from the Star-Ledger

10/16/01

BY MIKE VACCARO
STAR-LEDGER STAFF

NEW YORK -- Blood splotches covered Derek Jeter's pinstriped pants. His skin reeked of beer. His back didn't hurt yet, but made no promises for what it would feel like at the other end of a six-hour airplane flight. His elbow was scabbing. His shoulder was throbbing. His jersey was flecked in blue paint.

He had never felt better.

He had never looked better.

"I'm beat up pretty good," he said, "but I feel okay."

He'd better feel okay. The Yankees had better make damn sure that everything is in working order by the time they step onto Safeco Field tomorrow night to engage in Game 1 of an American League Championship Series they could never have expected to see. And wouldn't have seen. Except for one thing. Except for one person.

"One guy doesn't beat you in baseball," Jeter said.

Only he did. He had. Across three of the most remarkable baseball nights you will ever come across, capped by last night's 5-3 close-out of the Oakland Athletics, Derek Jeter was everything for the Yankees. He is everything for the Yankees. He is the biggest reason the Seattle Mariners, winners of 119 games and counting, will enter the ALCS as the team with everything to prove, carrying the burden of having to purge the Yankees, winners of three straight World Series championships.

And counting.

"We're not going home until somebody beats us," Jeter said.

This has to be what it was like to watch Joe DiMaggio every day, in those years when DiMaggio was at the peak of his powers, capturing the imaginations of a generation of American baseball fans. DiMaggio, we are told, was capable of doing everything between the lines of a baseball diamond. And, even more important, capable of doing anything.

Jeter?

Jeter can do anything. He reminded us of that Saturday, when he made the play that turned the entire series around, flicking that impromptu relay that barely beat Jeremy Giambi and barely kept the Yankees breathing. It is a sequence you will see again and again over the next hundred years, alongside Willie Mays' catch, alongside Kirk Gibson's home run.

Unless it is replaced by what he did last night, top of the eighth inning, stalking a Terrence Long popup that was drifting toward the temporary seats along the third-base line. The A's had a man on first. There was one out. Jeter understood that with a team such as Oakland, you needed to get outs wherever you can find them.

Even if it means diving into the stands after them, disappearing into the box seats, landing on the concrete floor, receiving a Budweiser shower for your trouble.

Holding on to the ball. Getting the out. Making like the great DiMaggio, who played with fire every inning because, he said, someone might be seeing him play for the very first time. Such is the treat we get with Jeter, watching him every night, but especially on these October nights, when he is as good as any player who has ever played. Ever.

"A once-in-a-lifetime player," Yankee reliever Mike Stanton said.

Did we mention that he had two hits, too? Did we mention that those two hits gave him 87 for his postseason career, one more than Pete Rose, more than any player who has ever played in October? We should mention that. Because Jeter surely won't.

"That stuff doesn't matter," he said. "That stuff is just things to talk about later on, when the games are over. Winning is the only thing. Around here, that's the only thing worth talking about."

Around here, the Yankees are still in play, still worth talking about, because Jeter refuses to let them be anything else.

"This kid, from the day I first saw him, he has that look in his eye," said Joe Torre, who thought he'd seen it all in his baseball lifetime, before Jeter forced him to expand the boundaries of his imagination.

"It's a look you don't teach. It's a look that says you have a fire in your belly, a love for the game and for the competition. This kid thinks cool in very hot situations. He never has any regard for putting his body in peril or being embarrassed with a bad swing. He's a true leader at a very early age for me."

He reminds everyone of what's possible when genius meets passion, when raw talent intersects with raw emotion. He will remind the Mariners of all of this shortly, don't worry. He will make sure the Yankees hang around the ALCS long enough to keep the M's thinking. Wondering: What will he do now? What will he do next?

With Jeter, you never really know until you see it.

And even then you're not so sure you really saw it. Until he comes up for air, bloodied and bruised, 56,642 voices chanting his name at once, louder, louder, loud enough that it moved Jeter to doff his cap in the middle of an inning.

Surely loud enough for them to hear it up in Puget Sound, where the Mariners are waiting to see if those 119 victories will matter even a little bit against the defending champs.

Wondering, no doubt, what Derek Jeter has in store for them.