By JOE LAPOINTE
NEW YORK – From the top tier in the left-field corner in Yankee Stadium, you could not hear Derek Jeter’s left ankle snap. But you couldn’t miss the sudden hush when Jeter writhed in the dirt. About 25,000 frigid fans gasped en masse in the game’s fifth hour.
This was early Sunday morning, in the 12th inning of an excruciating 6-4 Tigers’ victory. Later that afternoon, they beat the Yankees, 3-0, to take a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven American League Championship Series that resumes Tuesday night at Comerica Park.
Until that Jeter moment, a knot of hostile Yankees’ fans had swarmed like nutty gnats around a smaller group of Tigers fans in lightly populated Section 431-B.
A young woman in Yankees’ attire arrived greatly intoxicated, a large man her smiling escort. For about three hours, she screeched anti-Detroit insults, amid F-bombs.
But they left before reeling Tigers’ closer Jose Valverde made the Detroit fans scream their own curses at manager Jim Leyland. Valverde, a preening peacock, squandered a 4-0 lead in the ninth by giving up two, two-run home runs, the first to Ichiro Suzuki, the second to Raul Ibanez.
This encouraged the Yankees’ fans to amp up the taunts toward the Tigers’ fans, one a guy wearing a gray 1968 Al Kaline “DETROIT” road jersey with “6” on the back.
A young man and woman in “D” outfits teased back, shouting “Where’s A-Rod?” because Alex Rodriguez got yanked for a pinch hitter. Arms waving, they urged the New Yorkers to sing to them “Asshole! Asshole!” Their hosts obliged.
When things got quiet in extra innings, the same couple stood up and began to passionately kiss. When recorded music blared, they danced erotically, though fully clothed, for it was a night of frozen toes.
As midnight passed, the rival fan tribes struggled for new disputes. A few even shouted about the auto bailout. (Seriously!) But all that hostility ended when Jeter, 38, fell while fielding a grounder.
Jeter is from Kalamzoo, an intense supporter of the Michigan Wolverines and one of the finest athletes of his era. He is much like Steve Yzerman in his late years with the Red Wings: the respected captain, the alpha personality of the clubhouse and the face of the franchise.
Suddenly, the tension disappeared between Tigers’ and Yankees’ fans, who stood together to cheer him. “ DARE-ick JEE-ter,” the fans chanted as the future Hall-of-Famer was helped off the field. “DARE-ick JEE-ter!”
Glove-muffled rhythmic applause kept the tempo. When the game finally ended, the Detroit fans left with a weary sense of survival far from euphoria. The New York fans seemed dazed, and with good reason.
Still healthy but woeful is Rodriguez, the self-absorbed anti-Jeter, who is 37 years old and seems to have aged three years this summer. Fans boo bitterly his many strikeouts. They also boo the slumping Robinson Cano, Curtis Granderson and Nick Swisher.
Cano cost his team a base Sunday by jogging to first. Nearby, a cloddish fan stole an out from the Yankees by contesting Mark Teixeira, their elegant first baseman, for a foul pop fly.
The man wore a “Rodriguez” shirt. In the best of times, Yankees’ fans can be sore winners and their players can be grim in victory. When they lose, look out.
Perhaps you noticed on TV about 3,000 empty seats each game in the 50,000-seat Stadium. Is it a backlash against exorbitant ticket prices and gentrified seating for the wealthy?
Seems so to Jeff Passan of Yahoo Sports, who wrote: “The Yankees priced out the average fan in search of corporate blood money.” Some fans who show up annoy Swisher. “Sometimes, they get under your skin,” he told The Daily News.
Their best chance to rally might be for manager Joe Girardi to pitch his ace C.C. Sabathia on short rest Tuesday so Sabathia can face Tigers’ ace Justin Verlander in both Games 3 and 7.
Girardi, ejected from Sunday’s game, regularly pulls Rodriguez for pinch hitters but has worse sorrows. He learned last series that his Dad had died but kept it secret for a few days.
Few fans, even in New York, show much pity for the forlorn Bronx Bombers. Compared to the multiple heartaches around the Yankees, Valverde’s failures and the uncertain Tigers’ fielding is mere heartburn to Detroit.
And as we rode the D train home amid a few “D” shirts, we wondered:
Are the Tigers about to push past the Yankees again and into the World Series, just like 2006?
Had we just witnessed the end of Jeter’s career? With Jeter having recently sold his luxury condo in Trump Tower, it’s logical to wonder what comes after the expected surgery for this 18-season major leaguer.
Was Saturday night’s sorry scene a metaphor for something larger: A Yankees’ era crumbling like some graffiti-marked, weather-beaten and vandalized marble monument?
Or was it just Derek Jeter, hurt in the dirt?
Joe Lapointe, who grew up in Detroit and covered sports for the Free Press in the 1980s, retired from the New York Times in 2010.
