Was Jeremy Giambi safe on The Flip by Derek Jeter?

Saturday 13 October, 2001. 

Oakland, California. 

Game 3 of the American League Division Series. The hometown Athletics, up two games to none, seeking a sweep of the dynastic Yankees. 

Bottom of the seventh. New York ahead, 1-0. Two out, tying run on first. 

Terrence Long at the plate. Mike Mussina on the mound. 

A crowd of 55,861 rapt.

Destiny in the air. 

Mussina comes set and deals a 2-2 fastball that lingers in the zone. Long swats at the baseball and slashes a line drive past first base, down into the right field corner. The Coliseum rumbles.

Shane Spencer, the Yankees’ right fielder, rummages for the ball in foul territory, then uncorks a wild, rushed throw towards the infield.

Off with the crack of the bat, Jeremy Giambi chugs from first, past second, and rounds third as the ball overshoots two Yankee cutoff men – first baseman Tino Martinez and second sacker Alfonso Soriano.

A tied game seems certain. Except a genius plays shortstop for New York. Derek Jeter, America’s feted prince, is alert, mobile and in-tune with myriad possibilities. More, he is in motion, tasked with lingering between first and second in case Giambi receives an unlikely stop sign and scrambles back to third.

As the baseball evades Martinez and Soriano, however, Jeter keeps running, and meets it in the baseline cutout, midway between the bag and home plate. Giambi, meanwhile, is 20 feet adrift of Yankee catcher Jorge Posada, who has stayed home rather than wandering after the stray dart.

Cushioning the baseball in his glove while steaming into foul ground, Jeter comes alive, instinctively aware of the required calculations. In one sumptuous swoosh, #2 contorts his body and gently flips the baseball into Posada’s path, like a quarterback tossing the pigskin to where a running back will be in two seconds. 

With just enough velocity, and accounting for the reliable fade of physics, Jeter’s fluid shovel lands in Posada’s mitt as Giambi enters the batter's box. Standing up, refusing to slide, the leaden-footed plodder runs through home plate and is tagged on the right leg – either before, during or after landing on it – by Posada. 

The play is incredibly close, but home plate umpire Kerwin Danley punches out Giambi emphatically. The Yankees’ lead is preserved, and the script is flipped to Mariano Rivera with six outs remaining.

Sandman enters. New York wins the game, 1-0. And the entire series is transformed. Down two games to none, facing elimination, the Yankees rally following Jeter’s heroics to vanquish Oakland then swat aside the 116-win Seattle Mariners. The Arizona Diamondbacks eventually thwart a fifth pinstriped championship in six years, but The Flip becomes another iconic vignette in the storybook career of a Yankee captain.

We talk about it for generations.

***

Today, indeed, on its 25^th anniversary, The Flip is mostly remembered in hagiography, and as the ultimate Jeter stan – as someone with a dog named Derek – it pains me to poke holes in his magnum opus. However, several misconceptions persistently plague The Flip, and they must be addressed.

Firstly, there is the looming notion that Giambi should have slid. His manager, Art Howe, has repeatedly said as much. So, too, have Ron Washington, who waved him home as third base coach, and Ramón Hernández, the on-deck hitter who tried to direct traffic at the dish. (1) “If he slides, I don’t have a chance,” Posada once intoned. (2) And way back when, esteemed scribe George Vecsey dedicated an entire New York Times column to the matter. “Slide, Jeremy, slide,” Vecsey wrote repeatedly throughout his piece, a satirical anaphora echoing public sentiment. (3)

On the face of it, Giambi probably should have slid. Doing so may have helped him evade Posada’s tag more nimbly. Nevertheless, there is a reason we chastise baserunners for sliding into first: it slows you down. And for such a clumsy and uncoordinated baserunner as Jeremy Giambi, sliding did not guarantee success. In fact, one can easily envisage him tumbling into an ugly mess at the plate, flopping – rather than running – into ignominy.

Secondly, the unspoken assumption that Oakland would have won the series if Giambi scored – by sliding or not – is also incorrect. Although it is difficult for me to admit as a font of Jeter hyperbole, in purely statistical terms – pertaining to the game’s outcome – The Flip was not as important as it seemed. Yes, it was very important, but it alone was not decisive. Even if Giambi scored, the game would have been tied, and Rivera – the greatest closer of all-time – still would have thrown multiple innings in an elimination scenario. There is no guarantee that, having tied the game via Giambi, Oakland would have subsequently won it. Sure, The Flip was a hinge moment, then, but it was far from conclusive.

To that end, the vilification of Giambi for not sliding always struck me as unfair. Again, a valid argument can be made that he should have slid, but scapegoating one guy – admittedly, a steroid abuser who squandered any semblance of public goodwill – feels icky. Others have questions to answer, too, including Howe, who left speedster Eric Byrnes on the bench rather than having him pinch-run for Giambi. Winning and losing are team efforts, and focusing on one player – whether Jeter or Giambi – is myopic.

More resoundingly, though, an even greater conspiracy theory pecks at The Flip and its place in baseball lore: namely, the notion that Giambi was safe – whether he slid or not, and regardless of the play’s impact on the game’s outcome. For a quarter-century, indeed, a subterranean community – a cohort of ‘Giambi was safe’ truthers – has congealed around this heretical opinion. I, myself, have often considered Giambi safe when glimpsing one of the most replayed clips in baseball history, and a flicker of doubt still lingers in my mind.

Immediately after the game, neither Giambi nor Hernández – the two closest Athletics players – were sure when Posada applied the tag. “I knew he tagged me on the leg that tagged the plate,” Giambi told reporters. “I don’t know at what point he hit me. It was a tough play. He swiped. It was the same leg. I don’t know if I was up in the air or not.” (4)

Jason Giambi, the more recognisable sibling, was also on that 2001 A’s team, of course, and the future Yankee defended his brother. “Jeremy saw the ball being thrown in and he knew there’d be a play at the plate,” Jason told Susan Slusser for a 2015 book. (1) “He saw Posada standing there, so he was thinking he had to barrel Posada over. But he didn’t see the overthrow until he saw Posada leave the plate to get the flip. So, Jeremy thinks Jorgie is leaving the plate, and he’s halfway between either running him over or sliding. So, he tried to reach the plate as fast as he could, but Posada comes back and tags him on the back of the leg. I really don’t think Jorgie did tag him. It was from behind. But if Jeremy does slide, he might be more out. The way Jorgie went down and had his glove out, he would have gone straight into it. I still think Jeremy was safe.”

Perhaps naturally, that sentiment is shared by several people who were in the Oakland clubhouse that night, including Long, who was arguably robbed of a big RBI, and ace Barry Zito, who was ultimately tabbed with the loss. (5) “I think Jeremy was safe,” Zito has argued, emphatically. (6) So, too, has Eric Chávez, the A’s third baseman: “It was a great play, but there was no way he should have been called out. He was safe completely.” (7)

Generally, indeed, there is a hushed groundswell of suspicion – if not outright indignant belief – that Jeremy Giambi was safe on that fateful play. This anniversary, 25 years on, felt like a good occasion to investigate that groundswell, consider those claims, and try to untangle the truth. And so, I entered the rabbit hole, determined to answer a simple yet potentially insoluble question: was Giambi safe? 

Let’s dig in.

***

Alas, Jeremy is no longer with us. A complicated guy who battled substance abuse intermittently for decades, Giambi succumbed to suicide in February 2022, shooting himself in the chest at the tragically young age of 47. While serving as a private instructor in 2021, Jeremy was struck in the head by a baseball, suffering a fractured cheekbone requiring surgery, and the subsequent spiral led to his harrowing demise. (8)

Unsure of an objective place to start, then, I searched “Jeter Giambi flip” on Google Images and perused a vast cross-section of the 11,000 results. Deciphering a definitive answer from that collage proved difficult, though. Photographs are easy to manipulate and, by nature, they provide a static context devoid of chronology. You can find photos of Giambi’s foot on the plate with Posada’s glove in midair, but the sequence of events – whether that shot was taken after the play – is deceptively unclear.

To me, it seems the best shots of Posada’s tag were captured from the third base side, offering an unimpeded view. Still, isolating the exact moment Jorge’s mitt met Jeremy’s pant leg is fiendishly difficult – if not impossible. And the more I browsed, the more paranoid I became about the utility of photographs in this ill-advised endeavour.

Naturally, therefore, I turned to video. “I wish we’d had instant replay,” Howe once said of The Flip. “I’d like to know if he was out or not. It looks like his foot is on the plate as he’s getting tagged. Replay would have clarified the whole thing.” (1)

Oh, Art. Not so fast.

The Flip happened 25 years ago, lest we forget. Therefore, the video footage is grainy, botchy and somewhat pixelated. The clip posted to the official MLB YouTube channel renders in 480p resolution. Even at 0.25x playback speed, smashing the space bar to go frame-by-frame, I could not get a definitive read on when Posada’s glove touched Giambi’s right leg. In effect, one is searching for a pant ripple in a blurry, colour-washed splodge of lumpy pixels. Any perceived inkling is the work of confirmation bias.

From the third base angle, it sometimes seems to me that Posada tagged Giambi at the last possible second, with his glove being withdrawn – which is to say that, remarkably, Jorge kinda whiffed on his first attempt to tag Giambi and only caught him while moving his arm backwards. Occasionally, I think I can spot the merest hint of a pant ripple from that angle, with Giambi’s cleat less than an inch from landing on the plate, but again, an authoritative declaration to that effect is folly.

From the first base angle, you see, the pant ripple looks like it comes with Giambi’s foot already planted on the plate. However, as previously mentioned, that angle is obstructed, with Giambi’s knee obscuring Posada’s mitt, so square one comes back into view. Ultimately, indeed, splitting pixelated hairs from an ancient YouTube video is highly unlikely to yield a satisfactory conclusion, removing another tool from my arsenal.

In fact, my main takeaway from scrutinising the film pertained to Jeter. I came away in awe of his ability to make the play even remotely close. Before he intervened, Spencer’s overcooked throw was bouncing into nondescript irrelevance. To keep that play alive – to think about, conceive of, and execute such an unlikely relay – required a special surfeit of baseball feel. More, in shaping his body and intuiting which type of relay was needed, Jeter displayed an innate mastery of physics. Baseball’s foremost empath, Derek intuited exactly what the Yankees needed from him to shift the momentum and alter the script of a crucial game. That he delivered under that burden – as he did repeatedly throughout his career – speaks to his inimitable leadership. That’s why Jeter became a Yankee captain. He set the tone when they needed him most.

And so, I gradually began to surrender to the mythology, marvelling anew at Jeter’s preternatural ability. A sense of futility shrouded my search for answers, and I became increasingly convinced that The Flip is immune to binary classification. For a while, I contemplated asking those closest to the play for their opinions, but that felt rather frivolous, too – a river polluted by partiality.

“Oh yeah, he was out,” Posada told ESPN in 2015. (9) Meanwhile, Kerwin Danley, the home plate umpire, is highly unlikely to contradict his on-field decision and admit making an error in arguably the most consequential play of his career. Hernández, the aghast on-deck traffic warden, may have some interesting insight, but I struggled to find him and, regardless, he played for Oakland that night. His view cannot be objective.

Ultimately, then, we end up back where we began: attempting to parse partisan claims, assess half-baked anecdotes, and triangulate the testimony of rival competitors a quarter-century after the fact. The more you dig through the morass, the more you become convinced that simply stating an opinion and moving on is the most sensible use of time. Evidential vacuums are grist for barroom debate, and that is why we love sports. Sometimes, you just have to die on a hill, spouting whatever unprovable mantra animates your compromised soul.

Accordingly, my best conclusion is that, on an incredibly close play, mere millimetres separated Posada and Giambi, triumph and failure, glory and infamy. If we did have instant replay, fulfilling Art Howe’s wish, there probably would not have been enough clear evidence to overturn Danley’s call. And for that reason, I’m content to let it lie. To let it remain part of Derek Jeter’s grand mystique. Because believing in superheroes never hurt anybody, and we could all use a little magic.

Sources

1. Slusser, Susan. 100 Things A's Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die. 2015.

2. O'Connor, Ian. The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter. 2012.

3. Vecsey, George. New York Times. [Online] October 26, 2001. https://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/26/sports/sports-of-the-times-slide-jeremy-slide-slide.html.

4. Chass, Murray. New York Times. [Online] October 14, 2001. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2001/10/14/670219.html?pageNumber=353.

5. Coffey, Alex. The Athletic. [Online] April 29, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/1782660/2020/04/29/what-if-jeremy-giambi-had-slid-into-home-in-the-2001-alds/.

6. The Rich Eisen Show. YouTube. [Online] May 14, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3-nTq_v7Ws.

7. Matthews, Wallace. ESPN. [Online] February 29, 2012. https://www.espn.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/28296/chavez-giambi-was-safe.

8. Glasspiegel, Ryan. New York Post. [Online] June 30, 2022. https://nypost.com/2022/06/30/the-harrowing-details-surrounding-jeremy-giambis-suicide/.

9. Simon, Mark. ESPN. [Online] May 12, 2015
https://www.espn.com/blog/new-york/yankees/post/_/id/85129/15-minutes-with-jorge-posada.