
Edit Story

The Management Lesson You Can Learn From Derek Jeter's Yankee Uniform Number

Allen St. John

There's a management lesson to be learned from Derek Jeter's career and it all starts with a number. The number 2.

While I'm normally not all that interested in uniform numbers, Derek Jeter is the exception.   Although I've covered Jeter from the very beginning of his career, I was surprised when I did a little digging today and realized that The Yankee Captain wore only one number during his tenure with the New York Yankees.

I assumed he began his career in pinstripes with some non-descript and long-forgotten double-digit uniform number. I was mistaken.

When he was 21 years old, Jeter came up from the minor leagues for a couple of weeks in the spring of 1995 to fill in for an injured Tony Fernandez. There was the small matter of a uniform number.

Nowhere in sports is a uniform number more of a big deal than with New York Yankees.  You don't have to be a trivia geek to know that Number 1 was worn by Billy Martin, Number 3 was Babe Ruth, Number 4 was Lou Gehrig, Number 5 was Joe DiMaggio, Number 7 was Mickey Mantle, Number 8 was Yogi Berra and Bill Dickey, and Number 9 was Roger Maris, not to mention all the double digit numbers the team had retired.

Those single digit numbers were particularly special: they harkened back to the game's earliest days, when a uniform reflected a player's place in the batting order, which is why Ruth was 3 and Gehrig was 4.

Derek Sanderson Jeter was handed number two.

Yes, it's a stretch to say that this number was saved for the guy who would become the team captain and all-time hits leader. Mike Gallego, Wayne Tolleson, and Dale Berra had previously worn the team's lowest available number. But giving Jeter the number that the team will ultimately retire in his honor wasn't exactly a casual gesture either.

“The way I remember it, [equipment manager] Nick Priore was the toughest guy to sell, the protector of right and wrong,” Buck Showalter, the Oriole manager who was then skipper of the Yankees, told The New York Times. “He was ready to give Derek something else; what, I can’t remember. But it didn’t take Abner Doubleday to figure out that Derek had a good future with the Yankees. So we talked about it, me, Nick and Stick [General Manager Gene Michael], and Stick approved giving him No. 2.”

Looking back it's easy to see how giving Jeter a number that slotted in before the greatest player of all time signaled a change in the way the Yanks would do business. But it could have just as easily been an anecdote known only to a few frustrated Yankee fans.

Throughout the 1980s, Yankee Stadium was the worst place in baseball to be a young player. Owner George Steinbrenner had no patience for mistakes, and if a rookie made an error he'd often be dispatched suddenly to the minors on the so-called Columbus Shuttle.

More to the point, the team kept trading promising young players for high-priced veterans on the downward slope of their careers.The Yankees would develop players like All-Star first baseman Fred McGriff and Cy Young winner Doug Drabek, but they would be traded away and enjoy their major league success playing for other teams.

By 1995, that had changed a bit. Between 1990 and 1993 Steinbrenner was suspended from baseball for spying on Yankee star Dave Winfield, and in his absence the team began to build around young players like Bernie Williams and Pat Kelly and  has some success with the strategy.  In 1994, the team was leading the AL East when the remainder of the season was cancelled because of a player's strike.

So at the moment that Jeter got that single digit number, the Yankees were at a crossroads. Now that the team was good again--and Steinbrenner back from exile--would the team continue with the build-from-within strategy that was underpinning the Bronx Renaissance or simply return to its old ways of spending sprees on washed up stars?

The answer to that question would come in the spring of 1996. The fact that Steinbrenner had forced out Showalter after a playoff failure didn't bode well for the team's future. He was replaced by Joe Torre who at the time seemed like an uninspired choice, a by-the-book manager who would rely on veterans to help save his job for as long as he could.

The front office planned on giving Jeter, then one of the the top prospects in baseball, the starting shortstop job and moving incumbent shortstop Fernandez to second. Jeter, for his part, put the plan in grave jeopardy with an atrocious spring training--he played so badly that the Yankees planned to ship him back to the minors.

George Steinbrenner reportedly stormed into Torre's office demanding that the team find an experienced shortstop. "Should we get somebody else?" The Boss bellowed. "How can you let this rookie have the job?"

Torre came to Jeter's defense, for the moment, but he knew that, ultimately, what Steinbrenner wanted, Steinbrenner got.  And then fate intervened. Fernandez broke his elbow late in spring training, and young Jeter had a little breathing room.

He became the first Yankee rookie to start the season at shortstop since 1962. In his first game, in Steinbrenner's hometown of Cleveland, Jeter hit a home run ("Holy Cow!" crowed Yankee broadcaster Phil Rizzuto) and made a spectacular over the shoulder running catch. The job was now officially his.

Jeter would become the first Yankee to win the Rookie of the Year award in 15 years, and the team would win its first World Series since 1978.

More to the point,  Jeter's success changed the Yankees for good.  Homegrown players like Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and Jorge Posada (with Jeter, they earned the nickname The Core 4) provided the foundation for a team that would go on to win five World Series, seven pennants, and make 16 playoff appearances.

What's the lesson here? That baseball teams--like companies--reach decisive moments in which they have to decide between business as usual and a new way of doing things.

And sometimes the outcome of that moment depends on the performance of one person. For the New York Yankees in the mid-1990s, that person was Derek Jeter, and the rest, as they say, was history

(Note: The headline on this story was changed shortly after it was posted--ASJ)

Follow me on TwitterCheck out some of my other work here

