Batting Derek Jeter second is all Joe Girardi can do

On Thursday, Ken Davidoff of the New York Post published a column in which he quizzed Yankees manager Joe Girardi on why Derek Jeter and his .267/.315/.319 averages are batting second. Girardi’s answer was simultaneously a lie and a cop-out: “It’s not like we have a bunch of guys hitting .300. So that’s why we’ve kept it.”

First, .300 has nothing to do with it. Girardi knows that -- Nick Swisher, career average of .256, spent the equivalent of a full season batting second for him during his four Yankees years, and Curtis Granderson and his .250 average got 200 games up there as well.

As Davidoff points out, there is no way to parse the Yankees statistics such that Jeter isn’t one of the worst hitters on the team. Given that, given that long exposure to Girardi shows that the man has a brain, the manager is pretending to be less smart than he actually is. Why? Because he knows that messing with Jeter in his farewell season is just not worth it.

Does that make Jeter bigger than the team? Damned straight it does. Davidoff says, “You could argue the Yankees are prioritizing the ego of their fading legend... Do the Yankees have enough room for error to bet on one last Jeter hot streak?”

Heck, no. Of course they don’t. I am going to embark on the perilous and generally out-of-bounds attempt at mind-reading, but I suspect Jeter could go 0-for his-next-50 (which roughly describes his August as it is) and Girardi won’t move, bench, or mess around with him in any way. The negative attention, the manufactured controversy, just wouldn’t be worth it even if it costs the team a pennant.

Two examples from Yankees history: Joe DiMaggio batted fourth for almost his entire career and did so almost exclusively after 1937. It was a point of pride with him. Actually, if you read enough about DiMaggio it seems as if almost everything was a point of pride, as if his whole inner life was devoted to a 24-7 quest to be respected or not-offended.

In 1950, second-year Yankees manager Casey Stengel was looking to put DiMaggio in his place. DiMaggio played when he wanted to play and when he was on the bench he and Phil Rizzuto would sit there and openly say rude things about how clueless the old man was. DiMaggio was still very good, but was aging and had had an up and down season by his standards. First, on July 3, Stengel randomly put him at first base. That was humiliation number one. Then, on July 21, he dropped him to fifth in the batting order. Subsequently, he benched DiMaggio for “rest” that Joe hadn’t asked for. In each case the press blew up the story and DiMaggio, while mostly playing it cool in public, was privately outraged.

Roughly 20 years later, Stengel joked, “They said I didn’t like him, but I played him. What more could I do than that?” DiMaggio was undoubtedly not satisfied with that answer.

Closer to our own time, you can recall the media assault that followed Joe Torre’s demotion of Alex Rodriguez to the 8^th spot during the 2006 Divisional Series against the Tigers. Once that seemed like something worth caring about. Maybe it was. Either way, the result was the same -- a lot of noise, a disgruntled player, a besieged manager, a distraction that wasn’t worth the effort. The Yankees are followed by more media than any other team, a floating circus that crowds their clubhouse wherever they go. Ned Yost probably doesn’t deal with as much media all year as Girardi does in one week. If you sign with the Yankees you take that on knowingly, but it looks exhausting and it’s easy to imagine that wanting to avoid dealing with more of it might torque one’s thinking in one direction or another.

Derek Jeter isn’t who he was. He hasn’t been, in different ways and for different reasons, in four of the last five years. DiMaggio retired after the 1951 season, not wanting to reach this point. Jeter didn’t. The Yankees were either willing to gamble on an unlikely rebound or they figured they would make enough money on a farewell tour that they didn’t care how a one-legged double-play machine (on offense, not defense) would affect their chances. They were right: Attendance per game is up by about 2300 over last season, the third-highest boost in the majors. The team is hanging in there, but it’s lackluster, so it seems fair to assume that the increase is due to fans wanting to come out to get a last glimpse of the Great Man.

Baseball players can be great men and still have reached the point of obsolescence. The Yankees made a Faustian bargain, turning the season over to nostalgia. Once committed, you can’t back out without courting the perception of insult. It’s not that Girardi is stupid. He knows that dropping Jeter in the order would mean that over the season he would get a few more plate appearances from a better hitter and a few less from his incredible shrinking star. Normally, that would be justification enough, but one suspects that Girardi knows that all he has to gain is a postseason slot, and in this case it’s not enough.