Derek Jeter, shown at Yankee Stadium in 2015, would like to won a team, although it is unlikely to be the squad for which he starred. (Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)
Derek Jeter has largely stayed out of the public eye since ending his 20-year Yankees career in 2014, but he hasn’t lost his appreciation for baseball. In fact, he wants to eventually own a team and help “the game grow” and take back some of the ground he thinks it has lost to football and basketball.
“I think some of the other sports are sort of the sexy sports,” Jeter said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Wednesday. “I think kids nowadays, they look at players playing college, and the next year they’re in the NFL or NBA.
“Baseball, you sort of get lost, because you have to go play in the minor leagues for a little bit,” he continued. “So I think kids in this generation are into instant gratification.”
There’s little doubt that the popularity of college football and basketball helps the NFL and NBA, as top players, even after just a year at the college level, arrive at the pros already with national recognition. By contrast, far fewer people follow college baseball, which shares talent with minor league systems that incorporate players straight out of high school and foreign countries.
In Jeter’s case, he was talented enough to be the No. 6 overall pick by the Yankees in the 1992 draft, but it still took him three years to reach the major leagues. Of course, from that point, he went on to have one of the all-time greatest MLB careers, going to 14 all-star games, winning five World Series titles and finishing sixth in hits with 3,465.
Jeter told CNBC that owning a team was “the ultimate goal” for him. Owning the team for which he played — and which was recently valued at $3.4 billion — is probably unrealistic, but he added, “I’m always going to be a Yankee, that’s where I grew up.”
“The thing that I’m interested in is helping the game grow,” Jeter said. “I think that baseball is starting to take somewhat of a backseat to some of the other sports, and in my mind, I think this is the greatest sport in the world.”
“Baseball, in my opinion, mimics life,” Jeter noted. “It’s every day. It’s 162 games, plus 30 games in spring training, plus the postseason. There’s a lot of work that goes into it.”
Unfortunately for Jeter, some young people may have decided that baseball mimics some of the more mundane aspects of life, and are looking for bigger thrills elsewhere. The iconic shortstop, meanwhile, has a thrilling moment on the horizon — he’s reportedly set to marry Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Hannah Davis in July.
