Aaron Judge, Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani were hardly the only baseball megastars in the Bronx for Yankees-Dodgers.
Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez returned to Yankee Stadium on Saturday for Fox Sports’ national broadcast of the middle game in the much-hyped three-game set.
The former Yankees teammates were joined by ex-Red Sox rival David Ortiz and anchor Kevin Burkhardt, with whom they make up Fox’s MLB studio team.
Jeter and A-Rod took time before Saturday’s game to reminisce about their playing days. They returned to their old positions on the left side of the Yankee Stadium infield and shared their favorite memories there.
“That’s an easy one,” Rodriguez, 48, said on the Fox pregame show. “For me, I’ve got to go back to 2009. We’re playing the Phillies. Game 6 [of the World Series]. We’ve got [Andy] Pettitte on the mound, [Mariano Rivera] to close.”
He continued, “That last out, we had a ground ball to Robinson Cano to [Mark] Teixeira, and then Joe Buck with the famous call. I just raised my arms. I’d been waiting 34 years for this moment.”
That victory clinched the lone World Series championship won by Rodriguez, who hit 351 of his 696 career home runs during his 12 seasons with the Yankees.
Jeter, meanwhile, highlighted the first of his five championships, which he won as a rookie in 1996.
“That’s what you play for,” said Jeter, 49, who spent each of his 20 MLB seasons with the Yankees and remains sixth in MLB history with 3,456 hits.
Jeter, Rodriguez and Ortiz also joked around during the light-hearted segment.
Before he spoke about his ’96 title, Jeter brought up a 2006 pop fly that he and Rodriguez both tried to catch before the ball landed next to them — an infamous moment in the shortstop and third baseman’s sometimes tense relationship as teammates. Jeter remarked that the drop “led to a lot of headlines.”
Ortiz acted out his favorite Yankee Stadium memory by simulating a home run trot around third base.
“You shouldn’t be on this segment,” Rodriguez quipped to Ortiz. “You’re messing up the memories!”
The quartet also visited Monument Park, where Jeter’s No. 2 was retired in 2017. During that segment, Jeter and Rodriguez spoke about franchise greats such as Rivera, Reggie Jackson and Yogi Berra.
“When we were winning those championships early on, I used to tell Yogi, ‘You have 10 rings, but back in those days, you went straight to the World Series, so now with the playoffs, you really have only about five rings,’” Jeter said. “Yogi turned to me and looked, and he said, ‘Hey, come to my house and you can count them any time.’ He humbled me real quick.”
Jeter, who retired as a player in 2014, was a partial owner and the CEO of the Miami Marlins from 2017-22. He joined the Fox Sports panel last year. Rodriguez played for the Yankees from 2004-16.
The presences of Jeter, Rodriguez and Ortiz on Saturday added even more juice to a series between the Yankees and Dodgers that many billed as a potential World Series preview. Apple TV+ carried Friday’s game nationally, while ESPN is set to do the same with Sunday night’s.
Entering Saturday, the Yankees owned the American League’s best record at 45-20, while the Dodgers led the National League West at 40-25.
Both teams retooled with marquee additions last offseason, with the Yankees trading for Soto and the Dodgers committing to more than $1 billion in total value to sign Japanese superstars Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto.
The Dodgers won Friday’s series opener, 2-1, in 11 innings thanks in large part to seven shutout frames from the 25-year-old Yamamoto.
The teams boast five former MVPs between them, with the Yankees employing Judge and Giancarlo Stanton and the Dodgers featuring Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman.
The franchises have met in the World Series 11 times, with seven of those matchups coming before the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957. The Yankees emerged victorious in eight of those 11 meetings, but the Dodgers won the most recent one in 1981.
This is the Dodgers’ first trip to Yankee Stadium since 2016.
