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The Derek Jeter documentary in 10 easy screencaps

By Rob Iracane

On Thursday night, HBO aired an hour-long documentary about New York Yankees star Derek Jeter’s(notes) pursuit of his historic 3,000th hit. It was not a film shot from afar, rather an intimate look into the life of a personality because Jeter allowed HBO and MLB Productions to mike him up during rehab games and interview him in his private house. Jeter says he was so upfront and open in this documentary because “if and when” he has children, he wants them to be able to see their dad as a player.

But on the slim chance that Jeter’s future children won’t spring for a premium subscription — or on the good chance your cheapskate self didn’t — we thought we’d save everyone a few bucks by screencapping 10 of the doc’s most noteworthy and interesting scenes.

To the pictures!:

1. The film begins with our hero headed to the DL with an injured calf in late June. And our first glimpse of Derek Jeter arriving at the Tampa facility to start his rehab has him wearing a T-shirt from the University of Michigan, the college he was planning to attend after high school until he was drafted with the sixth pick by the Yankees in the 1992 draft. Sadly, there are too many female Wolverine alumni in their mid-to-late 30s who have no idea what they missed because of that decision.

2. Jeter celebrates his 37th birthday while rehabbing in Tampa but does not miss out on a sweet birthday treat. But don’t worry about the calorie count because after all that intense rehabbing and treatment, he needed it. Yankees senior player development guy Billy Connors waddles in with a decorated birthday cake saying, “This is for all these guys to enjoy.”

Hey, it’s no Fudgie the Whale, but at least they did spell his name right.

3. Minka Kelly, Jeter’s Hollywood girlfriend, is as sweet as she is beautiful. Minka opens up for the cameras and reveals that before she met Derek she knew nothing about baseball but learned everything about the game from sitting in luxury boxes with Derek’s father. When she and Derek started dating, she thought just making contact with a pitch counted as a base hit.

Heck, if that were true, even Yuniesky Betancourt(notes) would have 3,000 hits.

4. If we are to believe this film, Jeter’s rehab mostly involved him running on a treadmill in a pool and getting Icy Hot rubbed on his calf. Later, we do see him playing rehab games in Trenton wearing the ugliest uniform possible where he glad-handed everyone from the fans to his new temporary teammates to even the opposing catcher. Don’t lie: You’d swoon too.

5. Back in New York, the furnishings in Jeter’s lofty  apartment seem a bit sparse. We don’t get to see into his most intimate of areas like the bedroom or bathroom, but we see his kitchen and dining room, where the decor is as bland as his personality. (Although maybe Jeter’s apartment is like the White House: Half for the public to see and the other half for private quarters.)

We also meet Jeter’s personal chef Lisa Schoen, who at one point complains about essentially being a short-order cook when Jeter hosts 10 of his friends at his NYC apartment for lunch before a game. Schoen doesn’t hold back, either, saying that when she started cooking for Jeter, the only seafood that he ate was shrimp. But that was before Lisa served him a delicious bass!

6. See what we mean about the furnishings? Jeter is even seen using a poker table while having a meeting with agent Casey Close. Perhaps Mr. Close is showing Jeter a few different desk options from the latest Ikea catalogue.

7. Jeter? That guy doesn’t have an Edge. Despite the locally shown New York area commercials that imply our hero drives Ford’s crossover SUV, it appears he’s driving something more befitting of a multi-millionaire, like a fully loaded Expedition.

8. The documentary wasn’t without its maudlin moments. For some reason, the filmmakers thought that interviewing “comedian” Billy Crystal would add some insight to the production. It’s unclear why HBO considers Crystal the go-to guy for Yankees historical recollection, but it’s shocking that he wasn’t CGI’ed into this scene featuring Jeter’s friends, Doug Biro and former teammate Gerald Williams.

9. Is there a classier set of parents in the big leagues than Mr. and Mrs. Jeter? Derek’s father expresses his love for his son, saying that throughout his son’s childhood, adolescence and professional career, the results didn’t matter nearly as much as the effort. And we learn that on the day Jeter collected his 3,000th hit, his mother was at the christening for Jeter’s nephew instead. Derek selfishly admits he wishes that his mom and sister were at the game, but we later see him on a postgame helicopter ride to make it to the after party.

10. Finally, after 45 minutes of back story, we finally see the big 3,000, a hard-hit homer to left field off Tampa Bay Rays ace David Price(notes). But to hear Jeter tell it, there was never a guarantee that it would happen at home in front of a sold-out Yankee Stadium. The film even builds up the tension surrounding the Friday night rainout that could have pushed the milestone past the All-Star break, when the Yankees would start on the road. When asked about the delay in reaching the milestone caused by his calf injury, Derek admitted: “I felt like I was disappointing people.”

But in the end, the only people he disappointed were opposing pitchers looking to shut him down for 17 seasons. Those Michigan coeds, too.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Injuries among Major League Baseball players are on the rise, despite advances in conditioning methods and injury treatments, according to research published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

The new study — only the second to examine injury patterns among major league baseball players — used the number of players on the disabled list over a seven-year period to gauge the elite athletes’ risk of getting hurt.

“There is very little information about injuries and injury rates in major league baseball,” said Kenneth L. Cameron, director of orthopedic research at Keller Army Hospital in West Point, New York and an author of the study. “We wanted to quantify the injuries in baseball at its highest level.”

Analyzing the 2002 through 2008 seasons, Cameron’s group found that player injury rates jumped by nearly 40 percent after 2005.

The increase may have been due in part to a crackdown on steroid use during that period, Cameron told Reuters Health, because performance-enhancing drugs can also speed recovery between games.

“When the drug policy changed, it may have affected injury rates,” he said.

The nature of injuries did correspond fairly predictably to player positions, according to the research. Pitchers were more likely to injure their arms, wrists, elbows or shoulders, whereas fielders more often injured their legs and hips.

“These findings confirm what we could expect,” said Dr. Douglas Comeau, a sports medicine physician and assistant professor at Boston University School of Medicine.

The most common injuries among fielders include hamstring and groin strains. Pitchers, on the other hand, tend to strain or tear ligaments in the elbow or rotator cuff, said Comeau.

In the study, pitchers got hurt most often, accounting for 62 percent of all disability days, versus 32 percent for fielders.

Overall, however, the frequency of injuries decreased every month from April to September — the first and last months of the regular season.

The initial spike in injuries may be from a lack of conditioning prior to the first big games of the season, Comeau told Reuters Health. “Major league baseball players might not take spring training seriously, but then they need to play a whole game in a competitive situation.”

Doing too much, too soon, in practice is also a trap that sidelines many weekend warriors, according to Dr. Matthew Pecci, a sports medicine physician at Boston Medical Center.

“The recreational athlete is at risk because they don’t really practice on a regular basis,” he said. “They don’t strengthen their muscles enough to support their ligaments, so they may be at risk for an acute injury.”

Conditioning and rest are important ways to prevent injuries in major league baseball players and recreational athletes alike, the experts noted.

“In order to stay competitive at any level, the tendency is to want to work out harder, and the better thing to do would be to work out smarter,” said Dr. Andrew S. Rokito, chief of the division of shoulder and elbow orthopedic surgery at New York University Langone Medical Center. “It’s not always the best thing to continue with the same workout routine because you may not be challenging yourself.”

But when making any drastic changes to a workout routine, such as starting a weight-lifting regimen, good technique can be key.

“A smart way to start lifting weights at the gym would be to get some sort of guidance or proper coaching from a trainer as to how to lift properly,” said Rokito. “Changing your workout on your own risks injury.”

For avoiding injuries in the major leagues, Cameron and colleagues reach a similar conclusion. Their study data may be used to develop an MLB injury database, they write, “as well as in the development and implementation of specific preseason training and in-season conditioning for injury prevention.”

WASHINGTON—The National Football League’s new collective bargaining agreement will allow players to file workers compensation claims in states where their teams are not based, a loophole the league had tried desperately to close during negotiations.

On July 23, an email by player representative and New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees outlined three primary issues the players association still was grappling with, including workers compensation.

“The NFL is trying to impose a system where they can restrict which states we can file for workers comp,” Mr. Brees wrote in his email, which was published by the NBC Sports blog, Pro Football Talk. Mr. Brees added that workers comp is a “major benefit when it comes to long-term health care,” and that “(the players) will never let (the league) restrict our health and safety long term.”

Mostly at issue is California’s labor law, which has been the reason that several former pro football players file workers comp claims in the state despite not having played for any teams based there.

Under the state’s current law, it allows players to make a claim in California if the player has played at least one game within the state. The law grabbed attention in June when the Denver Broncos were sued by a subsidiary of Travelers Cos. Inc. regarding workers compensation claims made by retired Broncos players in California.

Under the new CBA, the ambiguity of California’s law for workers comp benefits remains the same. However, California lawmakers are aggressively trying to close the loophole that allows claims to be freely filed by players on teams based in other states, according to reports.