Tonight's classic game broadcast on WFAN is from July 9, 2011. That's the game where Derek Jeter got his 3,000th career hit. I think I'll tune in to hear what I missed.
See, here's the thing: Instead of being at Yankee Stadium that day, I was at a birthing class.
Okay, let's back up a bit.
Two very exciting things were happening in the early summer of 2011: Jeter was closing in on history and my wife Jessica and I were expecting our first child. I would merely be on the sidelines for both events, although certainly a lot closer to the action for the latter.
Like most first-time parents-to-be we had what I would call a reasonable level of anxiety. When my wife approached me months earlier to book one of these classes—so we had some idea what the hell was happening—we had two possible dates: July 9 and July 31 (our baby was due in early September).
"Well, July 31 is the trade deadline," I reasoned. "I can't ask to take off that date, so let's do July 9."
Easy peasy. Jeter began the season needing 74 hits to reach the magic number. He should get there by Memorial Day.
But Jeter got off to a slow start in 2011, and entering June he was still 17 hits away from 3,000. Okay, so maybe it would take until Father's Day.
On June 13, six days before Father's Day, Jeter limped out of the box after a fly out to right field. It was a strained calf and it sent Jeter straight to the injured list. His career hit total at that moment was 2,994 and holding.
Jeter returned from the injury in less than three weeks and was back in the lineup July 4 in Cleveland. He went 0-for-4 in the first game back, but rapped out two hits the next night. With one game left on the road trip Jeter was four hits away from 3000.
There was some discussion of whether he should sit out so that he could reach the milestone in front of the home fans. While Jeter did play that final game in Cleveland, he got only one hit, and then one more in the first of a four-game series at home against Tampa Bay. That was Thursday, July 7 and Jeter was now two hits from 3,000.
And here's the part that messed up me, my wife and my unborn child. On July 8 it rained. And the game was postponed.
The next day, Saturday July 9, at exactly the same time Jeter stepped in to face Tampa Bay's David Price my wife and I sat with about a dozen other couples in a birthing class in White Plains.
While I was normally attached to my phone and flinched every time it pinged, I was determined this time to pay attention to Nurse Whatever Her Name Was. I turned the Blackberry off and left it in my pocket so I wouldn't be distracted. I was trying to be a good father-to-be.
I'm sure the guys sitting behind me were trying too, but they weren't above checking their iPhones. There were some Yankees fans in the room, although none of them recognized or approached me. So I had to do a little eavesdropping to hear one of them whisper to his wife, "He got a hit. He needs one more."
A little while later, another dad-to-be said to his wife, "Oh my God! He hit a home run!"
Jess heard it too. We stared at each other with an "Of course he did" look. He couldn't just take the 0-fer and try again the next day.
Oh well, no sense worrying about it now. Let's just get through the rest of this class.
A few hours later we hopped into the car and turned on the radio. It was around 4:30 now, and John Sterling was hosting the postgame show. And he couldn't stop going on and on about how he had just witnessed one of the greatest "Jeterian" performances ever. It was then that I learned not only did Jeter get his two hits, including the home run for his 3,000th, but he also got three more hits, finished 5-for-5 and drove in the game-winning run in the eighth inning of an instant classic.
It was the kind of game they would be talking about for years. Or perhaps replaying during a pandemic. However you wanted to categorize it, I wasn't there. Jess and I could do nothing but laugh. This was an epic chain of events that started with the joy of finding out we were going to be parents. Throw in Jeter's tough April and May, the calf injury in June, and the rainout in July and you've got it all.
[By the way, our beautiful daughter Caroline was born in September. On the day Mariano Rivera broke the all-time saves record he stopped his press conference on live TV to congratulate me.]
I've shared this story of missing history before a few times on the radio. In fact, my friend Mike Vaccaro, the supremely talented writer for The New York Post, was driving around with his wife Leigh once when I did.
"I can't really say I regret not being there," I tried to reason. "I had another responsibility and that's okay. And while there are people who will say they saw Jeter's 3,000th hit I can say I saw around 2,000 others in person and that's not bad either."
I immediately got a text from Vaccaro that read, "My wife just looked at me and said, 'Thank God one of you guys has your s**t together.'"
So let's all tune into WFAN and Radio.cm tonight and hear Jeter make history. From what I've been told, it was a pretty spectacular game
