New York Yankees legend and Fox Sports analyst Derek Jeter is trading in his cleats for a clapboard.
The baseball hall of famer has quietly launched a production company, Cap 2 Productions (a reference to his number with the Yankees, and his role as captain of the team), which he hopes will take full advantage of the burgeoning interest in sports-related content from TV channels and streaming services.
“It’s not just some random company that was started because we said, ‘hey, we want to get into production now.’ This is an extension of what has been built over the last 10 years,” Jeter tells The Hollywood Reporter in his first interview to discuss Cap 2.
Jeter frames Cap 2 as an expansion of what he did with The Players’ Tribune, the athlete-focused digital publication that he co-founded with Jaymee Messler in 2014.
“When we started TPT, you have a vision of what it can become, and I think it’s grown to be bigger and better than a lot of people thought, myself included,” Jeter says. “I have a lot of confidence that 10 years from now, we’ll be saying the same thing about Cap 2.”
Cap 2, which is being repped by WME, has quietly developed a slate of projects – many of them baseball-related – with a number of TV and streaming partners.
Those include the ESPN docuseries Yankees Win and a World Series docuseries set at Apple. It also, however, includes programming like the upcoming History Channel series History’s Greatest Warriors, or the recently concluded Icons That Built America.
“I’ve always been interested in, for example, where greatness derives from. How people have gotten to the places in their lives, how they’ve overcome failures,” Jeter says of the philosophy behind Cap 2’s slate so far. “I just always wanted to tell those stories, you want to inspire, you want to educate, you want to motivate.”
Cap 2 joins a growing list of entertainment companies fronted by superstar athletes, both active and retired. Tom Brady has one, and so does LeBron James. Lionel Messi recently launched one, and Serena Williams has one too.
Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions has become a prolific player in the space, while Steph Curry’s Unanimous Media is making a major push into scripted fare with Peacock’s Mr. Throwback.
It has become a lucrative area for those connected in the sports world, with those connections leading to access that other production companies simply can’t match. And having a star athlete at the helm also, frankly, makes it easier to get meetings in town, something that has taken on added significance with the ongoing content pullback across Hollywood.
In the case of athlete-led production ventures, that sometimes means “you have to do what the people want you to do first,” says Erick Peyton, the president of Steph Curry’s Unanimous Media, who noted that his company shied away from doing too much basketball-related content, until they realized that it was what got them in the door in the first place.
Once shows click, other opportunities arise.
Jeter says that he wants Cap 2 to place a priority on telling family-friendly storytelling, whether in a documentary or scripted format. He also says that he is “intimately involved in everything and every decision. And it’s going to stay that way.”
“You want to have steady growth, you want to build a foundation from the get-go, you want people to understand what Cap 2 represents and the type of projects that we’re trying to do and be involved with,” Jeter says. “But yeah, five years from now, 10 years from now, who knows? You never want to put a ceiling on it, but you want all your projects to be meaningful, you want your projects to be impactful.”
He also argues that the role that athletes play in the public consciousness has changed dramatically since he founded The Players’ Tribune a decade ago. Whereas at the time it was a novel outlet for athletes to share their stories, now many top athletes, musicians and entertainers are social media juggernauts, with millions of followers.
In some ways, it presents an opportunity for an athlete-led media company to help step in and bring viewers behind-the-scenes in a longer-form way.
“I don’t want to be the back-in-the-day guy, but it was 10 years ago since I retired. I think people nowadays want to know everything about athletes and entertainers, so there aren’t too many secrets anymore,” Jeter says. “And I think athletes and entertainers, they’re very comfortable sharing things. So when you start talking about sports, you want to know everything you can about a particular athlete. You want to know their background. You want to know where they come from, they want to know the bumps in the road along the way, and people are more interested in that, because I think it humanizes them, whereas in the past, it was more mysterious. Now it seems like everything’s out in the open.
“People have millions of followers but it’s just quick snippets, you can’t really tell the long-form version of it,” Jeter adds. “So that’s where I think Cap 2 comes into play.”
Indeed, sports-adjacent content is still in a boomtime despite the larger content pullback.
Streaming services like Netflix, Peacock and Prime Video have all ordered documentaries and docuseries featuring athletes and sports teams, while traditional TV channels like ESPN are still active in the space.
For an athlete that knows the game and the players, it can often mean a leg-up when pitching a show.
“I love being behind the scenes on that and helping recruit players and making suggestions,” says Peyton Manning, whose Omaha Productions has produced Quarterback, Receiver and now Starting 5 on Netflix. “I’m learning a lot, like I’m not the smartest guy in the room on these Omaha Productions concepts, but I like listening to the smart people that are on the Omaha team, or people that we partner with at NFL Films or Netflix, and offering any thoughts that I have.”
There is also a burden of proof involved. Veteran Hollywood producers have a track record to run on, and ultimately athlete-led ventures need to do the same in order to survive in the long run.
They need “to understand what the market needs, wants, and what’s true to us at the same time, you’ve obviously got to have some wins along the way,” says Curry. “You have got to have that belief. That belief that we’re doing things the right way, in how we approach everything.
You also need to “present yourself in a way that you’re legitimate and to [demonstrate that] we do the work and we show up and just follow through,” he adds. “And you can trust that we hold up our end of the bargain every way, every step of the way.”
It’s a strategic push into content, made with confidence but not bravado. And it’s an approach that Jeter wants to take as well.
“I think you start slowly, and you take your time to make sure that you do it the right way, as opposed to rushing too quickly,” Jeter says. “Cap 2 is not going to be successful just because I’m a part of it, it’s going to be successful because of the projects that we’re involved with.”
This story appeared in the Oct. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.