The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Jeter had returned to Denbo a little wiser, a little bigger, and a little less likely to cry himself to sleep. He matured some during his semester at Michigan and during his instructional league play that followed, and he gained confidence in February and March while working out with the Yanks.

  Jeter had to negotiate one crisis of spring training faith—a veteran infielder, Dave Silvestri, was hitting him with a heavy dose of fraternity hazing, ordering Derek to perform menial batting practice tasks. But Gerald Williams, Yankee outfielder, assumed the role of Jeter’s mentor and guided the shortstop through the turbulence, and Long took his own big-brother-Derek-never-had role on the road with them to Greensboro.

  Meanwhile, as he surveyed the Fort Lauderdale camp prior to his departure, Jeter realized the gap between the big leaguers’ talent and his was not quite as vast as he had thought.

  So he did not arrive in Greensboro half as terrified as he had been when he arrived in Tampa the previous summer. Jeter hit the ball for the Hornets, sometimes with authority, and he fit in easily with the second baseman out of UCLA, Robert Hinds, and the other college boys on his team.

  But in the field, Derek Jeter was booting balls left and right, Long said, “looking like a right fielder trying to play shortstop. He had gangly legs going in every which direction, gangly arms going in every which direction. If he picked it up, he threw it away. Every way you can make an error he made it.”

  Up in the tight and steamy War Memorial press box, where a rusty fan served as the air conditioner, Ogi Overman was reliving a bad dream. A few years earlier, the official scorer for the Greensboro Hornets had given a third baseman named Andy Fox most of his 45 errors. Overman nicknamed Fox “Glove of Stone.”

  “I’d give him the E-5,” Overman said, “and he’d look into the press box and grab his nuts and give me the choke sign. He was a miserable third baseman.”

  Overman would point at Fox and shout obscenities at him, and no, it was not a pretty scene. But when he entered a Jeter error in the books, the official scorer knew to expect no such fireworks.

  “Giving Jeter an error became a running joke,” Overman said. “When in doubt, E-6.” Only the scorer took no pleasure in the process. Jeter never complained about his rulings, he said, “and you could see him hang his head and pound his glove like, ‘Goddarnit, how did I just do that?’ I felt a little sorry for him.”

  Overman did not believe in home cooking or overzealous southern hospitality. An error was an error in his book, and the only time he ever cut a Hornet a break, Shane Spencer was the beneficiary.

  Spencer was having a rough time at the plate when he lofted yet another benign-looking fly ball. The right fielder had to run a ways to reach it, but it was a catch he should have made. When the ball fell to the grass, Overman considered Spencer’s struggles and his charity work in the community and awarded him a double.

  Jeter caught no such break.

  “So many of his errors were so cut-and-dried,” Overman said. Jeter was on his way to setting the South Atlantic League record for errors, and every one of them was earned. “There was no flipping a coin to it,” Overman said. “It would be a dribbler right through Jeter’s legs, and I couldn’t do anything about it.”

  Only somebody in the Yankees’ front office could. That official did not want to hear about Jeter’s dreadful footwork, his wildly inconsistent path to the ball, or his unreliable arm. He did not want to hear that the Harvard product at first base, Nick Delvecchio, was not making any plays to bail out the shortstop.

  The official only wanted to hear that the Yankees’ $800,000 first-round pick would stop getting humiliated by a Class A scorer. That official called the Hornets’ general manager, John Frey, and screamed, “‘Tell that motherfucking scorekeeper of yours to quit giving Jeter all of those motherfucking errors,’” Overman said.

  The GM passed on the message to the official scorer. Overman was so enraged he almost quit on the spot.

  Jeter was the one who kept his cool. He never blamed Overman, or Delvecchio, or the lousy field, or the lousy lights, or the lousy luck that landed him on this lousy field under those lousy lights.

  Jeter blamed himself, and then tried to make it right. “He’d miss a Sunday hop,” Overman said, “and on the very next play he’d go eight steps into the hole, do a 360 in the air, and throw out the runner by a step. It was like he was redeeming himself, and the crowd would go crazy. Jeter was a very popular kid.”

  His redemptive plays were not enough to mute the growing chorus of front-office voices wondering if Jeter should be moved to center field. Gene Michael, Yankees general manager, decided to fly to Greensboro to see for himself.

  Michael was uniquely qualified to evaluate Jeter. Like Derek, he was a skin-and-bones shortstop prospect (he would be nicknamed “Stick”), a talented basketball player on the side, and a fielder who had committed 56 errors in his first full minor league season.

  “I didn’t know they were counting mine when I did it,” Michael said.

  They were counting Jeter’s for sure.

  A Hornets executive, Tim Cullen, a former infielder for the Washington Senators and a member of the 1972 World Series champion Athletics, gave Michael this scouting report on Jeter:

  “God Almighty, this is the worst shortstop I’ve ever seen. Where did you guys get him?”

  Michael could not believe the Yankees’ first-round pick could be so inept. Right away Michael noticed Jeter had advanced agility, a strong arm, and a spectacular talent for handling the slow chopper toward him. Michael noticed Jeter was playing with a first baseman who had trouble gathering his semi-wayward throws.

  The GM also noticed Jeter fielded ground balls two or three different ways in the same game. He noticed Derek had no plan of attack, and he would tell him Cal Ripken Jr. compensated for his lack of range by applying the same robo-routine to every ball hit his way.

  Another evaluator, Clete Boyer, told Jeter to stop catching the ball between his legs, to get it out in front. A lot of voices, a lot to change. Jeter was burdened by his fielding follies, but Michael and other Yankee officials were encouraged that Derek did not carry that baggage into the batter’s box.

  “The boy’s making three errors a game and hitting .270,” R. D. Long said, “and he tells me, ‘I’m going to hit .400 this year.’ I’m looking at the boy and saying, ‘No way,’ and sure enough he goes on a tear.”

  Only one year removed from his devastating debut as a pro, from his summer spent wanting to go home to his mother, Jeter was learning how to survive and occasionally thrive in a game built around failure.

  Delvecchio, the Harvard grad, had spent the previous season in Oneonta, New York, watching high school boys fall apart at the plate and in the field.

  Those boys never recovered. Jeter? He knew how to recover. One time he struck out with the bases loaded and came back to the dugout and declared, “That guy just showed me everything he’s got. He’ll never get me out again.”

  Jeter went 0 for 5 in another game and announced, “Tomorrow I’m going 5 for 5.” He would go 4 for 4 before his last at-bat ended in a line drive to the second baseman.

  Jeter’s bat was not quite as powerful as his arm. Delvecchio was the second cutoff man once when the shortstop ran out to take a throw from deep left center. When Jeter turned and fired to the plate, Delvecchio found himself in the role of unnecessary middleman.

  He had never seen a ball explode out of someone’s hand like that; Delvecchio did not even think about catching it. He let the ball whiz by his ear and land in the catcher’s mitt without a bounce, beating the runner by five feet.

  “I know Derek’s arm got injured,” Delvecchio said. “I’m not sure how or why, but after that year his arm diminished just a little bit.”

  Either way, Jeter was staying in the moment. He was hitting and the Hornets were winning, creating a buzz among the locals and sometimes drawing sellout crowds of 7,500. The team’s manager, Evers, had been promoted to the Class AA Al
bany-Colonie Yankees and replaced by Denbo, whom the shortstop adored.

  Suddenly minor league life was agreeing with Jeter. He was taking to Greensboro, and Greensboro was taking to him. If it was not a perfect love affair, it had more to do with the thief who broke into his Mitsubishi 3000GT at the ballpark than it did the city’s Old South roots.

  In 1960, Greensboro had become ground zero for the civil rights movement when four African-American students from A&T sat at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter, starting a series of sit-in protests in cities around the South.

  In 1979, five antiracism activists chanting “Death to the Klan” at a rally were gunned down by Klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party in an incident known as the Greensboro Massacre. Fourteen years later, Horshok said, “you still had pockets down here in the South that . . . if you went into the wrong part of town and talked to someone’s girlfriend, you could’ve gotten in a lot of trouble, if you know what I mean.”

  Jeter had friends of all colors and creeds, and he was sure to never marginalize his mother’s heritage. Sometimes Derek told people he was black and white, and sometimes he told them he was black and Irish.

  “Derek is biracial,” said Long, “but he sees himself more as a black person. In high school he was a victim of prejudice a few times—even people he thought were his friends said things—and so that’s his association.”

  Jeter had been cut by the jagged edges of racism in Kalamazoo the year before, when he parked his Mitsubishi outside a fast-food restaurant and heard kids in another car shout, “Take that car back to your daddy, you n-----,” before speeding away.

  “It’s not Kalamazoo,” Jeter would say of racism. “It’s everywhere.”

  By all accounts, the overwhelming majority of Greensboro residents who came across Jeter did not care that he was black, or black and white. Delvecchio said his teammate did speak of facing prejudice on the road.

  “People loved to get on him for who he was, the big publicity, the fact he was a first-round kid and biracial,” Delvecchio said. “I know he had to put up with the nonsense of being biracial.”

  Delvecchio also said many minor leaguers were jealous of Jeter and would claim the Yankees “just got him because of his arm. He’s going to be a pitcher. He can’t play shortstop.”

  Jeter blocked out the negative noise, no matter how relentless or vile. Having just turned all of nineteen, Derek was strong enough to assume a leadership role. He would work the locker room to make certain everyone knew what restaurant and club the guys were hitting that night. In the pregame hours he would walk behind Denbo, smack him on the ass, and say, “You ready to go tonight?”

  Greensboro had itself a playoff-bound team, and the community celebrated with the Hornets at the Grand Stand bar near the left- field seats. Jeter’s older teammates were responsible social drinkers, but the kid shortstop was not one to sneak in a beer, not at the ballpark.

  “Derek would sit out there all friggin’ night drinking Coke,” Horshok said.

  Players, coaches, and townies would engage in karaoke contests at the Grand Stand, billed as the largest outdoor sports bar in North Carolina. Jeter, for one, saved his singing for road trips. “Derek had the worst singing voice on the bus,” Delvecchio said. “He loved Mariah and Janet Jackson; he used to sing Mariah at the top of his lungs.

  “I told him, ‘You’re horrible. You’re worse than me.’ And Derek would say, ‘The first thing I do when I get to New York, I’m going to find Mariah Carey and go out with her.’”

  Jeter was tooling around in his Mitsubishi and trying to persuade Delvecchio to appreciate Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. The teenager was mentoring the twenty-something college boys in more ways than one.

  They would go to clubs together, “and Derek was underage in a lot of these places,” Delvecchio said, “and nobody cared. . . . He occasionally had a beer here and there, but he never took it to excess.”

  The Hornets took turns approaching attractive women in these clubs. When it was his turn, Delvecchio rarely struck out. But when it was Jeter’s turn, he said, the shortstop would get in the middle of the bar, “and he’d extend his index finger and point and motion for them to come over without making a sound. Without fail, they always came over. If Derek did that fifteen times with me, he was fifteen for fifteen. I never saw such confidence. The women absolutely loved him.”

  So did his teammates. Jeter did not walk about with an air of royalty. He carried himself like a thirty-fourth-round draft choice, like a player who had received Mariano Rivera’s $3,000 bonus to sign.

  Derek also was his baseball brother’s keeper. After Rivera’s surgery, Jeter counted his pitches in ’93 and reminded Mariano he needed to be efficient to preserve his arm. The nineteen-year-old shortstop was looking out for the twenty-three-year-old starter.

  Jeter built up his less talented teammates, never broke them down. A twenty-fifth-round pick, Delvecchio was a converted outfielder who had tremendous power (he was good for 21 homers and 80 RBI that year) but who struggled with his footwork at first base. He had a hard time picking up Jeter’s throws from short under the poor War Memorial lighting, and he was likely responsible for a dozen of Derek’s errors.

  “And he never said a word to me about it,” Delvecchio said. “That’s how cool he was. He’d come over and say, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ We all thought Derek was fantastic to play with.”

  Jeter would pass down lessons from his old man’s playing days at Fisk University, too. Out of left field, Jeter approached Matt Luke, a big, strapping eighth-rounder out of the University of California, and handed him a page out of the Charles Jeter playbook.

  “My dad always told me that you’ve got to get two or three hits against mediocre pitchers,” Derek told Luke, “because when you face an ace you’ll be fighting some nights just to get one.”

  Luke absorbed the thought and decided it made as much sense as anything a grizzled minor league or college coach had ever told him.

  “And here’s a high school kid telling me, a college kid,” said Luke, who was on his way to a season of 21 homers, 91 RBI, and a .304 batting average.

  No, Jeter did not let his mounting sum of errors ruin his Greensboro experience. The lost and homesick eighteen-year-old had slowly grown into this confident and independent nineteen-year-old.

  Despite his age, Jeter was a credible leader. For 7:00 p.m. games he would arrive at War Memorial at 1:30 to do some soft toss and hone his inside-out swing as the Garth Brooks music blared on the stadium speakers. Jeter was almost always the first Hornet to arrive at work, even beating the team owner to the door.

  Horshok was the owner of a local nightclub, the Rhino, and a carnival barker who knew how to create an electric small-time environment for his big-time prospect.

  He booked concerts and Elvis impersonators and postgame fireworks shows and fired confetti cannons from the stadium roof. The team mascot, a giant red and blue wasp known as Bomber the Hornet, raced kids around the bases and always lost.

  As executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association, Horshok also kept a group of prominent friends that included Mickey Mantle, who showed up at War Memorial one day to shoot the breeze. The sixty-one-year-old Mick, who would soon seek treatment for his alcoholism, was en route to a golf tournament in Georgia, and he said his goal was to get there without having a drink.

  “Hey, Mickey,” Horshok said, “you know who Jeter is?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Mantle responded.

  “Well, you’ve got to meet him.”

  Mantle did not know the identity of any other Greensboro Hornets. Just Jeter. Denbo had Horshok ask Mantle if he would speak to the Hornets, and the Mick declined. He would only agree to talk to the teenager at short.

  Horshok thought Jeter was destined to become a great player, he said, “so I wanted to make sure they met.”

  The team owner pulled Jeter out of the group and walked him into a handshake with a Yankee prodigy from a di
fferent time and place. They met along the outfield fence, and Horshok stepped away so they could talk one on one, $1,500 bonus baby to $800,000 bonus baby.

  Horshok saw Mantle doing the talking and gesturing, and Jeter doing the listening and nodding. Long before he roamed center field and swatted 536 home runs and secured a place among baseball’s all-time greats, Mantle had been a young shortstop who struggled with the burdens of great expectations.

  They had a few things in common. Mantle might have been the most popular of Yankees, and Jeter clearly was the most popular of Hornets.

  In fact, Jeter was just as comfortable with the townsfolk as he was with Mantle. He was a favorite of the team’s booster club, and with the locals who wanted to make him feel at home.

  “You’d see him go to potato salad, fried chicken, and hamburger cookouts with fans, when he didn’t have to go,” Horshok said. “Derek bought completely into what the people around here were all about.”

  Earl “Bubba” Clary was one of those people. A former placekicker at East Carolina and a sports nut newly divorced, Clary attended a businessman’s special at War Memorial and ultimately opened up his large three-bedroom home to any Hornet who needed a hot meal or a place to stay.

  Matt Luke and the third baseman, Scott Romano, moved in, and Shane Spencer and catcher Tom Wilson followed. Minor leaguers strapped for money and living three or four to a small apartment suddenly had bigger and better accommodations free of charge.

  Jeter and his roommate, Long, crashed at Clary’s for the final month of the season. At forty-five, Clary was a bachelor having the time of his life. He felt like the little boy he used to be, listening to Mantle play baseball on the radio. Jeter liked to call him Big Earl, and Clary would serve as the ballplayers’ middleman when they were trying to score female companionship for the night.

  When attractive women asked the Hornets for autographs, some players would include Clary’s phone number with their signatures. “So after games we’re over here watching SportsCenter at eleven o’clock,” Clary said, “cooking some steaks on the grill, and the women would be ringing my phone. I was the players’ agent, and I’d take the scraps. When we had enough women over here, I’d take the phone off the hook.”