Carlos Beltran is Joe DiMaggio.
I was thinking that the other day: how similar they are as players. There are the obvious parallels: centerfielders, good, graceful defensive centerfielders. Good hitters: excellent on-base percentages, excellent power. Beltran, at his peak, was probably faster than DiMaggio was, but DiMaggio wasn’t slow. Both men played in New York. Both men had extremely brilliant postseason resumes.
Beyond that, DiMaggio and Beltran share a certain style of play; an ease with the game of baseball. As Casey Stengel said of DiMaggio: "Joe did everything so naturally that half the time he gave the impression he wasn’t trying." The same is true of Beltran.
Here’s another parallel: the most frequently cited statistic about Joe DiMaggio, the statistic that captures the kind of player he was, is that he hit 369 homeruns, and struck out just 361 times.
The most cited statistic about Carlos Beltran? 311 stolen bases, 49 times caught stealing.
Those statistics parallel: if DiMaggio wasn’t the most prolific slugger of his time, he was certainly the most efficient slugger; his power hitting didn’t come at a cost of a high number of strikeouts. Same thing with Beltran: he stole bases, but unlike most base stealers, he wasn’t caught often.
Beltran is not equal to Joe DiMaggio: I’m not trying to argue that. But Beltran is the closest version of Joe D. that the current generation of baseball players has, the player who is the most like DiMaggio.
So how come Carlos Beltran isn’t famous the way that DiMaggio was?
Derek Jeter is the most iconic player of his generation. It is safe to say that words have been written about Jeter than about any of his peers, including Alex Rodriguez. Many more words have been written about Jeter than Albert Pujols, though Pujols has been the better player.
Why?
That’s what this article is getting at: that’s our subject.
In an old article for this site, I made a brief aside about Warren Spahn:
…Warren Spahn was a reflection of his time, wasn’t he? I mean, weren’t the 1950’s in America a hard fight for consistency, for a kind of impossible permanence?
I suppose that each generation carries a specific number of wants or desires, wants that are shaped by external forces and experiences. Spahn’s generation bore witness to the terrors of the Second World War, and suffered the subsequent anxieties of the nuclear age. It is unsurprising that when they returned home, they sought stability over all else. It’s a generalization, of course, but I think that the desires of that era were stable desires: a family and a house in the suburbs and a job to work for forty years. They didn’t come back from the Second World War intent on changing the country. No: they just wanted to keep things together as best they could, for as long as they could.
Paul Simon said it better: "Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts."
Let’s run down the heroes of each generation, the players who were clearly on the top of their respective pop charts. The icons.
Ty Cobb.
Then Babe Ruth.
Then Dizzy Dean, during the Gashouse years.
Then DiMaggio.
Jackie.
Mantle and Mays.
Koufax.
Then Aaron.
Maybe Rose? Or Reggie!
Then Strawberry or Canseco.
Ripken, for a year.
Then Mac and Sammy and chicks digging the long ball.
Which morphed into Barry Bonds.
And then Jeter.
I’m sure I’m missing someone…it doesn’t really matter. There’s no ‘science’ about who counts as iconic, no metrics to look into. We’re just spit-balling, as the kids say.
Sometimes the most iconic players of an age are the best players….Cobb, Ruth, Mays. Sometimes, though, the most iconic players aren’t the best players. Reggie and Rose weren’t the best player of their era….they just fit the times. The big, transcendent moment in Aaron’s career happened near the end of it, when he was just a good player. Jeter hasn’t been the best player of his era, either.
Going into this list further:
I started with Cobb, which sort of ignores the long history of baseball that existed before Tyrus entered the game. I just don’t have as clear a sense of who the big stars of pre-1900 baseball were…King Kelly, obviously, but I’m not sure who else. I’m not sure who best fits that time, so we’re starting with Cobb.
What’s your sense of pre-World War I America? My sense, gleaned entirely from movies and books, is that it was a rough time; a transitional time. Americans and immigrants from Europe were crowding into cities, where they lived and worked in conditions that would horrify our modern sensibilities. I think that the first two decades were a time when people took risks; maybe I’m wrong about this, but I imagine the pre-war years as a time when ambition was rewarded. The people who rose to prominence were risk takers; people who pushed boundaries. Jack London was the great writer of this generation: Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea-Wolf (1904), White Fang (1906).
The defining characteristic of Ty Cobb, again gleaned from books and accounts, was his absolute determination. In this regard, I think that Cobb echoed the value of his time and place better than Wagner or Lajoie. Determination was the aspiration of the land: four decades removed from the Civil War, America was focused on seeing its grand experiment through. Skyscrapers were going up in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia; California and Alaska (or ‘Russian America,’ as it was called prior to 1867) were being civilized. It was an era of pushing, of striving.
At least that’s how I’d phrase it if this was a Ken Burns documentary. Maybe we can have him do the audio.
Ty Cobb was a dirt-poor kid who just pushed: trying to reach the big leagues, he’d send anonymous letters to Grantland Rice, talking up some kid named Cobb, trying to get Rice to put his name in the papers. He didn’t quit; he couldn’t be at ease.
The other icon of that era was Christy Mathewson: just hazarding a guess, but I’d be surprised if Mathewson engendered a tenth of the passion that Cobb did. People liked Mathewson, and I’m sure all of the moms wanted their sons to emulate Mathewson. But….I’d bet that most of the kids playing ball imitated Ty Cobb.
Or….Hal Chase. Hal Chase was very representative of his era: he was a corrupt, manipulative SOB, at a time when corrupt SOB’s were getting ahead in America. Chase was famous…he was far more famous than his statistical record suggests he should be. He was famous because he touched a nerve of that time.
Chase was famous in part because he was a first baseman who made an effort trying to play defense there. All of the people who observed him were agog about his defense. To modern fans who know 1B to be the position of rotund behemoths, it’s an odd thing: one hundred years ago there was a defensive 1B people wrote poetry about.
Well…Chase was a smart guy: decades on, it’s possible to conjecture that that was part of his plan: that he picked a position that a) was actively involved in a lot of plays, and b) required less skill, because a large part of the job is responding to someone else’s effort. Perhaps he thought that if he played the position with enough panache, show enough of something ‘new’ (if not particularly helpful), he could stick in the majors.
Babe Ruth was a fit for the Roaring 20’s….he was obviously perfect for that time; perfect for that moment. Babe Ruth might be the athlete most perfect for his era…counting just American athletes, it’s him or Ali. Ruth was ebullient at a time when America was ebullient. Ruth crossed boundaries; as a player he challenged a basic philosophy of the game and changed the game. As a man, he broke every rule every manager made for him. He was an orphan of low birth and questionable ethics, and he ascended to become the most famous man in America. He was a Horatio Alger character brought to life, at a time when post-War America was changing its rules.
I’d pick Dizzy Dean as the icon of the Depression. Dean was a fantastically popular player in his prime. The Cardinals, during the Depression, were the southern- and western-most team in baseball, and they had an ethos that seemed to fit those hard-scrabble times. He was cocky and funny and he couldn’t be bothered to learn the Queen’s English... he fit that time.
Lou Gehrig didn’t fit that time…Gehrig was a quiet, hard-working, shy. He didn’t fit the Twenties because he wasn’t nearly joyous enough, and he didn’t fit the thirties because no one had jobs to be hard working in. I love Lou Gehrig....when I was a kid I’d scour old baseball books for references to Gehrig. His story seems richer than any era…it has echoes of Greek tragedy. But he wasn’t the iconic player of his own era.
Joe DiMaggio was the next big star. Maybe he wasn’t quite the player that Williams or Musial were, but he absolutely lapped them in terms of stardom. Why?
I don’t think it’s merely numbers. A 56-game hit streak is impressive, but so is hitting .400, or winning a Triple Crown. Winning the World Series helps, and playing in New York helps, but I think DiMaggio’s status as the guy that my grandfather’s generation picked as their representative goes beyond World Series rings and a hitting streak.
I think….and this here is some broad speculating, because that’s what you get if I can’t use WAR…. I think DiMaggio became famous because he embodied the hopes that immigrant families had for their kids in next generation: a dream of fitting into the fabric of America, conforming to some mode of being America. DiMaggio was, of course, a great success on a successful team. But I think a central characteristic to DiMaggio’s icon status was the ease of his play, how seamlessly he fit into the game. Every account of him uses words like ‘grace’ and ‘finesse.’ No one looked the part of a ballplayer like DiMaggio. Off the field, he looked like a movie star, and then, when his career ended, he married a movie star. He married the movie star: he married Marilynn Monroe.
Why is all of this important? Because America was shifting towards assimilation; towards a sense of broader nationhood. The old divisions in American cities that had Italian and Irish neighborhoods were breaking down; the notion of ‘us’ was starting to take hold. Italian Americans weren’t Italians first; they started to have generations in the States, started to transition to a sense of ‘American-ness.’ No one made that transition look smoother than Joe DiMaggio.
In terms of cultural impact, the closest player to DiMaggio wasn’t Williams or Musial, but Hank Greenberg, the first great Jewish player.
Which paved the way for Jackie, of course.
It was Mantle and Mays next, both of them together…let the good times roll.
Koufax….Koufax was a counterculture’s kind of ballplayer: a skinny Jewish kid from Brooklyn who didn’t even try pitching until he was seventeen. As a young pitcher he had obvious talent and little success. Then, like he had flicked a switch, he dominated the game: 111-34, 1.95 ERA, 33 shutouts. He was a star in L.A. when L.A. was the new land; the place that the rest of the country dreamed about. Then he went away; like a lot of the music icons of that era, he disappeared from the scene at the height of his talents.
I don’t know that Aaron symbolized the tensions of the Vietnam era, so much as he happened into a moment when the social discourse was strained…the war in Vietnam was coming to an unsatisfying end, the Civil Rights movement had gained ground, the Watergate scandal was coming down around Nixon, and ABBA was winning the Eurovision song contest…it was a stressful time. The response to Aaron, the death-threats, the overt racism….it was a sign of the fracturing times.
The 1970’s are tough to pick out….I think that Reggie Jackson or Pete Rose were the next iconic players, the next players who everyone had an opinion about. Jackson was a talker, a braggart who had the abilities to back up his boasts. He was ‘me, first,’ at a time when self-aggrandizement was in vogue, a time when the fashion was to stand out. Reggie stood out: he was the man for that time. He wasn’t as good as, say, Mike Schmidt, but he was twice as famous as the Phillies third baseman. Rose had a similar egotism, but he matched it with a style of play that was anything-but-complacent. Whatever you think of Rose now, he worked to be a ballplayer.
Jumping into the 1980’s… I started following baseball in the mid-1980’s. From what I remember about that time, Strawberry and Canseco were the big names in the game. There were others: Gooden and Clemens, Eric Davis, Puckett, Mattingly….but my sense was Strawberry and Canseco were the biggest stars.
(This is a long aside. Feel free to skip it.)
The change that occurred in baseball in the 1980’s is a microcosm of a change in American life that was taking place then, one that has culminated, I think, in the Occupy movements being pepper-sprayed by overzealous cops in America. I’m talking about the disparity in wealth.
In 1980, Nolan Ryan signed the first $1 million dollar contract. At the time, the average income for a household in America was approximately $18,000 dollars. So Ryan’s income was equivalent to the incomes of 56 average households in America.
Salaries for professional athletes had been going up steadily before then, but I’d hazard that the 1980’s were when the salaries for star athletes crossed over a weird line: making ten times what an average family makes is one thing….you can still have neighbors if you’re making $180,000, and the average stiff is making $18,000. You don’t stand out; you are understood as a part of a larger society.
Making fifty, one hundred, five hundred times what an average family makes….that becomes another thing. Most of you know that the quality of life for winners of big lotteries typically decreases when they get their big checks. Most of you, if you thought about it for an instant, would be able to figure out why: having vast sums of money fosters isolation.
Think about going out to dinner with friends, one of those small rituals in life that makes it satisfying. If you’re like me, you probably end up splitting the bill most of the time, or you have some way of taking turns paying. Some sort of ‘I’ll shout this round/I’ll get next’ sort of thing.
If you went ahead and won the lottery, if you were suddenly $50 million dollars richer, do you suppose that you would continue doing that? Would that small ritual continue?
No. It would change. It would start gradually…you’d probably start picking up the bill. After all, you’re suddenly staggeringly wealthy, and you want to share your great good fortune.
Gradually, your friends would start expecting you to pick up the bill. You wouldn’t notice, and then you’d start to notice. Then, one day, you wouldn’t pick up the bill, and your friends wouldn’t either. Or…they’d take their time offering. You’d drive home wondering if your friends actually liked you, or if they were just coming around for a free meal.
Let’s say that your small ritual was going to some chain restaurant. Flush with new cash, going to Applebee’sisn’t going to cut it. With $50 million generating interest, you’d probably try to branch out a bit. Your friends, if they’re suddenly being asked to pay their tabs, would probably hem-and-haw about going to a place where the menu doesn’t have prices next to the entrees. And pretty quickly you’re eating alone.
This would be true for just about all the small things in your life that give you joy: all of them would be altered, in ways that you could not predict. This is true if you win the lottery, and it is true if you work really hard and contribute meaningfully to society and earn a huge salary for your work. Too much money isolates.
It’s just my opinion that baseball stars of the 1980’s crossed over a line; they reached a point of gross excess, where there were no more checks. Just looking at the highest salaries in baseball since 1980, and the average annual income in the US:
|
Year
|
Avg. Income
|
Highest MLB Salary
|
Player
|
# of Households that represents
|
|
1980
|
$18,000
|
$1,000,000
|
Ryan
|
56
|
|
1985
|
$24,000
|
$2,100,000
|
Schmidt
|
88
|
|
1990
|
$30,000
|
$3,200,000
|
Yount
|
107
|
|
1995
|
$34,000
|
$9,200,000
|
Fielder
|
271
|
|
2000
|
$42,000
|
$12,900,000
|
Belle
|
307
|
|
2005
|
$48,000
|
$26,000,000
|
A-Rod
|
542
|
Just my sense, but I think the stars of the 1980’s were the generation that crossed a line and just couldn’t figure it out. That’s the story of Gooden and Straw and Canseco: they passed a point where there was any way to understand their lives by setting themselves against ordinary lives; against the lives that they knew or recognized.
Which morphed, of course, into the whole steroid thing: if the 1980’s were about setting up new standards for excess, the 1990’s were about everyone wanting that excess; everyone expecting it. This was not merely true of ballplayers; that decade, which was the first decade I remember fully, was a decade of high optimism
Robin Yount was the highest paid player in 1990…he was paid the equivalent income for of one hundred households. Five years later, that number jumps to almost three hundred households. That’s crazy…that’s an exponential jump.
People blame steroids on salaries all the time: salaries make it worth the risk of using steroids. I wonder if the spike in salaries also had players think they were just not like everyone else: that they were magically exempt from the rules that guide the lives of you and me. I think they really thought that: I’d hazard that guys like Bonds, and Palmeiro and Sosa and McGwire really thought that using steroids was okay, that it wasn’t actually cheating. That’s why it’s taken them so long to come out and talk openly about what went on: they don’t see it as a problem.
Anyway…we’ve veered a little off course….let’s get back to Jeter.
Derek Jeter’s career Triple Crown line currently stands at 259 home runs, 1301 RBI’s, and a .310 batting average.
Chuck Klein retired with 300 homeruns, 1201 RBI’s, and a .320 batting average. He died in 1958, and was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 1980. Goose Goslin retired with a 248/1609/.316 line…he retired in 1938 and was elected in 1968. Edgar Martinez sits at 309/1261/.312 and is still waiting. All of them were great players. None of them enjoyed a fraction of the adoration that Jeter received.
Among iconic players, Jeter’s statistics aren’t particularly impressive….he’s just halfway to 500 homeruns, a mark reached by generational players Ruth, Mays, Mantle, Aaron, Reggie!, Mac and Sammy. He’s won no MVP trophies. He’s won zero batting titles, and has only led the league in runs (once), hits (once) and the always-talked about category of plate appearances (four times). He does have a lot of hits….that’s the one counting stat where he stands out the most.
I don’t say any of this to belittle Jeter’s career: he’s clearer a Hall-of-Fame player, and I’ll be happy when he gets in on his first year of eligibility.
What I’m trying to understand isn’t Jeter-the-player, but Jeter-the-icon. Jeter as the player towards whom a nation has turned its lonely eyes towards. Why was it Jeter, instead of the superior Pujols? Why was it Jeter instead of the DiMaggio-esque Carlos Beltran?
I think it’s the same generation thing…I think that Derek Jeter was just right for these times.
Sooner or later, textbook writers and bloggers and historians and novelists will try to capture what it was like to live in America during the first decade-and-a-half of this century. What the ‘sense’ of that time was like.
I think it’s safe to say that it’s been an anxious period, a time when division has become our default mode of contemplating our world. That’s certainly been the mode of our politics, and it’s been the common tenor of our attitudes towards each other. There had been a strong pressure to divide: to choose up sides, establishing an ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Red state or blue state. Religious or secular. DH or no DH. Pick your side, and defend it until the other side walks away in a huff.
I think….and this is more speculation….but I think that in a strange way, Derek Jeter has come to exemplify that conflict. Not intentionally, of course: I don’t think Jeter had any specific intention to be the baseball representative of our national mood. It just happened that way.
The ‘sides’ to interpreting Jeter are pretty plain. On the one hand you have individuals who are spending this last month of the season finishing off a hagiography of ‘True Yankee’ Derek Jeter. These are folks who take any criticism of Jeter as a personal affront. This side has as members the last gasps of old-school sportswriters, clinging to the notion that sports are some kind of morality play.
On the other side, you have people eager to diminish Jeter’s career in any way possible. If someone mentions Jeter’s postseason successes, the folks on this side will happily point out that Jeter’s postseason batting line almost exactly mirrors his regular season batting line. And it’s not enough to say that Jeter is a bad defensive shortstop: he has to be the worst defensive shortstop in history. His career WAR is barely higher than the career WAR’s of Trammell and Larkin, and his season-by-season WAR is less than both of those shortstops. He should’ve moved off shortstop when the Yankees got A-Rod. This side claims as their own the brilliantly sardonic wit of the Fire Joe Morgan writers.
This is the echo chamber that Jeter’s career has existed within: just about every article written about Jeter over the bulk of his career can be slotted into one of those two sides. Jeter landed in the middle, and both sides took aim.
What is remarkable about Jeter….what is potentially singular about Jeter’s status as the iconic player of his era, is how littlehis icon-ness relates to anything he’s done. A significant part of his resonance is based on coincidence. It’s a coincidence, for instance, that Jeter happened to start his career as the steroid scandal came to light, at a moment when sportswriters in America were desperately seeking a star who was beyond reproach.
It’s a coincidence, too, that his career has unfolded in an era where there is a split between traditional measures of a baseball player’s greatness, and new measures of greatness. Ten years earlier, no one batted an eye about good-hitting middle-infielders winning Gold Gloves, but by the time Jeter was winning his Gold Gloves, people were noticing, and they weren’t happy about it.
It was a fluke that Jeter was a Yankee: he was the sixth pick in the 1992 draft, which means that he could’ve been drafted by Houston or Cleveland or Montreal or Baltimore or Cincinnati. One of the Houston scouts stronglyadvocated for the team to pick Jeter, but they passed on him. He just happenedto fall to the Yankees.
It’s a fluke, too, that he joined the Yankees at the exact moment the franchise was getting its act together, after a decade of ineptitude. Jeter arrived just Steinbrenner and Co. were realizing the monumental advantages they had in revenue sources over every other team in baseball, just as their farm system was pouring out a deep base of talented players.
It was a fluke that he was one of a triad of super-famous shortstops in the American League, alongside A-Rod and Nomar. This grouping, in a sense, tripled Jeter’s fame: it was hard, in the heady days of the late 1990’s, to mention Nomar or A-Rod without mentioning Jeter. A lot of conversations spiraled into debates about which one was the best shortstop.
All of the attention and praise and criticism have come to Jeter: he has made almost no effort to cultivate good press, nor has he done anything to draw the critical ire of the sabermetric community. He is not eminently quotable, or particularly personable: his public image is team-focused and pretty bland. He doesn’t have a wife or kids, and he keeps his personal life very much out of the public eye. His charitable work, while admirable, is no more generous than what hundreds of players do. He doesn’t trumpet his greatness or complain about award votes or scoring decisions. He’s never, to my knowledge, disparaged WAR. In the small controversies that have come in his career (contract talks with the Yanks, all the stuff with A-Rod), Jeter’s default response has been to keep quiet and let everyone else talk. It’s worked brilliantly: he’s a master of professionalism.
This is the extraordinary thing about Jeter’s status as baseball’s icon: almost none of his fame has had much to do with anything he’s done….he’s mostly famous because he was the right guy for the moment: the player who best fit our age of division and anxiety.
So who comes next? Who will be the next iconic player?
I don’t think it’ll be Mike Trout. I love Mike Trout, but he doesn’t seem to generate any particular heat. He’s very easy to love, and just about impossible to dislike. He plays on a ‘nice’ team: I don’t know that there’s a big population of fans who actively dislike the Angels. Who are their rivals? Oakland? Meh.
Bryce Harper has a better chance of being iconic: though his performance on the diamond is maybe 30% of what Mike Trout’s done, he engenders a lot more controversy. He’s a hard-nosed player in a way that Trout isn’t: you have a sense, with Harper, that he really wants to win. Or not win, actually….he wants to succeed. I don’t know if there’s another player in baseball who looks more pissed off when he makes an out than Harper.
Harper has a nice sense of theater: he seems to play to the moment in a way that Trout doesn’t. He plays in Washington, which is a big East Coast city. He’s cultivates a satisfying rivalry with the Atlanta Braves, baseball’s current guardians of morality. He’s arrogant and talented, in the vein of Reggie or Cobb. He’s quotable: "That’s a clown question, bro" is the best line from a baseball player this decade. While Harper trails Trout in career accomplishments, he seems to draw attention to himself in a way that Trout doesn’t. If I had to pick anyone, I’d go with Harper.
Yasiel Puig is another contender: as a player he’s as brilliant as Trout, but he takes more risks than Trout does: if there’s a chance to throw out a runner, Puig’ll take a shot. Half the time he’ll nail the runner and half the time he’ll airmail the throw, but he takes risks. He’s the same on the bases: just the other week he tried to score on a double-play grounder. It was a bad decision, but it was entertaining, too. He keeps opponents on their feet.
Jose Fernandez has a shot. The most endearing quality about Fernandez is the joy he takes at playing the game. He just loves it….he loves playing baseball. That seems a ‘light’ thing to build icon-ness around, but there’s always a possibility. The last iconic pitcher was Pedro Martinez, who was cut from the same cloth as Cobb: smart and gifted and profoundly competitive. The difference was that Pedro possessed a humor that Cobb or Hornsby or Ted Williams utterly lacked: there was a sense of mischief with Pedro. Fernandez is like that.
And maybe it’ll be Trout after all. Maybe, after twenty years of arguing about Derek Jeter, we’ll all come to a consensus on the next guy.
Ah, I wouldn’t bet on it.
David Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com