{"id":630,"date":"2009-09-07T21:49:30","date_gmt":"2009-09-07T21:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=630"},"modified":"2017-02-11T22:38:48","modified_gmt":"2017-02-11T22:38:48","slug":"driven-branding-derek-jeter-redefining-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=630","title":{"rendered":"Driven: Branding Derek Jeter, Redefining Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Driven: Branding Derek Jeter, Redefining Race<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture<\/a>
\nVolume 17, Number 2<\/a>, Spring 2009
\npages \u00a070-79
\nE-ISSN: 1534-1844 Print ISSN: 1188-9330
\nDOI: 10.1353\/nin.0.0041<\/a><\/p>\n

Roberta Newman<\/strong><\/p>\n

Promoting the opening of the Museum of the City of New York’s<\/a> exhibit, “The Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947-1957,” curator Ann Meyerson noted that for the first time since Jackie Robinson<\/a> crossed the major league’s color line in 1947, not a single African American player was likely to be included on either of the city’s teams’ twenty-five man rosters in 2007. Excluding, for the sake of argument, Mets<\/a> prospect Lastings Milledge<\/a>, now with the Nationals<\/a>, where did that leave the captain of the New York Yankees, Derek Jeter<\/a>?\u00a0 In a 2005 interview with the St. Petersburg Times<\/em>, Jeter handled the subject of his race with characteristic, media-savvy care: “My Dad is black, my Mom is Irish, and I’m Catholic, so I hear everything. I’m in New York and there are all different people, all races and religions. I can relate to everyone.”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since his 1996 rookie season, Derek Jeter has not only played shortstop for the New York Yankees<\/a>, he has parlayed his ability to “relate to everyone” into what advertisers hope will translate into an ability to “sell to everyone,” working overtime as a pitching machine.\u00a0 Most of the products Jeter pitched before 2006 were ones generally associated with baseball and conventionally endorsed by its players-Nike<\/a> sneakers, Gatorade<\/a> sports drink, Ford<\/a> cars and trucks, and a variety of breakfast and snack foods, including Ritz crackers<\/a>, Post cereals<\/a>, Skippy peanut butter<\/a>, and, perhaps inevitably, Oreos<\/a>.<\/strong>\u00a0 Not so surprisingly for one of the most generously compensated players in the game, Jeter also endorsed a financial institution, Fleet Bank<\/a>. In his role as a well-known man about town, not altogether unfamiliar to the readers of New York’s gossip columns, Jeter also appeared with his equally famous, generous compensator, George M. Steinbrenner<\/a>, in a Visa commercial. Recently, however, Jeter has branched out beyond the expected, connecting his image to two very different…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Driven: Branding Derek Jeter, Redefining Race NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture Volume 17, Number 2, Spring 2009 pages \u00a070-79 E-ISSN: 1534-1844 Print ISSN: 1188-9330 DOI: 10.1353\/nin.0.0041 Roberta Newman Promoting the opening of the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibit, “The Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947-1957,” curator Ann Meyerson noted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,8,20],"tags":[7947,129,15685,130,7222],"class_list":["post-630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-baseball","tag-derek-jeter","tag-nine-a-journal-of-baseball-history-and-culture","tag-roberta-newman","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=630"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51538,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/630\/revisions\/51538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}