At one point this past baseball season, Derek Jeter, out injured, revealed that he wasn’t watching Yankees games regularly. He didn’t have the Extra Innings package, he said, and the games were blacked out in Tampa. (Why the YES Network would say NO to Tampa like that, I have no idea.) Now we know what he might have been doing instead of watching TV — reading manuscripts!
That’s right, according to yesterday’s announcement, Jeter, El Capitán of the New York Yankees, is getting involved in another iconic New York enterprise: book publishing. In partnership with Simon & Schuster, Jeter Publishing will put out adult nonfiction (biographies, business titles), middle-grade fiction and children’s books, starting as early as next year. “I think this sort of sets the blueprint for postcareer,” he told Julie Bosman of The Times.
A couple of midsummers ago, in a cover story for the magazine about what can be expected out of a 37-year-old baseball player — Jeter was just about to reach that age — Michael Sokolove offered this summary:
Jeter is his era’s DiMaggio. Admired. Diffident. By all outward appearances, charmed. He became the Yankees’ full-time shortstop in 1996, at age 21, and only once since then has his team failed to qualify for the playoffs. (His 599 postseason at-bats amount to just about an extra season’s worth of swings.) The Yankees have reached the World Series seven times during Jeter’s tenure and prevailed in five of them. . . . The tabloids track his romances with one glamorous woman after another — the latest being the actress Minka Kelly, Esquire’s “Sexiest Woman Alive” in 2010. He is building a house in Tampa, Fla., a waterfront paradise so massive, at 30,875 square feet, that locals have dubbed it St. Jetersburg.
Maybe publishing isn’t an imperiled industry after all. Does that sound like the kind of guy who gets involved in a losing operation? And it doesn’t seem as if Jeter plans to be his era’s Mr. Coffee, either, a mere pitchman like Joe DiMaggio. No, Mr. Book has his head in the game. “I’ve always had an interest in business, and my interest in business has really expanded over the years,” he said. “And I have an interest in content. So this gives me the opportunity to really combine the two. And it gives me the opportunity to curate and share interesting stories and share content with the public.” O.K, make that Mr. Content instead. It’s still hitting with power.
Now, who do we speak to over there at Jeter Publishing to talk about putting together a collection of some blog posts?
