Aaron Boone spent half a season as Derek Jeter’s teammate in 2003, but he spent 7 ½ years prior to that playing alongside another Hall of Famer in Cincinnati Reds great Barry Larkin.
Boone never actually got to play much against Jeter – the Reds and Yankees’ only interleague meeting in Boone’s time there was in June 2003, the first game of that series the day Jeter was named Yankees Captain – but he saw “a lot of similarities” between the two great shortstops.
“Both were that new age shortstop where you were truly a two-way player, both really hit the ball the other way extremely well, both were very athletic, and captains of their team. In baseball, that’s rare,” Boone said over the weekend.
But when Boone got to New York, Jeter was “even better” than he imagined.
“Derek was, I think the most confident player I ever played with. Being in the NL, I mainly played against him a little in spring training, but being someone who followed the game, I came here with an expectation of a guy I had a lot of respect for and was a great player,” Boone said. “But, he was better than I even thought. Always wanted the ball, and played the game with a ton of confidence. That didn’t mean he was the best of the best with talent or whatever, but I felt an underlying real confidence in what he was doing.”
Whether or not Jeter felt that, too, he’ll never say, but if you read some of the stories Sweeny Murti has retold this week about The Captain, confidence seems to be a common theme.
Boone may or may not get to see Jeter officially inducted into the Hall of Fame on Wednesday afternoon – the Yankees will be preparing to snap a string of eight losses in 10 games against Toronto at Yankee Stadium – but the man who hit one of the biggest homers in Yankees postseason history knows that the biggest part of Derek Jeter was the he, quite simply, was Derek Jeter.
“I don’t necessarily know how he felt, but Derek was the face of baseball for his 20 years in the game,” Boone said. “He was in the middle of a lot of great Yankees championship teams. He was the shortstop and the Captain, and I think that’s all part of who he is.”
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