DEREK Jeter isn’t bothered by the abuse he hears in Boston. He isn’t bothered by the abuse. He isn’t bothered by the T-shirts, some of which would make Opie & Anthony blush. He isn’t bothered by the fact that he’s heard 12-year-old kids shower him with all manner of ugliness, while their proud fathers stand next to them shouting twice as loud.
It’s never bothered him. It never will bother him.
But it does surprise him.
“I guess I wasn’t thinking it through,” Jeter said yesterday, a few hours before the Yankees and Red Sox would wrap up their first Yankee Stadium series, 10 days before they would renew their relationship all over again in Fenway Park. “I figured once the Red Sox beat us in 2004, things would be different. Maybe there’d be less – I don’t know – anger?” He smiled.
“I guess what I didn’t figure on,” he said, “is that now they have bragging rights to remind us about, which is something they never had before. So I guess it’s going to go on that way until we get them back.” Another smile.
“And then they’ll find another reason to hate us,” he said.
Jeter is a curious study in the matter of the Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, a benchmark for just how elevated the passions and visceral realities things are on both sides of the great abyss. Time was, Red Sox fans could stand up and cheer Joe DiMaggio, even if he walked into Fenway and knocked a couple over The Wall. Time was, Yankee fans could politely applaud Ted Williams when he’d come in and go 3-for-5 with an upper-deck moonshot against Allie Reynolds or Eddie Lopat or Whitey Ford.
Billy Martin was never cheered in Boston, which is likely due to either a) the one-sided fight he had with Jimmy Piersall under the Fenway Park dugout in 1950; or b) this quote, authored in the final hours of the 1977 season: “Second place fits Boston. Second place for a second-rate town.” Things probably changed forever when Carlton Fisk and Thurman Munson became arch-enemies, because those were exactly the kinds of players for whom an older generation of Yankees and Red Sox fans would have given respectful, enthusiastic applause. But they hated each other for most of their careers, and that dislike easily seeped into the grandstand. And from that moment on, it was no longer agreeable to show such even-handed respect. The etiquette has been amputated.
Still, Jeter is a different case.
“Actually, in a weird way, I hope no Red Sox fan ever does stand up and cheer for me,” Jeter joked, “because I worry about what would happen to him.” He has had a ground-zero seat for this latest conflagration of the great rivalry, and he’s been the one that Red Sox fans have targeted, almost from Day One. Yankees fans have shifted the Great Satans of their obsessions. It used to be Pedro Martinez.
Then it was Manny Ramirez. Nomar Garciaparra heard it for a while, and now it’s David Ortiz who absorbs most of the bile.
Of course, none of it compares to what Jeter hears in Boston.
“Here, at Yankee Stadium, they give it to Red Sox players pretty good,” Jeter said. “But none of them hear the same stuff I hear. I mean, you wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I hear.” Actually, I have. I spent a few innings on Sunday afternoon a few years ago in a vacant seat just behind the Yankees dugout, and I sat there with the express purpose of hearing what Jeter hears when he emerges from the dugout, when he stands on the ondeck circle, when he walks to the plate.
I am, as a rule, un-offendable.
But even I had a hard time believing what I was hearing. It was that bad.
“And that’s every at-bat,” Jeter said. “And it’s still the same way. It wasn’t about the curse or whatever. It was about us.” He smiled again. It doesn’t bother him, really, no matter how long or how loud or how vicious or how vile it gets. But it does surprise him.
“I guess beating us,” he said, “wasn’t enough.”