The New York Daily News
Sunday, September 17th, 2006
Every day the Captain walks into the clubhouse with his grande skim cappuccino from Starbucks, answers questions at his locker, goes off to the training room, takes batting practice, takes the field on a sprint ahead of the rest of the guys, plays baseball without much more emotion than an occasional pumped fist.
There is something in Derek Jeter's routine, the clean lines and the gentle strides that looks familiar to a couple of old Red Sox.
He was born to pinstripes, never grandstands, never gives voyeurs a glance within. He has the unquestioned respect of a clubhouse where players carry enough MVP and Cy Young awards to fill a wing of a museum, and the same respect from those who play against him.
The old Red Sox players remember someone else like that.
"He's got a little Joe DiMaggio in him," says Bobby Doerr, the 88-year-old Hall of Fame second baseman who came into the game a year after DiMaggio and left at the same time. "You look at a player for what he does, for what he represents. That's the awe we had with Joe D."
Jeter, Doerr says, is worthy of the mantle.
"Right now, I think he might be the best player in baseball. There's nothing he can't do, for God's sake," says the Red Sox' 86-year-old legend-in-residence Johnny Pesky, speaking New England heresy. "He's the epitome of a Yankee."
There has been a quiet search for the modern DiMaggio ever since Paul Simon wondered about Joltin' Joe's forwarding address in 1968, although Simon was singing about more than a lost ballplayer.
Red Smith, maybe the greatest of all sportswriters, laid it out in the final column of his career in January of 1982, about why he maintained his faith that he wouldn't spend the rest of his days with middling, uninspiring ballplayers: "I told myself not to worry. Some day there would be another Joe DiMaggio."
They were the last words Smith wrote. There hasn't been one since.
Jeter is playing toward what might be his first MVP award this season - both Doerr and Pesky say he deserves it - or possibly his first batting title. DiMaggio had three of the former and two of the latter, in a career that lost three years to World War II. He was also considered the greatest centerfielder anyone had seen until the emergence of Willie Mays. By that standard, the Clipper eclipses the Captain.
But those who knew DiMaggio and have seen Jeter say the comparison is legitimate.
"They have the same kind of mannerisms," Yogi Berra says. "Joe never walked to the outfield - he always ran on the field, he always ran off, just like Jeter. (Players) all looked up to Joe. Joe did everything perfect like Jeter does. I knew Jeter as he came along; he's a loner a little bit, he likes to be private. But all the girls go after him. With Joe, it was the same thing."
Frank Torre, Joe's older brother, knew DiMaggio for years and has watched Jeter since he was a rookie shortstop and Joe was a new manager in 1996.
If anything binds Jeter and DiMaggio, it is their sense of occasion.
"Some people perform at a higher level when the chips are down and that's why it's important not to look at stats," Frank Torre says. "But look at (Jeter). One of them plays they still talk about in Oakland. The flip. That's leadership taking over."
In David Halberstam's book, "Summer of '49," he writes of how Charlie Keller was awed by DiMaggio's intensity when he had to rise to a moment, such as facing Bob Feller: "You could actually see the veins and muscles in DiMaggio's neck stand out, Keller remembered."
From his home in Nantucket, Halberstam says, "I think (Jeter is) more a real leader than DiMaggio was in some senses. DiMaggio was clearly the best player of his era, but he was very aloof, so the leadership was that he was the great DiMaggio and that he always played hard and that the bigger the game, the better he played."
Jeter, ever reserved, gives the expectedly demure response when asked about the comparison.
"I've heard people say it. It's flattering anytime you hear something like that. It's kind of unfair to him, though," Jeter says, sitting in front of his locker. "I've only been here a little while."
If there are similarities, they are accidental, Jeter says. "It wasn't like I molded myself after him. You can't be something you're not or you aren't going to be believeable."
There may never be another Joe DiMaggio in the way Paul Simon and Red Smith pined for one. Elegance has been replaced by hipness, swing by hip-hop. The counterculture DiMaggio despised is rooted in the game and baseball no longer dominates the cultural landscape the way it did in the 1940s, before television was common, before cable existed, before the NFL and NBA were viable leagues. In that sense, it would be hard for Jeter, or anyone, to be larger than the game. Alex Rodriguez might have been a candidate, recognized as the best all-around player in baseball, but he has been criticized too much for having a manufactured personality. People can get too close now, and lines show up in players' faces the way they never did on newsreel footage. Jeter's mystique might come from the fact that he has guarded his privacy with the same intensity DiMaggio did.
Dom DiMaggio, now 89 and living in Southeastern Massachusetts, admires Jeter, but he isn't so quick to dub him his older brother's successor.
"For one thing, we know that Joe was extremely graceful. On the field, his every move was just as graceful as can be," Dom says. "I think Jeter is a little more, not voluntarily showy, but Jeter plays hard and it shows. Joe, everything he did, he played hard, but he did it so smoothly and gracefully it didn't appear he was doing it hard."
Part of being Joe DiMaggio meant never letting them see you sweat. Ernest Hemingway saw in DiMaggio the perfection of grace under pressure, which is why he befriended him and had Santiago, the Old Man in "Old Man and the Sea" refer to him as "the great DiMaggio."
"I never seen him slide for a ball in the five years I played with him," Berra says. "He caught everything shoulder high."
The relationships with the media were different, too. Writers were sometimes part of the inner circle at Toots Shor's and other hot spots, but they knew they were never to share their private view of DiMaggio with the rest of the world.
"We used to ride the trains together. We ate with the writers, we drank with the writers," Berra says. "It's changed a little bit."
Inside the clubhouse there were only a few reporters, not the dozens greeting Jeter and his teammates, even for an unexciting mid-week game against a second-division team.
"Joe just sat at his stool, have something to read, smoke his cigarette. Nonchalant," Berra says. "He'd be there looking around. You say, 'Hi,' he says 'Hi' to you. Them days, they didn't have it like they do now. We used to park out in the street and walk in." Now fans in the Bronx are kept 100 yards away, reduced to shouting at players who walk from the fenced-in parking lot to the stadium entrance.
What Berra sees in Jeter that reminds him of DiMaggio is the command of the clubhouse. Coming to the Yankees 60 years ago, he says, there was no question DiMaggio was in charge.
"You were a little scared of him at first. You got to know him after a little while and it's okay," Berra says.
Even Joe McCarthy, the stern manager who guided the team through much of the 1940s, had a healthy respect for DiMaggio's place."
When Joe McCarthy started a meeting of players in the clubhouse once, Joe wasn't there yet, he got there about five minutes late," Dom DiMaggio says. "(McCarthy) stopped the meeting and they waited for him, Joe had his topcoat on, his jacket, he took them off. And Joe McCarthy said, 'O.K., we'll start all over again.' Joe laughed, McCarthy laughed; they understood each other. But they knew what the deal was."
Everyone around Joe DiMaggio knew the deal. If you were loyal, he would be loyal.
"If you did something with Joe that he didn't like, that was the end of it," Dom DiMaggio says. "And the person who had done it knew that he had made a mistake, and he knew Joe was right, and he admired Joe despite the fact that Joe cut him off because he knew he made the mistake."
It could be saying the wrong thing to the press, hot-dogging or loafing on the field, embarassing DiMaggio, being too familiar with him or breaking rules like bringing wives to the wrong occasions.
There is also some of DiMaggio's famous pride in Jeter, too.
Jeter has been known for freezing out transgressors as well, notably Rodriguez following the 2001 interview in Esquire in which he said Jeter never had to lead and wasn't as good a player.
When Ruben Rivera was caught stealing one of Jeter's gloves, it was ultimately Jeter who decided Rivera's fate, and Jeter decided Rivera should not be a Yankee.
When Jason Giambi fought to regain his teammates' respect following his all-but-explicit admission of steroid use, it was Jeter who signaled to the rest of the team that Giambi had paid his dues. On the other hand, when Rodriguez was being booed like a Bostonian at Yankee Stadium earlier this year, members of the team noticed that Jeter did not put an arm around A-Rod or tell fans that they should support their third baseman.
While Dom DiMaggio says he admires Jeter, he says it takes more than leadership or stoicism or elegance or greatness to claim his brother's legacy. It takes all of them.
"You'll get ballplayers that might have the statistics that might match Joe, but they might not match the overall person," he says.
For decades he has been hearing baseball people talk about the next Joe DiMaggio. He heard Paul Simon's song, heard Red Smith's vision that someday there would be another.
"Has there been one?" Dom DiMaggio says. "I haven't seen one come around."
For now, Jeter might come the closest.
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