Doug Mientkiewicz Praises The Former Yankees Captain Derek Jeter For The Friendly Locker Room Environment He Created

Previous Gold Glover Doug Mientkiewicz recalls his time spent with Derek Jeter with affection.

Derek Jeter must always be brought up while talking about the New York Yankees in recent years. Jeter, the 15th captain of the organization, is renowned for both his distinctive style of baseball and winning attitude. In the twenty seasons that he spent wearing pinstripes, Captain Clutch established himself as a well-known figure in the league.

Doug Mientkiewicz Praises The Former Yankees Captain Derek Jeter For The Friendly Locker Room Environment He Created

Mientkiewicz played for the New York Yankees in 2007 and was a member of the group that finished the year with a 94-game winning streak. A member of the 2004 Boston Red Sox World Series champion team moving to New York may have seemed unusual, but Mientkiewicz made the best of it.

And Derek Jeter was a big reason why.

Mientkiewicz, a 2007 Yankees player, said he was first “skeptical” about joining the club on the Foul Territory Show.

When I signed with the Yankees in 2007, I confessed that I was apprehensive about visiting the team’s clubhouse. I was so at ease, he remembered. They weren’t who I initially believed them to be. You all resemble this always operating business machine. The fact that it was so much fun left me speechless, and Derek [Jeter] had a big part in it.

“Seeing how Derek really was and how much fun he was behind closed doors was probably the biggest surprise of my career.”

To prove his argument, Mientkiewicz related an amazing tale of a time when Jeter played a practical joke on him.

Everyone has known Derek Jeter as a dedicated ballplayer who is all about the game ever since he made his debut with the Yankees. His interviews were the one place where his love of baseball was evident. The clubhouse, though, was a another matter.

“The rumor is we all had [Derek Jeter Driven] Cologne on, and all the bugs showed up. Game 3 rolls around,” he said, adding that Jeter was the consummate captain who was always worried about and taking care of everyone on the roster, checking in on teammates regularly, and things of that nature.

“He [Jeter] doesn’t speak to me,” added Mientkiewicz. “[Jorge] Posada is coming up to me shaking his head. He’s like, ‘You f–ked up man.’ And I’m like, I don’t recall what I did.

“The game goes by, he doesn’t talk to me the entire game, doesn’t look at me, which is unlike him… The next day, it’s Game 4. I walk into my locker and on the chair is a Macy’s manilla folder. I open it up and it’s a professional letterhead that says… something to the effect of, ‘Due to your comments… we’ve had to pull 2.7 million bottles of Derek Jeter Driven off the shelves,’ and my heart sinks.’”

He later adds that Jeter told him, “That letter was all bulls–t.”

 

 

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