E6: Jeter (A Rant)

I have always liked and admired New York Yankee shortstop, Derek Jeter. Every one does. He plays hard, delivers consistently, and comports himself as a gentleman, on and off the field. The complete package.


I never really thought about how much I like and admire him, never thought about liking and admiration as quantifiable entities. Rather I just appreciated the guy, kind of open endedly. 

That was until yesterday, when I read a piece in The New York Times about his new "house" near Tampa, Florida. You flew over it on the way to this paragraph.

Here are some stats on it:


"The 30,875-square-foot mansion, which overlooks Hillsborough Bay, features seven bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a pool, two boat lifts, a drive-through portico and a pair of three-car garages flanking the north and south ends of the property."


By comparison, my mansion is 900 square feet. I can fit 34 of my mansions in Derek's. With room to spare, actually.


(As an aside, I think he made a mistake with only seven bedrooms. He should have made it an even ten, so that he can have the whole starting line-up, including the DH, over for smores and slumber parties. But then, that would actually not likely happen, as Jeter is known for his sense of privacy.)


So why do I now realize admiration is quantifiable and that I admire Derek less today than yesterday? Because Jeter, with this house, shows that he is just as clueless what to do with his wealth as almost every other gazillionaire in the world. I mean, here is a truly humble guy, from solid middle-class stock, who because of his prodigious athleticism makes extreme money -- more than 99.9% of Americans, way more -- and yet this house of his indicates that he really has no good idea what to do with that money. Here, he had a real opportunity to make an outstanding play on the world's diamond. 


Meaning, that in a global culture that believes unquestionably that money is its own good and the more the better, Jeter could have proved he's not just another rich guy following the rich guys flock, sheepishly amassing wealth beyond anybody's ability, including his own, to make sense of it, and to rationalize it.  


But he didn't break away from the flock. Instead he built an edifice to pointless wealth, the biggest, most pointless edifice in all the land. And in so doing he dropped the ball.

The Times article didn't mention the price tag of Jeter's cottage, but it did cite the homes of two teammates. Relief phenomenon Mariano Rivera's 9,250 sq. ft listed at $8.99 million (his other, smaller house, was given no price); catcher Jorge Posada's 9,788 sq. feet are are going at the fire sale price of $6.495 million.


So let's do some math. Rivera's house averages out to $972 per square foot; Posada's, $664. Assuming that Jeter decided to spend a dime and do it right, as apparently Rivera did, Derek's house at $972 per sq. ft carries a $30 million plus price tag. If he decided to pinch pennies, as apparently Posada did, the house will have only cost him $20.5 million. 


Twenty mil, thirty mil -- what the dif? Last year, as he had in the previous nine years, Jeter made $18.9 million -- that's just for playing shortstop. It doesn't include endorsements, estimated at another $9 mil annually. So, Derek had to play somewhere between 175 and 245 games to pay off his house (not including playoff games, of course -- he is a Yankee, after all), between a little more than a season and a season and a half. It's pretty safe to say that he's not going to be sweating the mortgage payments. He's already swatted through them.

But again, for what? Seven toilets that for the most part will go unflushed? Think of the number of toilets $20 or $30 million could provide where they're actually needed. Or the thousands of classrooms that could have been built instead of that single house. How much does a hospital go for these days? Think of the living, breathing good those millions could be doing, instead of the inert, extravagant meaninglessness in which they now lay frozen under the Florida sun.


Sure, Jeter gives to charity, even has a foundation all his own. And so, he is a good guy. But in opting for that house, when one so much simpler would have done equally well,  and then to have publicly turned the difference into projects, domestic, international (Hungary has a shortage of textbooks), he could have catapulted his own legend to a whole new level, perhaps setting a path for others to follow. Forsaking a palace, he would have built a kingdom.


Maybe next year he'll play to his potential.