Now before I get bombarded with Yankee fan e mails calling me a gutless, hating Red Sox fan, let me get a few things out of the way.
1) Derek Jeter is a great Yankee.
2) Derek Jeter has been a wonderful superstar.
3) Derek Jeter belongs in the Hall of Fame.
4) I would have loved to have seen Derek Jeter in a Red Sox uniform.
5) I have praised Jeter on this blog with this post, this post and this post. And I defended Jeter FROM Yankee fans on this post. So I've been as positive and fair minded as a lifelong Red Sox fan can be about #2.
Did you catch all of that?
Good.
Now let's get to the heart of this.
He went from winner to WHINER with that press conference.
Ooooo... free agency was so tough.
Listening to him complain through that press conference was a little startling because he's always played the media game so well. But this should have been the easiest press conference in history.
"All the business stuff aside, I am proud to be a Yankee and hammer this contract out. I know they wanted me back and I wanted to come back. It took a little bit of time but we're here and let's win number 28."
Boom. Easy. Simple. Totally forgettable.
Instead we have tripe like "I was more angry at the process and how I was being portrayed."
Really?
You mean being portrayed as someone asking WAY more than the open market would ever get you?
Because that's what happened.
"I heard greed."
It's funny. So did we. We heard a guy who had already been paid incredibly well for his services and clearly well into the last half of his career essentially being asked to be paid AGAIN for what he did in the past.
But the worst thing was when he said "When the organization says, ’go shop’ when I said I wasn’t going to, yeah, I wasn’t happy about it."
Sorry, but I have to call B.S. on this.
You weren't happy about being asked to find what your actual worth on the open market was? You weren't happy being told "Hey, before we keep shoveling more money to you, how's about seeing what OTHER PEOPLE think your price tag is"?
I wrote that that was the only fair thing to do. To truly find the REAL market value of Derek Jeter and see if the Yankees would match it.
Guess what Derek? The Yankees wanted to make a decision on whether or not to keep you based on reality, not on Yankee prices.
And do you know what? When other teams do that, Derek Jeter has benefitted.
Other teams make decisions of whether or not to keep a player based on the actual open market price. And many times those decisions lead to teams saying "We're not going to match the market price."
And lookee here!
Jeter, did you like playing with John Wetteland?
Jimmy Key?
David Cone?
David Wells?
Roger Clemens?
Chuck Knoblauch?
David Justice?
Mike Mussina?
Jason Giambi?
CC Sabathia?
The Yankees got all of them either through free agency or salary dumps because their original teams didn't ante up.
So you had no problem when OTHER teams made decisions based on costs.
But not when it came to you.
You had to be paid like an elite player, even though you are not anymore, for your intangibles, for which you've been made a millionaire nearly 200 times over.
And he STILL got paid at least twice what any other team would pay him. The Yankees raised the offer even though no other team was bidding on him.
If you ask me it sounds like an awesome process.
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