HOF 2020

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HOF 2020

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1johnandlisa
Jan 21, 2020, 10:13 pm

So Derek Jeter is in. One vote short of unanimous.

Larry Walker too.

Looks like there are about 100 books about Derek Jeter on LibraryThing. Are any of them good?

2rocketjk
Editado: Jan 24, 2020, 12:49 pm

>1 johnandlisa: I'm a huge Yankees and Jeter fan, but I've never read a book specifically about Jeter. The closest I've come is The Yankee Years, the Joe Torre/Tom Verducci book about Torre's tenure as Yankees manager. Mostly the book is really written by Verducci, with some memoir passages by Torre. The book is not always admiring of Jeter. What I remember most along those lines is Verducci's claims that Jeter fell down in his role as Yankees captain by not supporting Alex Rodriguez enough (or at all) when Rodriguez was having his famed problems in the post-season. Verducci says that Torre's decision to move Rodriguez so far down in the lineup, supposedly to take pressure off of him, actually had the opposite effect because it drew so much media attention and indicated the team had lost faith in him. Correspondingly, Verducci says that Jeter essentially left Rodriguez to twist in the wind by himself, never coming to his teammate's defense or showing public support. This was due to the lingering bad feelings between the two from Rodriguez's incredibly ill-considered public remarks about Jeter never having had to (paraphrasing, now) carry a team all by himself made when Rodriguez first joined the Yankees. Verducci presents several other reasons why Rodriguez was a hard guy to like during those years, but makes the point that as team captain, it was Jeter's job to support him in public, and his failure to do so hurt not only Rodriguez but the team as a whole. On the other hand, Jeter has always been a relatively private guy, and his function as the Captain had always been to lead by example, rather than to spend a lot of time providing cover for teammates or otherwise provide copy for writers.

Anyway, Jeter is clearly a first ballot Hall of Famer, and an all-time great at his position. The knock on him, as I'm guessing you know, is that he didn't have great range. Or, to put it another way, that his range was barely adequate. C'est la vie.

Anyway, I recommend the Torre/Verducci book, but otherwise, to your actual question whether any of the books about Jeter are any good, my answer is I don't know. My guess is that most of them are along the lines of either hero worship or hit pieces.

3johnandlisa
Jan 24, 2020, 10:29 am

Thanks for the Torre/Verducci rec!