Back in the day, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez were both New York Yankees and I only knew two things about them. One, A-Rod had a portrait of himself-as-a-centaur hanging above his bed. Two, Derek Jeter sent his hookups and one-night-stands home with a swag bag including an autographed baseball and some memorabilia. Those two stories were all over the tabloid media for years and years. A-Rod was always the messier Yankee, but Jeter definitely got around too. Jeter was just more discreet about it overall. Now Jeter is the subject of a seven-part docuseries on ESPN, The Captain. He was asked about the postcoital swag bag story and he says that it never happened. O RLY?

Despite dating a bevy of famous beauties—Mariah Carey, Jessica Alba, Jessica Biel, Scarlett Johansson, Minka Kelly, and Adriana Lima among them—Derek Jeter managed to keep the media at arm’s length when it comes to his personal life. That all changed in 2011, when The New York Post ran a story accompanied by the splashy headline, “JETER’S BOOTY HAULS.” The piece alleged that Jeter had been “bedding a bevy of beauties in his Trump World Tower bachelor pad—and then coldly sending them home alone with gift baskets of autographed memorabilia”—and accidentally gave the same woman identical swag.

“Derek has girls stay with him at his apartment in New York, and then he gets them a car to take them home the next day. Waiting in his car is a gift basket containing signed Jeter memorabilia, usually a signed baseball,” a friend of the woman told the Post. “This summer, he ended up hooking up with a girl who he had hooked up with once before, but Jeter seemed to have forgotten about the first time and gave her the same identical parting gift, a gift basket with a signed Derek Jeter baseball.”

In The Captain, Emily Smith, the New York gossip maven and writer of the piece, explains that they got a call from a woman who “described two occasions when she got the memorabilia,” and that she “saw some pictures of it, but we didn’t publish them.” But she later admits that it was never confirmed whether the woman was just visiting Jeter or slept with him. While Jeter chose to ignore the story at the time, he finally addresses the wild rumor that’s followed him for the past decade-plus in the film.

“Yeah, I read the article. Yeah, of course,” says Jeter. “You know, you see it, and then it’s like, how the f–k did people come up with this? You know, basically, that’s it. And who would believe this sh-t? And you believed it!”

He continues: “I remember being at a Starbucks one time and there’s some random guy behind me and he says, ‘Hey, I just want to let you know that I’m giving out gift baskets because you did.’ And I turned around and said, ‘You’re a f–kin’ idiot!’ and the look on his face… like, did he think I was gonna say, ‘Yeah, good job, man!’”

“It’s a story that became larger than life. People keep regurgitating this story that never happened. Never happened,” he concludes.

[From The Daily Beast]

I honestly didn’t think it was a terrible story at the time, and even now, I’m still like “hey, if you’re a famous guy and you have a lot of sexual partners, it’s probably not the worst idea.” Like, yes, it’s tacky and impersonal to have one certain way you’re saying goodbye to someone you picked up the night before, but what I always liked about the story is that if you spend the night with Jeter, he was arranging a car to take you home in the morning and you got a lil’ gift bag to boot. That’s more than a lot of women get after a one-night-stand. So, this just begs the question: how did Jeter send his hookups home? Did he expect them to call a cab while he showered? What if they actually wanted a signed baseball after getting railed??

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.