Jeter sends off Stadium in style

The boxscore will say Derek Jeter went 0-for-5, but he was still the star of the night. AP Tom Verducci's Mailbag Submit a comment or question for Tom. Name: Email: Hometown: Question: SEND

Derek Jeter missed the entire one-hour pregame ceremony in which the Yankees said their ceremonial goodbyes to Yankee Stadium. The captain, afterall, was busy getting himself ready to play a baseball game. He took treatment in the trainers' room for his badly bruised hand, took extra batting practice in the indoor batting cage and stretched on the floor of the Yankee clubhouse. By the latter stage of the ceremony, Jeter looked up from his stretching and discovered that he and Bernie Williams, his former teammate, were the only ones left in the room. Williams, the graceful former centerfielder, was still in the clubhouse because he would be the last Yankee introduced, the headliner on a program that included Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and Reggie Jackson.

"Bernie, I can't believe this is the last game," Jeter said.

"I know, it's a weird feeling, isn't it?" Williams said.

"It's so strange," Jeter said. "This place is all I've ever known. I can't even picture what it's going to be like next year. I can't even think what that will be like."

Today Yankee Stadium is gone, no matter what the palace across the street has plastered across it in gold filament. It ceased to exist as a baseball cathedral and American landmark upon the final out Sunday night. It is nothing but history and memories now. And Jeter will be synonymous with the place. Since the triple decks and the concrete were constructed in time for the 1923 season opener, an instant wonder of the sporting world, no player collected more hits at Yankee Stadium than Jeter.

The sportswriter Fred Lieb nailed it from Day One when he called it The House that Ruth Built. But this Yankee Stadium, the one with the 1974-75 makeover, belongs as much to Jeter as the original did to Ruth. A generation of fans will tell their grandkids, "I saw Jeter play," and the best stories will often take place in those clear, cool nights of Octobers past.

The boxscore will tell you that Jeter went hitless in the final game at Yankee Stadium. The boxscore stands as an inadequate historian. Jeter, the one Yankee fans will remember for coming up big in the big spots, had one more clutch performance left in him. Two days earlier, Yankees officials told Jeter that he should represent the team and address the fans at the final game. It was up to him what he would say.

Jeter received a brief scare before the game, just after he was done stretching and made his way to the field, when a Yankees official told him to go to a table set up behind home plate.

"I have to talk now?" he said.

He had nothing prepared yet. But the table was set up so Hal Steinbrenner could present Jeter with a crystal bat and ball to commemorate his all-time hits record at Yankee Stadium.

Jeter didn't have much time to think about what he would say. After all, he still believed the Yankees had a postseason hope, and then there was the matter of his hand. Jeter's parents had advised him at the start of last week to make sure he looked around him and soaked in his surroundings. On Saturday he decided to do that before one of his at-bats, looking around the big ballpark and committing to memory its shape and size just before he stepped into the batter's box.

"And then I got hit," Jeter said, referring to getting plunked on the hand with a pitch.

Jeter was hurting so badly still on Sunday that manager Joe Girardi wanted to take him out of the game in the second and then third innings. Jeter would have none of it.

"At least for one day," Jeter had said before the game, "it's alright to be selfish."

With two outs in the ninth inning, Girardi sent in Wilson Betimit to replace Jeter at shortstop, affording Jeter a cameo sendoff. Jeter, ever humble, sprinted off the field with his head down before most fans even knew what was happening. He took one last curtain call in the old ballpark.

Mariano Rivera, of course, closed The Stadium, at least as far as locking down the final out of the final game. It was up to Jeter to deliver the valedictory. Somebody handed him a microphone as he and the rest of the team gathered on the mound. He had not written down a word. He had thought about what he might say on his drive into the stadium. He had reminisced about the place with Reggie Jackson Saturday night. His parents had given him advice: "Just speak from the heart. You'll do fine." And then he did just that. "It's a huge honor to put this uniform on every day and play," he told the crowd. "And every member of this organization past and present has been calling this place home for 85 years." He spoke about moving across the street to the new stadium, but three things would remain constant:

"Pride, tradition and, most of all, we have the greatest fans in the world," he said. "On behalf of the entire organization, we want to take this moment to salute you, the greatest fans in the world."

It was the right way for the Stadium to end. In fact, the best parts of the night were the unscripted parts. Jeter, the last captain of Yankee Stadium, represented the franchise with class and dignity, same as he always as done. Then players milled around the pitching mound, scooping dirt into paper cups and snapping pictures. It looked like the last day of a Little League season.

The last group of Yankees to stand for a picture on the mound was the most special one of all. Jeter, Rivera, Pettitte and Jorge Posada stood side-by-side, their arms linked around one another's backs. The four of them made their major league debuts within a five-month period in 1995. They became part of the backbone to a dynasty. Now they are the last active members of the Old Guard, the only ones left from the four world championships in five years that began in 1996.

"The four of us take a picture every year," Pettitte said. "Usually we do it on picture day. But this one . . . this one is special."

The Yankees had changed around them, devolving into a team going home instead of to another October. The memories of the ballpark, however, are immutable. Jackson, for instance, on Saturday visited The Black, the centerfield bleachers that served as the batter's eye background. He trusted his internal GPS to find the spot where landed his third home run of Game 5 of the 1977 World Series, the most iconic of his many home runs. And then Jackson sat down in The Black, alone but for the company of the memories. And then he began to cry.

"I feel like I'm losing an old friend," he said.

Jeter, still an active player, still clinging to this crazy hope of catching the Red Sox, wasn't ready to cry just yet, but he did call it "an emotional night." He sat at his locker when it was all done for the last time, the same locker he has used since 1996, when he took it over from the departed Luis Polonia, the one nearest to the Thurman Munson locker. He slowly peeled off his uniform, folded it neatly and, with his socks and spikes -- the dirt still in the cleats -- placed the apparel in plastic bags and then into a blue shopping bag. It was a night, and a feeling, worth keeping.

"So much of my life is here,'' he said, looking around the clubhouse. "It's all I've known. I can't imagine not being here."