by Ian O'Connor
The Blues made their share of overseas trips to compete against the best available international competition, and one summer they planned to travel to South America. Charles and Dot wanted Derek to make the trip for the cultural experience.
Hall talked them out of it, told them Derek could not afford to miss that much time away from baseball. The coach knew what his players did not.
The Blues were so caught up in the city game, in reaching for faraway NBA careers, that they paid little attention to what Jeter was doing on the diamond for Kalamazoo Central or for his summer league teams.
They knew he wore Yankee caps and jerseys and interlocking “NY” pendants, and they knew all about his prediction that he would land at shortstop in the Bronx. But they were shocked when they found out Jeter was far more proficient on a baseball diamond than they were on a basketball court.
The Blues were all so focused on earning Division I basketball scholarships, Hart said, “it just didn’t dawn on us that Derek was better than all of us in another sport. I mean, as it turned out, what we were doing was nothing compared to him. We were just trying to get into college, and this guy was already making himself a pro.”
Courtney Jasiak was the first baseball coach to tell Derek Jeter he was not ready to play shortstop. Just as James Smith had moved Charles Jeter to second at Fisk University, Jasiak moved Charles’s son to third on his sixteen-and-under Kalamazoo team.
A right-handed batter and thrower, Jeter was fourteen when he started playing for the twenty-one-year-old Jasiak, whose over-the-top, treat-every-game-like-it’s-the-World-Series temperament unnerved Derek. Jasiak put his team of teenage warriors in a men’s city league to compete against twenty-five-year-olds, and when he went winless in his first eight games, the coach decided to jump his third baseman hard.
Derek rarely said a word during practices or games. “I was kind of crazy back then,” Jasiak would say, “but I just felt he had more to give from a leadership standpoint and I let him know it.”
Jeter responded, and Jasiak’s Brundage Roofing team scored a couple of victories against the men. Meanwhile, Brundage destroyed local opponents in its own age bracket and did so with a tiny sixteen-year-old at shortstop, Bobby Marks, an accomplished diver who made his mark in baseball by gobbling up everything hit his way.
“Derek did not like being shuttled to third base at all,” Jasiak said.
He got some time in at short all the same, and Jasiak used to roll balls to Derek’s left and make him field them with two hands. The teacher marveled over his pupil’s lateral movement, and Jasiak assured people Jeter would someday be a first-round pick in the big league draft.
Derek did nothing at Kalamazoo Central to temper that optimism. On a bitter February day during his freshman year, Jeter showed up for junior varsity tryouts in the large and drafty Central gym. Norm Copeland, the jayvee coach, hit the prospects a series of soft grounders on the hardwood to test the strength of their arms.
Jeter fielded one and fired a ball on a line no more than three feet off the court. The poor kid assigned to catch it never had a chance; the ball crashed into the boy’s stomach.
Copeland absorbed Jeter’s long and lean athleticism, the foot speed, and the turbocharged arm and told his son to find the varsity coach, Marv Signeski. “He’s got to see this kid,” Copeland said.
Signeski watched from the balcony above the floor. “Hey,” he called out to Jeter, “varsity tryouts aren’t for another two hours.”
Derek was one freshman who could have played on any varsity team in America. He remained with the jayvee because Central had an all-state baseball and hockey player at short, Craig Humphrey, leaving Copeland to try to maximize his phenom’s potential.
The coach pulled Jeter aside after the team’s first full practice.
“Derek,” Copeland said, “I want to make sure you always give me 110 percent.”
“Oh,” Jeter answered, “you don’t like the way I play?”
“No, I like the way you play very much. You’re head and shoulders above everyone else, but I’m worried you might play down to the level of the other kids.”
“OK. I understand.”
Jeter understood. He loved baseball too much to ever dumb down his game.
Despite the vast difference between his skill set and his teammates’, Derek never criticized a fellow player, never rolled his eyes or kicked the dirt over an error committed by a lesser light. He maintained his father’s demeanor on the ball field and ran faster, threw harder, and hit better than his old man ever did.
But when he was a teenager, Charles had been the one with the better glove. “Derek was not a good fielder in high school,” said one summer teammate, Chad Casserly. “He’d field the ball and then always pack his glove, pack it and pack it and pack it, before finally releasing the throw. He butchered some ground balls.”
Jeter was a dead pull hitter, too, and pitchers started nibbling away on the outside corner of the plate. The Kalamazoo Central coaches worked with Derek to take those outside pitches to right field, and before they knew it he was spraying balls all over creation and developing an inside-out swing that would put batters twice his age to shame.
If Copeland was thrilled with Derek’s progress, he pushed for more. The coach wanted Jeter to make regular appearances on the mound, too.
Derek liked to play deep at short to buy himself time on line drives, and to take advantage of his Nolan Ryan arm. During summer ball, when asked by Kalamazoo Gazette sportswriter Paul Morgan why he did not pitch, Derek shot Morgan a frightful look and said, “You’re too close to the hitter. Somebody could get killed.” Jeter, Morgan said, “wanted to be as far away from the hitter as possible.”
Derek told his jayvee coach of a different fear, told him he was afraid that pitching might damage his arm. Copeland did persuade him to take the mound in one game, and Jeter threw eight warm-up pitches for eight strikes, and then he threw nine strikes to three batters who never once saw the ball. “But he didn’t want to be there,” Copeland said. “That was the one thing he was pretty emphatic about—staying at shortstop.”
Jeter had no problem unleashing his fastballs at short. Kalamazoo Central was playing its local rival, Portage Central, in one jayvee game that devolved into a theater of the absurd for the Portage third-base coach.
Three times Portage batters ripped liners with runners on base, and three times Kalamazoo outfielders hit Jeter with their cutoff throws, and three times Jeter threw from the outfield grass to nail runners at the plate. From his dugout, Copeland saw the Portage coach fling his cap in the air before saying the following:
“I surrender. The first time I sent the kid, I didn’t even bother looking at home plate to see the play and I couldn’t believe it when I heard the umpire call him out. The second time I sent him, I watched it and I couldn’t believe it when the ball got there so quickly.
“The third time I sent him, you made a believer out of me.”
Jeter was promoted to varsity two-thirds of the way through the season, after Humphrey told Signeski he would clear the way by moving to second base. When the Central varsity faced Portage in the district playoffs, Jeter came to bat in a critical situation, with first base open. Casserly and Ryan Topham, another Portage player who was a summer teammate of Derek’s, turned toward their head coach in the hope he would walk the freshman.
Bob Royer did not know enough about Jeter, so he chose to pitch to him. “And Derek hit a seed,” Casserly said.
Jeter kept planting those seeds all over Kalamazoo, growing into one of the finest amateur players in the state. He played for Signeski and then Don Zomer at Central and graduated out of Jasiak’s boot camp and into Mike Hinga’s Maroons summer team, which played as many as seventy games a season. It was nonstop baseball for a kid who could not get enough, a charmed existence for a boy holding fast to his grown-up goal.
As the shortstop next door, Derek Jeter was the antithesis of Eddie Haskell. “He was like Beaver Cleave
r, except a Beaver who didn’t get in trouble,” Hinga said. “Derek’s mom and dad would’ve crushed him if he got in trouble.”
By all accounts, Derek earned his parents’ wrath a single, solitary teenage time, committing a felony—at least in the court of Charles and Dot—that would not even have drawn a parking ticket in most American homes.
Derek borrowed the family Datsun 310, joined some buddies for a night out, and ended up outside a house that was hosting a girls’ sleepover. A friend tossed rocks at the house windows, a man emerged from the house to chase the boys, and the cops were called to the scene, the whole event inspiring Charles and Dot to deny their son car privileges for two months.
That was that for Derek, one small brush with his parents’ draconian law. The Jeters did not have to worry about far more serious teen behavior issues; as a seventeen-year-old Derek told a family friend and a Kalamazoo scout, Keith Roberts, “Life is tough enough without drugs and alcohol.”
Tough enough? Even as he projected an altar boy’s disposition, Derek’s was not a trouble-free youth, not when he was subjected to the bile spilling out of small and ignorant minds.
Sonny Connors’s fears for his biracial grandchildren were realized. Though most of his teachers and coaches said they never heard others direct racial slurs at Derek, Courtney Jasiak recalled an incident after a play at the plate in a heated tournament game against a suburban Detroit team.
“They had this huge catcher,” Jasiak said, “and he didn’t like the way Derek came in. He called Derek the N-word. . . . The catcher got ejected, but Derek was about to fight him. We got in between them.”
Growing up, Derek and Sharlee were sometimes called hurtful names. When Sharlee was young, Derek nearly threw a punch at one kid who called his sister an Oreo but did not succumb to the urge. “Why give them the gratification to where people know something bothers you?” Derek would say.
Dot Jeter moved to assure her children that everything would be OK, that she would deal with the offender’s parents. “I’m going to take care of this,” Dot said, and place the phone call she did.
Halfway between Detroit and Chicago, Kalamazoo was not unlike other midsize midwestern towns, where the vast majority of the 1980s populace appeared progressive-minded when measured against the whites who lorded over Charles Jeter’s segregated South.
But Charles and Dot were once denied a vacant Kalamazoo apartment by a Jurassic-thinking realtor, and they were pained to see their children followed by suspicious salespeople, and to know their complexion drew stares from rude strangers.
“Kalamazoo’s not too big,” Derek would say, “but if you go somewhere with just your mother, you’re a little bit darker than your mom. You go somewhere with just your dad, you’re a little lighter than he is. So you got some funny looks. . . . Sometimes you felt the stares.”
Charles and Dot did what they could to wrap a protective cocoon around their children.
“You can’t get away from the fact there are racist people in society,” Charles would say. “Some things happened, but our kids never let that affect them. We told Derek and Sharlee to chase their dreams, to not let anyone stop them.”
When Derek closed in on his big league dream, sharpening his swing by swatting an endless procession of baseballs into a net installed in his garage, Keith Roberts heard the sounds of intolerance around the Kalamazoo Central batting cage.
“I know with some scouts it was an issue, that the Jeters had a biracial marriage,” Roberts said. “I mean a few scouts, not a lot. You overhear scouts talking.”
Roberts’s older brother, Duane, was influential in integrating local schools and establishments and ran the Kalamazoo chapter of the NAACP. “Kalamazoo is an accepting place,” Roberts said, “but there is still some ignorance.”
David Hart, Derek’s basketball teammate with the Blues, sometimes traveled into Kalamazoo from nearby Battle Creek, met up with a fellow black player, Kenyon Murray, and a couple of white girls, and immediately felt a community’s glare.
“It’s a small town, not a melting pot like New York City,” Hart said. “So you do have those little rules where you stick to your side of the tracks and I stick to mine. We didn’t grow up in the South with traditional bigotry, but there was an underlying feeling there, an invisible line, and growing up you were always conscious of it.”
The Jeters were so conscious of the invisible line, they suspected Derek was left off the all-district baseball team in his junior year of high school because of his biracial roots.
“I thought that definitely had something to do with it,” agreed Derek, who batted .557 and hit 7 homers as a junior.
Though Jeter was clearly the best player in his district, it was hard to believe a disjointed group of high school coaches secretly conspired against him, especially because the state’s coaches association would name Derek its player of the year the following season.
Much more likely, said Paul Morgan, the Kalamazoo Gazette sportswriter close to the Jeter family, the snub was the byproduct of Central’s poor record and the fact that many district coaches did not see Derek play in person.
But the Jeters had their reasons to see ghosts where there were none. If nothing else, they refused to allow other people’s ignorance to define who they were or what they would do.
Derek kept a 3.82 grade-point average as a senior, when he was considered the best high school ballplayer in the land. Surrounded by his trophies and plaques in his home, Jeter was asked by Morgan to name the award that made him most proud.
Derek immediately pointed to his eighth-grade math certificate. “I worked my butt off for that one,” he said.
He was a member of the National Honor Society, a reliable tutor for freshmen lagging behind in their computer lab, and an A student in Sally Padley’s fast-tracking British lit class who would draw himself in a coat of arms (as a Yankee on one side, a Central basketball player on the other) that was among the best drawings Padley had ever received.
Jeter had everything going for him: An arm so strong he would break the webbing of his first baseman’s glove on a critical (and accurate) throw, costing his Maroons a trip to the Connie Mack World Series after hitting two long home runs in that very game. A confidence so unwavering he would take the big jump shots for the Blues, and for Clarence Gardner and Don Jackson at Central.
A heart so compassionate he would start a collection for a Central basketball teammate who had been arrested and could not afford a lawyer. As captain of the team, Jeter persuaded Gardner’s wife to contribute $350 to the fund on the promise he would personally reimburse her—a promise he kept.
Derek’s Midas touch knew no bounds. The shortstop with the Dave Winfield poster on his wall had Division I college coaches and major league scouts attending his games. The Yankee fan born twenty-eight miles from the historic ball yard in the Bronx had piqued the Yankees’ interest. The pragmatist with the honors certificates displayed as prominently as his athletic trophies had pre-med possibilities lined up in the event baseball did not work out.
The baseball star with the steady high school sweetheart, Marisa Novara, also had fallback marriage plans in place. He was not just telling everyone he would become the shortstop for the New York Yankees—why stop there?
Jeter made another prediction to his summer coach, Courtney Jasiak, while they were working out in an indoor hitting loft, and to his summer teammate, Chad Casserly, while they were having a warm-up catch in the outfield.
“I’m going to marry Mariah Carey one day,” Derek told them.
This was Jeter’s vision of love, and it would have to wait. His vision of professional baseball needed to unfold first.
2. The Draft
On the morning of June 1, 1992, Julian Mock stepped out of his Cincinnati hotel and went on a three-mile run that would dramatically alter the course of baseball history. Mock was the Reds official who would make the fifth overall pick in that day’s major league amateur draft, and he had two prospects in mind
when he started his jog: Chad Mottola, an outfielder for the University of Central Florida; and Derek Jeter, a shortstop for Kalamazoo Central High School.
Mock was not sure if either player would be available at number 5, as baseball executives often did all they could to cloak their true draft-day intentions. But Mock knew his scouts loved Jeter, and he knew the big club was, in his words, “screaming for a power outfielder” in Mottola’s mold.
The Reds were only a season and a half removed from a World Series sweep over Oakland, but they had taken a 74-88 plunge in 1991. Mock was facing a stressful decision, and jogging allowed him to get away from everything and clear his mind.
The New York Yankees would make the sixth selection in the draft, and Mock did not much care how his pick would affect theirs, not on a professional level. On a personal level, Mock cared very much about the Yankees, the team he had rooted for in his Selma, Alabama youth.
Selma was not just divided by white and black—it was divided by Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams. There were two types of fans in Selma, Yankees and Red Sox fans. “If you said something about DiMaggio or Williams, those were fighting words,” Mock explained. “You’d better have a record book in your pocket to back up your facts.”
The local paper, the Selma Times-Journal, devoted plenty of coverage to the mighty Yanks up north, and Mock lost himself in the daily accounts. Of course, Selma’s big league allegiances were altered on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson arrived at Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field.
“When Robinson came in,” Mock said, “all the blacks in Selma were Dodger fans.”
The following year, Mock and a couple of high school buddies jumped into a Chevy and drove 1,138 miles to Yankee Stadium without making an overnight stop. They saw the home team play the Red Sox and watched in awe as the great DiMaggio filled the ballpark with his presence and grace.
From their upper-deck seats in left field, the country boys from Selma could not get over the size of Yankee Stadium and the depth of the roars that greeted DiMaggio at the plate. Mock had made his first trip to New York in 1946, when he was working at the Selma post office for 99 cents an hour and yet somehow scratched together the $150 needed to get to Atlanta, hop on a train with a friend, and take in the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall and the Giants at the Polo Grounds.
