Mariano Rivera bobblehead doll (eBay)
June poses something of a lull for the Major League Baseball fan. The excitement of Spring Training and opening day have faded. It is not yet the All-Star break. You can see trends and contenders developing, but every pennant is still up for grabs and the various leaderboards will be disrupted by unforeseen injuries, slumps and hot hands before October. I thought I would take this slow moment to tell a baseball story—at a time when the names of Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, and (the most perishable of these names) Scott Brosius are not yet lost to common memory.
I was editing Car & Travel magazine with 1.1 million AAA member readers in New York. A travel editor in New York mostly sends freelance writers to Tasmania, Bermuda by cruise, and the Amalfi coast of Italy for a wine story, and then assigns himself some weekend drive-to destination. I would shave off a Friday of work, maybe a Friday and a Monday, and spend a long weekend somewhere on the Eastern seaboard. The job, after all, was to assign and edit, not to travel and write, though some traveling and writing was expected. It helped that the publisher—a talented writer named Peter Crescenti, who was among the first people to be called a rock music critic—always took his annual New Orleans and Baltimore travel assignments, leaving his office empty for days.
Inspired by Peter, one way I spoiled myself was to assign myself a Major League Baseball story or two every year. New York is crazy about baseball, with its two teams and their long, tangled histories. New York is also understood to be one of the cradles of the game; the poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) reported on baseball (when it was two words) in Brooklyn. Over my six years working this plum travel editor gig, I assigned myself three MLB Spring Training stories: one to Arizona, the Cactus League; one to Port St. Lucie, Florida, where the Mets hold Spring Training; and one to Tampa, where the Yankees train in the spring.
I was a little nervous asking for credentials from the Yankees organization. I remembered the time I was freelancing a story for The New York Times’ (now-defunct) Connecticut Weekly section about all the Major League Baseball players who live in Connecticut—most of them Mets, but Lee Mazzilli on the Yankees’ coaching staff lived in Connecticut, and I wanted a Yankee in my story. Whereas the Mets’ media relations team always bent over backwards to give me whatever access I wanted, no matter what I was reporting or for whom, I will never forget the response from the Yankees’ PR guy when I asked for credentials for a home game at Yankee Stadium to interview Mazzilli. He said, “I got 50 things on my list to do today, and you just made 51.”
But you never hit the ball if you do not swing the bat, so I reached out to the Yankees’ media relations team again for my spring training story, and I got a completely different answer. It turns out they were only territorial in the Bronx, where they were overrun with reporters. I remember hearing some crazy claim that The New York Times had more reporters covering the New York Yankees than the entire continent of Africa. In Tampa, the organization really did not care. My guy asked how many days I wanted access to the clubhouse. I said I would be in Tampa five days. How about five days? He said, “Five-day pass? You got it.”
Once inside the Yankees’ clubhouse in Tampa, I developed a quick rapport with Scott Brosius, the third baseman, which was the position I fielded as a ballplayer. I kept hanging around the clubhouse after I might have been expected to have reported my travel story because I had all those days of access and I was enjoying hanging around the dynastic New York Yankees’ clubhouse and grazing on their impressive food spread. But I also had a couple of gaps in my story. I felt comfortable enough with Brosius to approach him and ask for help.
I said, “For my travel story, I should get Derek Jeter, because he’s the star shortstop, and our readers are all New Yorkers, many Hispanic, so I should get one of the Hispanic players, ideally Mariano Rivera.” I had not yet seen either player.
Brosius said, “The problem with Jeter is he’s got a shoulder injury, so he’s always in the whirlpool room. But he likes talking to reporters. The whirlpool room is down the hall over there, so go down there and just kind of hang around and you’ll eventually catch him running out of there to go to the trainers’ room further down the hall.”
I went over to where Brosius indicated and paced back and forth around the entrance to what I now knew was the whirlpool room. It did not take long for this expert advice to bear fruit—quite awkward fruit. It just so happened that Jeter came blazing out of the whirlpool room exactly when I was passing in front of it in my surveillance mode, and we collided into each other—worse, Jeter hit me with the shoulder he was favoring with an ice pack, his injured left shoulder. What followed next was the most vivid two or three seconds of my life.
I saw what Derek Jeter looks like when he is assessing a threat. Someone unexpectedly had collided with his injured left shoulder. Who was this threat, and how should I be eliminated? I saw the eyes an opposing pitcher sees when the game is on the line and Derek Jeter is digging into the batter’s box. I thought of a line by the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke about the fragmentary torso of an ancient statue of Apollo: “here there is no place that does not see you.” There was no place that Derek Jeter did not see me. I thought of that moment at a zoo, watching the big cats stroll, when one animal shrugs off its lethargy and actually sizes you up. Even in the reductive environment of captivity, every pore in a big cat looks at you when the animal looks at you with its eyes. Every pore in Derek Jeter’s body looked at me.
I apologized like a buffoon and basically pinned it on Brosius by saying he told me to hang out here if I needed an interview with you. Jeter quickly recovered his composure and gave me a brief, productive interview about things to do in Tampa before he went further down the hall to the trainers’ room.
When I went back to Scott Brosius, he said, “Now, you said you want Mariano Rivera—I get it, he’s our biggest Hispanic superstar. Let me tell you about Mariano. This is how much Mariano does not want to talk to strangers. All our wives run our foundations, and we all support each other. The Riveras invited us to an event at their home for their foundation, and of course we went. We pull up to their house and I get out of my car, and there is a valet parking attendant standing there with his right hand stretched out waiting for my car key, and it’s Mariano. And I did literally the only thing you can do when even one of your friends and a Major League superstar is holding out his hand waiting for your car key in the posture of a valet parking attendant: I handed him my car key without saying a word. And he got into my car without saying a word, and he drove away to park it. I purposefully delayed at the front door of their house talking to people because I wanted to see Mariano come back and get back in line as a valet parking attendant. Sure enough, here he comes, sprinting back to the back of the valet parking line like some 15-year-old kid with his first summer job. And he gets back in the valet line, not saying a word to anyone. No one says a word to him. Which was the point. He had a house full of strangers, and he didn’t want to talk to any of them. His turn in the valet line comes again. And some nicely dressed man gets out of a beautiful car and looks at the valet parking attendant and sees it’s Mariano Rivera, and Mariano Rivera is holding out his hand, waiting for the man’s car key. So, this man did literally the only thing you can do when someone is holding out their hand, waiting for your car key in the posture of a valet parking attendant, even if it’s a Major League Baseball superstar, the closer for the world champion New York Yankees, and a first-ballot Baseball Hall of Famer—he handed Mariano Rivera his car key. That’s how much Mariano does not want to talk to you.”
