The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  “Went to two plays, too,” Mock said, “which I couldn’t get out of soon enough.”

  He did not ever want to leave Yankee Stadium in late September 1948, but he needed to get back for classes at Auburn University, where Mock would become an outfielder with hopes of playing professional ball.

  He ended up in the air force instead, got married on exit, and started a career in coaching and teaching in Atlanta. Mock led Murphy High to a number of city and state titles and was introduced to the scouting business by a fellow coach, Lem Clark, who was working for the Pirates.

  Mock ended up as a territorial scout for the Reds, and then as their scouting director. He never completely surrendered his childhood affection for the Yanks.

  Mock was a Mantle fan, he said, “until I found out he had permission to be with his wife for the birth of their baby and he didn’t go. I went through the Horace Clarke era, and I stayed a Yankee fan until they got Reggie Jackson. I couldn’t pull for a team that had a self-promoter like Reggie, but after he left I became a Yankee fan again.”

  Only on June 1, 1992, Mock woke up as the biggest Cincinnati Reds fan in the world. Would he go for Jeter, the high school phenom coveted by his own scouts despite the fact that Cincinnati’s Barry Larkin was a twenty-eight-year-old four-time All-Star at short? Or would he go for Mottola, the older, stronger, more experienced player at a position of need?

  By the time he completed his three-mile jog, Mock had his answer. He showered, dressed, headed to the office, and refused to reveal the name he would announce on the speakerphone when he walked through the door.

  “I didn’t tell a single person,” Mock said. The scouting director was tired of the Reds’ intentions getting leaked to the press. “One of the guys called me Columbo,” he said, “but that’s the way I wanted it to be.”

  As draft time neared, many in the Reds organization were merely hoping Jeter would still be on the board at number 5. With the first overall pick, the Houston Astros were considering the Kalamazoo kid and college star Phil Nevin. Cleveland, Montreal, and Baltimore would pick after Houston, and early indications had those franchises passing on Jeter for college prospects the likes of pitchers Paul Shuey and B. J. Wallace and outfielder Jeffrey Hammonds.

  Those in the Reds organization who wanted Jeter figured they only needed him to get past the Astros at number 1. And yes, those Reds officials believed Jeter was worthy of the first overall pick. They saw him as the best high school player in the land, better than the warm-weather hotshots from California, Florida, and Texas.

  In his frostbitten corner of Michigan, stuck on a losing Kalamazoo Central team, the biracial golden child who did not make the all-district cut as a junior became everybody’s all-American as a senior, and only one thing was out of place in Derek Jeter’s otherwise picture-perfect life.

  The New York Yankees did not have a prayer of getting him.

  Dozens of scouts tracked nearly every swing Derek Jeter took during his senior season at Kalamazoo Central, but none matched the profile of Harold “Hal” Newhouser. A Hall of Fame pitcher for the Detroit Tigers in the 1940s and 1950s, Newhouser was hired by the Houston Astros to find professional baseball players in a climate more likely to produce Big Ten football and basketball stars.

  The wet and raw Michigan baseball season created a painfully small window for talent evaluation, and Newhouser attacked that window the way he had attacked American League hitters during the mid-forties, when he won at least 25 games in three consecutive seasons.

  He would slide into long johns and corduroy pants, throw on two sweaters beneath his jacket, pull his woolly hat over his ears, and then make the 290-mile roundtrip drive from his Bloomfield Hills home to the Kalamazoo tundra to watch Derek Jeter quarterback his team at short.

  The drive was worth it. What Newhouser saw in Jeter, Tom Greenwade had seen in a teenage prodigy from Oklahoma, Mickey Mantle, whom he signed for $1,500 while they sat in the scout’s Cadillac.

  “I don’t know if Derek will play shortstop or end up in center field,” Newhouser told Jeter’s summer league coach, Mike Hinga. “But either way he’s going to play in the majors for twenty years.”

  The old scout understood the Astros would not get Jeter for Mantle’s $1,500, or for the 500 bucks Newhouser’s hometown Tigers gave him to sign as an eighteen-year-old in 1939. The boy lefty gave $400 of his bonus to his mom an hour before a Cleveland Indians scout pulled up to offer a brand-new car and a $15,000 deal.

  Newhouser was a young man of his word, so he stuck with the Tigers, made his debut with them in September of ’39, and beat the Cubs in Game 7 of the 1945 World Series after the military refused his attempts to enlist because of his leaky heart valve. If Newhouser was known as an incurable hothead on the mound and in the clubhouse, he was a meticulous and even-tempered scout.

  Before his 1992 induction into the Hall of Fame, an honor granted by the Veterans Committee after an endless three-decades-plus wait (some voters thought his wartime record was inflated by the watered-down competition), Newhouser scoured high school and sandlot ball fields for future Cooperstown immortals. He worked for the Orioles, Indians, and Tigers before landing with the Astros, and the prominent signings on his resumé were Milt Pappas, who won 209 games, and Dean Chance, who won a Cy Young Award.

  Jeter was going to be a more prominent signing than both.

  “He’s the best I’ve ever seen,” Newhouser told Don Zomer, Jeter’s coach at Kalamazoo Central.

  The professional scout made a profound impression on the amateur coach. One day at practice, Zomer spotted a solitary figure in the stands he had taken for a father waiting to give his son a ride home. The man approached Zomer behind the batting cage and introduced himself, and the coach was struck by the stranger’s tanned, leathery face.

  When Newhouser offered his name, Zomer nearly fell over. Some scouts paraded around in their blazers, the coach said, “but Hal had on an old jacket and a stocking cap and looked like he was going hunting.”

  Newhouser was going hunting for sure—hunting for a player whose signature would ease the sting of the Astros’ 97-loss season in 1991.

  On assignment, Newhouser made as little fuss as possible. He carried himself without any swagger, and he often did not bother bringing a radar gun to his games.

  “I don’t need a gun to tell me somebody throws fast,” he would say.

  Newhouser did not need any box scores or stat sheets to tell him Derek Jeter would be a twenty-year big leaguer, either.

  “Derek is so natural,” the scout told his wife, Beryl. “Derek has the most wonderful pair of hands I’ve ever seen.”

  Newhouser was hardly the only big league scout left breathless by Jeter’s exploits at Kalamazoo Central. In fact, when Central played a double-header against the local rival, Portage Central, and its own highly touted prospect, Ryan Topham, more than forty scouts braved the mid-April sleet and snow and turned the Portage field into an American Idol audition ten years before the show’s debut.

  Topham, Jeter’s summer teammate with the Maroons, had already signed a National Letter of Intent to play at Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish chased a Jeter-Topham daily double and had booked Derek and his parents for a campus visit.

  Jeter told Gary Tuck, a Notre Dame assistant and former Yankees coach, of his pinstriped aims. Tuck was hoping Dot Jeter’s Irish-American roots would help convince Derek that the road from Kalamazoo to the Bronx ran through the emerald fields of South Bend.

  “My mother wanted me to go to Notre Dame,” Derek would say.

  As academic-minded people, the Jeters insisted their son prepare for college despite the intensifying interest from the pros. Derek seriously considered offers from Notre Dame, Miami of Florida, and Michigan, and despite his mother’s preference, he was leaning toward Miami.

  His Michigan visit with the Wolverines’ head coach, Bill Freehan, an eleven-time All-Star catcher with the Detroit Tigers, changed everything. The Jeters liked Freehan and his assista
nt, Ace Adams, who met the family in an Ann Arbor restaurant in the hours before Michigan hosted Notre Dame in the Big House. They had the restaurant all to themselves.

  “Do you think Derek will ever play here?” Dot Jeter asked.

  Adams about choked on his food.

  “Mrs. Jeter,” he replied, “Derek could have started for us in tenth grade.”

  Michigan was just coming off NCAA probation for violations committed under Bud Middaugh, and the Jeter signing represented a home run in every literal and figurative way.

  The way Adams saw it, Jeter was the best player Freehan had ever recruited. The assistant thought Derek would be worth five runs to the Wolverines in every game—he would save two in the field and produce three at the plate. Beyond that, Charles Jeter delivered a scouting report Michigan had yet to hear from a recruit’s father.

  “My kid never disappointed me one day, ever,” Charles told the Wolverines’ staff.

  The day Jeter called with word he was committing to Michigan, Freehan walked into the coaches’ office and broke the great news. “He’s coming with us,” Freehan said.

  “Goddamn,” Adams replied. “All that hard work paid off.”

  But had it? Would Jeter hand back the scholarship and turn pro if he was drafted high in the first round?

  Adams remained worried. The big league scouts were everywhere, he said, “and they were all lying to us, telling us they weren’t going to take him.”

  All those lying eyes were on Jeter for that Saturday double-header against Portage early in Derek’s senior season.

  The teams were not the main attraction, as Portage was a suburban power and Kalamazoo the city long shot hoping to win half its games. Instead everyone wanted to see the duel between fast friends, Jeter versus Topham. They played together across three summers, traveled together to tryout camps, stayed over at each other’s homes.

  Jeter entered the double-header with three homers in his first two games, and with the clear understanding that, on this stage, he was the Jordan and Topham was the Pippen.

  Only neither could run anything approaching a fast break in this snowy, dreary, rainy weather. “A typical Michigan baseball day,” said Eric Johnson, a Portage pitcher.

  The teams knew they had to play on a day like this, if only because full-fledged storms usually washed out a third of the area schedule.

  Topham made the first impression. With Kalamazoo holding a 3–1 lead in the opening game, the Portage star ripped a first-inning fastball through the sleet and over the 345-foot sign in right.

  Jeter was moved to answer, and quickly. In the third inning, he lashed at a 3-1, eye-high fastball from Portage’s Chris Quinn and sent it screaming into the pine trees beyond the 385-foot sign in center.

  The shot whistled straight over Topham’s head; the outfielder did not even turn to watch it clear the fence. Johnson, playing shortstop at the time, could not get over the flight path of the ball.

  “If I was on top of second base, I could’ve jumped and caught the thing,” he said. “It was one of those jaw-hitting-the-ground moments, because nobody could believe how hard Derek hit that ball. It was exactly what the crowd had come to see.”

  In the sixth inning, the crowd of fans and scouts saw something it never expected to see—a Derek Jeter strikeout, his first and last of the year. Derek was facing a 2-2 count, two outs, bases loaded, when his summer league teammate, Chad Casserly, fired a slider that caught the outside corner of the plate.

  The umpire gave Jeter the benefit of the doubt, and the Portage side let the man behind the mask hear it. Casserly came back with the same pitch in almost the same location, this time missing the plate by a hair, and Jeter started heading for first base.

  Only Derek was halted by the sickening sound of an umpire calling him out. Jeter spun around with his head tilted, shot the masked man a crooked smile, and headed for the visiting dugout to retrieve his glove.

  Zomer jumped all over the ump. “And I just ran off the field while everybody cheered,” Casserly said.

  Portage won, 12–8, and the scouts milled about before the start of the second game. Some were carrying stopwatches to time Jeter and Topham on their sprints from the batter’s box to first base. Others were carrying radar guns to time Jeter’s throws from shortstop to first, throws clocked at 90 miles per hour.

  Derek was very much aware of the scouts, at least those who were not hiding in their cars or behind trees in order to conceal their interest. Jeter stole glances at them whenever he could, the way a shy teen steals glances at the prettiest girl in his third-period history class.

  Derek was desperate to be noticed, and so when he hit a dribbler toward short in the first inning of the second game, he exploded out of the box and raced hard against all those stopwatches timing him to first.

  Johnson, another friend, was Portage’s starting pitcher, and one who had eagerly anticipated this matchup. He was happy he had gotten Jeter to hit this slow roller, at least until Derek beat out the throw on a bang-bang play.

  But as soon as Jeter crossed the bag it was clear he was in distress. In his zeal to reach base safely and post a blazing time for the scouts, Jeter extended his final stride, caught his spikes on the outfield side of the soaked bag, rolled over his ankle, and began hopping on one leg.

  A hush swept over the entire field, leaving Johnson to think, “Oh, no, what just happened?” Portage was going to defeat Central whether or not Jeter was in the lineup, only this moment was not about winning and losing on a high school scoreboard.

  “You could tell everyone was thinking, ‘I hope this doesn’t hurt Derek’s chances,’” Johnson said.

  Jeter was helped off the field by his father, and Kalamazoo went down by a 10–0 count. Derek was terrified he might have suffered a broken ankle, and he was only slightly relieved when the doctor told him he had a high ankle sprain and could miss most of the year.

  The injury could have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars and a place in the first round of the draft. Only the six-foot-three Jeter had an inner toughness that cut against the grain of his praying mantis build.

  He missed a handful of games, slid his swollen ankle into a brace, and returned to his losing Kalamazoo Central team in high-tops and higher spirits. Derek was not about to let his human frailty defeat him.

  Jeter could not match his .557 batting average and 7 homers from his junior year, but he did hit .508 and finish with 23 RBI despite the fact that his injured ankle stripped him of all his home-run power.

  The numbers were good enough to earn Jeter plenty more than the all-district honors that had escaped him in 1991. The American Baseball Coaches Association and USA Today would name Jeter their national High School Player of the Year, and Gatorade would name him its High School Athlete of the Year.

  As it turned out, Derek’s draft status did not begin deflating the moment he blew a tire on the first-base bag at Portage. Hal Newhouser still believed Jeter was the best amateur prospect in America, high school or college, and he was hell-bent on the Astros selecting him with the number-one overall pick.

  With the Reds picking four slots behind Houston, Reds scouts Fred Hayes and Gene Bennett wanted their team to be ready to scoop up the Astros’ potential fumble.

  But Hayes and Bennett were not making the final call for Cincinnati any more than Newhouser was making the final call for Houston. Scouting directors, general managers, and team owners did not make a habit of watching high school games in the Michigan rain and snow, at least not the way their scouts did, and yet they were the ones responsible for deciding who was worth drafting and who was not.

  Sometimes those decisions were not about speed and power, but dollars and cents. So veteran scouts who were not in prime position to sign Jeter knew enough to hang in there with the Kalamazoo kid.

  Dick Groch was one of those scouts. He was hiding in plain sight at Jeter’s games, avoiding eye contact with the shortstop, and declining to introduce himself to Jeter’s coach.

/>   Zomer took calls all day from scouts needing directions to Kalamazoo Central, from scouts asking for weather reports and places to eat. Sometimes the phone rang in the small hours of night, and Zomer never cared.

  “When you’re doing it for a kid like Derek,” he said, “you don’t mind at all.”

  But Dick Groch did not bother to set up a meeting or even to stop by the batting cage to say hello.

  “Never met him,” Zomer said. “I had no idea who he was.”

  Groch was employed by the New York Yankees, and as draft day approached, he was finally emerging from the bushes and preparing to pounce.

  Dick Groch first saw Derek Jeter at a baseball camp in Mount Morris, Michigan, where the shortstop fielded ground balls, showed off his arm, and ran the sixty-yard dash. Groch was standing next to an assistant coach at Michigan State who was taken by the teen’s talents and who wanted to get Jeter on his mailing list.

  “You’d better save your postage,” Groch told the coach. “That kid’s not going to school.”

  The Yankees’ scout had been watching Jeter for only half an hour when he ruined that Michigan State assistant’s day. Groch had been a junior baseball coach for eighteen years, and he had seen dozens of prospects come and go as a scout.

  He knew a star when he saw one.

  “When you look in the window of a jewelry store,” Groch said, “it doesn’t take long to see that big ring. If you’ve been in it as long as I had, you know the difference between going to the Kentucky Derby and the county fair.”

  Groch could not help himself. The young shortstop inspired the veteran scout to empty his considerable bag of metaphors.