Ruden Sports News

During a period when editors have had to think carefully about whether stories belong on the sports pages or police reports, Derek Jeter provided a welcome reprieve for a few hours on Thursday night.

It was validation that there are still a few heroes with the ability to transcend the games we play, and even make us forget our rooting allegiances.

While the Yankees, sports’ version of Apple, is a superbrand that the public either loves or hates, Jeter mostly transcended partisanship, a rather difficult balancing act.

Only the most ardent Yankee-hater is blinded by what Jeter represents. Whether he is the best, sixth-best, 10th-best shortstop of all time, it is irrelevant. No athlete should be put on the pedestal of being a role model, but given recent events, he certainly should be representative of the level of excellence, on all levels, that the people who play the games we root for should aspire to.

Jeter’s final game in the hallowed park that is Yankee Stadium not only magnetized us, but gave us the dramatic ending that not even the best in Hollywood could have properly produced.

As the headlines trumpeted on the back pages of the tabloids, it was indeed 2 Perfect.

There is not much I can add to the general narrative, which has been told by writers and fans in a much better position to comment.

All I can do is offer some personal reflection, as someone not knitted to the venerable Yankee pinstripes.

Truth be told, I don’t watch much professional baseball anymore, one of those who has fallen victim to games that drag on with too much inaction at a time I admittedly have a diminished attention span. I saw Jeter in person for the final time this summer, but my trip was not a pilgrimage, but rather to spend a pleasant evening with friends who happened to have an extra ticket.

I have a conflicted relationship with the Yankees. The Mets have always been my team, though for a period into the early to mid ‘80s, the Yankees were my “second” team. That seed was probably the need to root for a team with a better chance to win than the Mets. Which basically meant I had almost all of MLB to choose from.

I became anti-Yankee due to George Steinbrenner and his boorish antics, but that has become compromised in recent years by getting to know the team’s general manager, Brian Cashman, and seeing so many benevolent acts he has done to put a smile on the faces of people in need of a smile.

He will be unhappy for sharing this, but he told me years ago to reach out anytime, especially with young fans going through difficult times, he can brighten a day.

Cashman is a person impossible to root against.

That was my own background entering last night, though that is likely a digression that would not have made a difference. It was an evening not just for Yankee fans, but fans of baseball, fans of sports, fans of dreams.

The one team — really the only team — that I throw my unconditional allegiance to is the New York Giants. Those three hours each week are sacrosanct.

Yet there I was last night, watching the start of the Yankees game and, most surprisingly, during the 9th inning, when the Giants’ outcome was still in doubt, hammering the keys on the remote with the same rapidity I type these words.

When two Orioles hammered home runs off David Roberston in the top of the inning to blow a save and tie the game, he was vilified on social media. Did anyone really doubt he was, rather, an enabler for one of the memorable moments that remind us why we are fans?

How else for one of the most clutch athletes of this or any era to exit the home stage?

How else for Derek Jeter to, with his wooden wand, put the final words to the final page of his book?

How else to create a moment that was, in the end, 2 perfect?