Who is Derek Jeter?

I was listening to the Tampa Bay broadcast of the Rays/Yanks game on the way home from work, when one of the guys brought up what I at first thought was a completely moronic question. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how interesting of a question it was.

He set the question up thus: Michael Jordan was so dominant, he made the Bulls what they were. Is it possible that - keeping in mind that this is like comparing apples and oranges because they're very different sports - the Yankees made Derek Jeter? If he had been drafted by the Expos, would he still be the great Derek Jeter?

My knee-jerk reaction was "idiots, he was the number six pick in the draft, of course he would still be awesome."

But then you strip away the rings, the massive media attention (some of it self-inflicted - yes, we're talking about the Mariah years) and he starts to look more like a regular guy (or like the Rock had sex with a muppet... his words, not mine).

You put him on any number of small-market, not recently successful teams, and suddenly he's the one big talent on the team, with all the hopes of the club on his shoulders. And maybe he buckles under the pressure, or gets psychologically messed up a la A-rod, or he has a solid but largely unnoticed career as an above-average hitter, an average shortstop, a guy who gets drafted in fantasy baseball but not in the top 25. Yes, he has good numbers, and he's been above average for a long time, but his numbers aren't the things that fantasy players dream of.

This is in great contrast to what actually happened, where he came into a clubhouse where he wasn't a big shot, just a young guy with a lot of talent surrounded by a lot of other young guys with a lot of talent (Mariano Rivera, please stand up). Oh, and Don Mattingly.

I'm not sure how Jete became the face of the Yankees, except that he's always been a clutch guy. That's one of those intangible things that can't be counted in the stats (it's also a somewhat apocryphal thing... yeah, I remember him being clutch this time and that time, but I don't remember those 5 times he struck out to end the game). The Mr. November moment was truly special, for the city and the team, but even before that he was the Yankee darling. But I digress.

Instead of being "the guy" he was just "one of the guys," and it's impossible to say how much impact that had on him. Reading interviews with him (some in Joe Torre's horrific book, which will surely spawn another blog entry) leads me to believe that he was always very team oriented, but maybe that would have been tested had his team let him down more.

This is all a lot of "what if" and "maybe that" but it's interesting speculation. One of the main things that this internal debate (I got home before they finished discussing it on the radio, so I'm not sure what conclusion they reached) caused me to realize was just how difficult it is to think of Jeter NOT being a Yankee. Which, I suppose, was the point.

I really will blog about the Torre book at some point, and possibly the Minaya/Rubin ridiculousness, but for now, I'm going to enjoy the end of my DVRed Yankees game. If I had any artistic talent, I would draw a cartoon of Joba squashing thousands of those damn Cleveland bugs.