Ex-Teammate Accuses Derek Jeter of Being the World's Pettiest Gambler
Derek Jeter is not a man who inspires neutral opinions in people.
If you’re a Yankees fan, he’s a hero of the franchise, a man whose career places him alongside the likes of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle as players whose single-digit uniform numbers have an iconic place in the New York pantheon of heroes.
If you’re a Marlins fan, he’s the two-bit horse trader who sold your franchise down the river by trading your favorite players to his old team.
And, apparently, if you’re Jeter’s ex-teammate Phil Hughes — now with the Padres — Jeter’s a petty little snake who can’t take a loss on a small-time gentleman’s wager without being a jerk about it.
Hughes went on Barstool Sports’ popular “Pardon My Take” podcast and ripped Jeter for being incredibly petty even by diva standards.
Jeter, like plenty of people in general, loved to make a bet.
They weren’t huge, Charles Barkley on the golf course-level six-figure-plus bets, mind you. They were little things, a few bucks here or there.
But when Jeter lost one of these friendly wagers, he’d pay in the most inconvenient way possible, a one-man argument in favor of U.S. coinage starting at five cents instead of one.
“He had this thing. He liked to do small little wagers every now and then. But he was such a competitor that if he lost, he would pay you pennies,” Hughes said.
“So it would be like a hundred bucks on something stupid like a college football game that’s going on or something. And if he lost, he would literally have a bag of pennies the next day. And it wasn’t like a dollar. It was a hundred bucks. It’s a lot of pennies.”
Indeed, it was 10,000 pennies if we’re talking a hundred bucks.
Pennies, because they last awhile, vary in weight; the old copper pennies weigh 3.11 grams, while the new zinc ones weigh 2.5.
So $100 in pennies weigh anywhere between 55 and 70 pounds.
Kinda makes you appreciate paper money a lot more, since a $100 bill weighs all of about one gram (70 pounds of $100 bills is about $3 million) and doesn’t get lost in your pocket.
Hughes pointed out that Jeter “probably had to send someone to a bank and do a special request to pay you in pennies.”
And while banks do keep boxes of pennies on hand, even they probably had to explain to corporate why they needed four such $25 boxes on what Hughes implied was a regular basis.
Paying someone in pennies is a classic jerk move, and Jeter was apparently one heck of a jerk.
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