to Jeter and Rivera.

And we realized there was no one to whom Jeter could bequeath his ball club. For the first time since Clueless Joe proved us all wrong, there's no fertility in the farm system, no wide-eyed prodigy ready to slide the pinstripes onto his blessed body.

Looking around the park, it was obvious this isn't your daddy's Bombers. We endure the new, glossy park with its sterile, corporate walls, and the ten-buck beer, and the halls lathered with sponsors, and the apathetic fans buried into their gadgets, and the Abercrombie crowd, the martini bunch, who only look up from their iPhones when they hear the crowd cheer, jumping like baboons at the nearest red-lit camera. The goon who scowls in front of some sections, flexing a "Stop" sign, ordering you to flash a ticket before he allows you into the aristocracy of padded seats and waitresses and the murmur of the corporate crowd who came to the game because it's trendy, not because it's baseball. It's just not the same.

Some of us miss Jeter already. Some of us miss the old and only Yankee Stadium. Some of us miss the urine stench and stained bathrooms, the ancient, baseball-only smell of mustard and cigars and spilled beer, and Freddy limping around the old park with his pan, handing us that old spoon to bang on his hardware. Some of us miss an amalgam of everything.

So while we celebrated Jeter and his team, we also came to mourn. There was a symbolic burial this weekend, his last in pinstripes. Even if the Yankees were stacked with blue-chip prospects, there could not be another Jeter. The iconic shortstop arrived in New York at the perfect time, when the city and the Yankees were experiencing a boom, a confluence of timing and talent we won't see in some time, if ever, what with New York City more and more morphing into a tourist  pamphlet, void of the ethnic and cultural flavor we so savored 20 years ago.

Mets fans have been belching their bromides all weekend. so sick of the nth Jeter tribute. Some of that is fair, the clear overkill that comes with hero worship. Some of it is jealousy, the little brother complex that always befalls the Met fan. They had their Jeter, but let him go to Canada. Now it's just a struggling David Wright and rampant, rabid prayers that Matt Harvey can galvanize the young, gifted rotation into 2015.

But it's always been "wait till next year" with the Mets, who fittingly inherited that mantra from the Brooklyn Dodgers. Heck, the man who owns the Mets even patterned their new park after Ebbets Field and even devoted the Mets' home to the Dodgers. Just one of endless ironies and indignities of playing next door to the most famous team in the world. Now, without Derek Jeter, the Yankees are feeling forlorn, too.

We often complain about the arduous drive to see our local teams. Between parking, tolls and tires popped in potholes, it's a lot to suffer. But we did for many years because it was worth seeing the Yankees. Now, New York City baseball is also under construction. No. 2 is leaving us, and leaving the Yankees far away from No. 1.

Follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonKeidel

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