The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Only the 1993 Hornets were not exactly the 1986 Mets. They were a serious-minded lot hell-bent on winning the Sally League crown.

  Ryan Karp, the lefty pitcher, was 13-1. Luke and Delvecchio provided the power, and despite his Gene Michael–tying 56 errors, Jeter was about to be named the most outstanding prospect by the league’s managers.

  Even though he remained skinny enough for Long to joke he might break his wrist on a check swing, Jeter would hit .295 with 5 homers, 71 RBI, and 18 steals. But Derek was not about numbers. He was about chasing the championships that were out of reach at Kalamazoo Central.

  The 85-56 Greensboro Hornets had a chance to win the Sally League in a best-of-five series with the 94-48 Savannah Cardinals, an older team that did not have a fast tracker like Jeter on the roster. The series went to a winner-take-all game in Savannah, “and I built it up into the Super Bowl,” Horshok said. “We had private planes down there, we rented banquet rooms, and the players got first-class treatment.”

  The Yankees even offered the Hornets $1,000 a man as a bonus if they won it all. “And when you’re in low A baseball,” pitcher Mike Buddie said, “that’s a lot of money.”

  Greensboro needed its money player. With his team down late in that Game 5, Jeter shot a laser into the left-center gap with two runners on. It looked like a sure triple, maybe an inside-the-park homer, at least until a Cardinals outfielder named Joe McEwing reached the ball.

  Jeter had already started his sprint from second to third when McEwing slid into the ball and intentionally kicked it under the fence. “A brilliant play,” Buddie said.

  Jeter was sent back to second base, a run was taken off the board, and Savannah would send the Hornets home with no trophy and no bonus to call their own. As much as the Yankees hated to lose any playoff series, even one in the bowels of Class A ball, they were excited about the fact that their prized shortstop rose to the postseason moment.

  Jeter was Greensboro’s best player. He was so good, in fact, that the beat writer who covered Derek, Charlie Atkinson of the News & Record, approached Ogi Overman, the official scorer who helped Jeter make Sally League history with his 56 errors.

  “You do realize,” Atkinson told Overman, “that Derek Jeter is going to hit .350 in the majors someday?”

  Everyone was becoming a blind believer in Jeter’s bat. His glove? That was an entirely different story.

  Over in Cincinnati, the scouting director who had picked Chad Mottola instead of Jeter in the ’92 draft, Julian Mock, kept throwing those 56 errors in the face of the Reds’ new GM, Jim Bowden, who had backed the scouts in support of Jeter. (Meanwhile, Bowden hated Mottola’s long swing from the first time he saw it, even if that long swing produced 21 homers and 91 RBI in Mottola’s first full year of high Class A ball.)

  Many executives around baseball—including more than a few in the Yankee organization—figured Jeter would not remain a shortstop. In the middle of the ’93 season, Long sat down his teenage roommate in a diner and told him to prepare for a possible switch to the outfield. Long did not tell Jeter it would definitely happen; he told him to prepare for it to happen.

  Jeter turned and shot him a blank look through those pale green eyes.

  “I’m never moving from shortstop,” he said. “It’s never going to happen. Never.”

  Derek Jeter had been hit by a pitch on the left hand, and so his instructional league orders were to play defense, and only defense, until Brian Butterfield said otherwise.

  The coach was the son of Jack Butterfield, a widely respected scout and development man with the Yankees who had died in a car accident in 1979. For Brian this was a dream assignment, a chance to have a former draft class valedictorian in his fielding lab for thirty-five consecutive days.

  Butterfield’s charge was clear: make sure the Yankees did not have to make their shortstop an outfielder. They started at 9:30 every morning at the minor league complex in Tampa, performed drills for sixty to ninety minutes, watched film of those workouts for thirty to forty-five minutes, and returned to the field to correct the mistakes found on the tape before Jeter played shortstop—without ever stepping to the plate—in afternoon games.

  Butterfield thought Derek was too passive while receiving double-play throws at second and taught him to go get the ball. The coach changed Jeter’s approach to grounders, showing him how to present an open and relaxed glove.

  “Derek looked like a baby Doberman running around,” Butterfield said. “Basically we had to break everything down.”

  The coach rolled balls to Jeter’s left and right, hit fungoes at him, drilled him hard on slow choppers. Derek made the necessary adjustments so quickly and definitively, Butterfield said, “that toward the end of the instruction league he was taking a quantum leap.”

  By the start of spring training in 1994, Jeter was ready to validate everything the Dick Groches and Hal Newhousers and Gene Bennetts had said about him at Kalamazoo Central. He actually knew how to field a professional ground ball, and he was filling out with the help of the Yankees’ strength and conditioning coach, Shawn Powell.

  “The ugly duckling,” said Bill Livesey, the executive who drafted Jeter, “had become a swan.”

  The Yankees needed to be right on Jeter, as they proved to be so wrong on Brien Taylor, the pitcher with the $1.55 million left arm. The previous December, while defending his brother’s honor in a fistfight gone awry, Taylor had shredded his labrum and dislocated his shoulder, and the doctors were fairly certain he would never again touch 99 miles per hour on the gun.

  Jeter had a maturity and a sense of purpose Taylor never had, and Yankee scouts, coaches, and executives loved to say the shortstop had a “good face” or a “sincere face.”

  Jeter had the right makeup, the loving two-parent home, and the clear commitment to be worth every penny of the Yankees’ $800,000 investment. But Derek was only nineteen, and a lot can happen to a teenager to rearrange that sincere face.

  He would make ’94 the first special season of his professional baseball career. Jeter started the year with Tampa in the high Class A Florida State League, and before he shot through the minor league system like a comet in the night, a good friend helped show him how to perform off the field as well.

  Out of upstate New York, the son of a former University of Maryland pitching coach, R. D. Long was a gregarious personality, a self-styled Charles Barkley inside Jeter’s tight circle of less conspicuous friends. Long was an athletic six-foot-one utility man known for his speed, and he was hard to keep up with from one end of Tampa’s anything-goes nightlife to the other.

  Long went by the nickname “Hollywood.” He visited Jeter’s Kalamazoo home after the ’93 season and was taken aback by the way Derek’s bedroom was decorated. “It was wall-to-wall Mariah Carey posters,” Long said. “Like a little kid.”

  R.D. assigned himself as the one to show the younger Jeter how to navigate the club scene. Up front, Long impressed upon Jeter the need to identify high-maintenance women.

  “If that woman looks like a million dollars and puts it right in your face, that one you get away from,” R.D. told him. “That one in the corner who is quiet? That’s the one you go after.”

  After practicing all day in the hot sun, after torturing their bodies some more in Powell’s weight room, Yankee prospects spent their nights indulging in the pleasures of the flesh. They were young and single, and the fact that they were recognized as potential millionaires did not hurt their batting averages in the clubs.

  One prospect not named Jeter bragged about bedding nineteen different women over nineteen consecutive nights, a DiMaggio-like streak that few doubted. “We went out every night, going hard,” Long said. “And 8:00 a.m. would come, my eyes can’t even open, I’m telling myself there’s no way in hell I’m going today, and I’ve got Derek Jeter knocking on my door saying, ‘Let’s go.’

  “Athletes, we are hunters by nature. We can’t help it. We are conquerors by nature. . . . And Derek and I hunted e
very night. But I saw him do his workouts on two hours’ sleep, and it was the most incredible thing I ever saw. Derek was a maniac in those workouts. He was a monster, and that’s why he was great. He was obsessive-compulsive regarding baseball preparation.”

  No matter how much boys-will-be-boys fun the minor leaguers had in Tampa, Jeter never let any of it negatively impact his work or his goals. But yes, the young Yankees were neck deep in fun, enjoying their red-blooded American fantasy.

  “One thing me and Jeter used to do was have him play the shy brother,” Long said. “I had to go in like a lion and push [a woman] back to Derek. We had good times, but Derek was always very respectful of every woman he’d meet.”

  His looks ensured he would meet a lot of them. While in Tampa, Jeter once pointed at a model pictured in a magazine and said he wanted to date her. One Yankees employee happened to know the model, placed the wingman’s phone call, and weeks later Derek Jeter was dating her.

  Jeter did not resemble that kid weeping in his hotel room anymore, wishing he had accepted the full ride to Michigan. He was tearing it up in the Florida State League, hitting .329 before leaving Long and other friends in his infield dust. Jeter was promoted to Class AA Albany-Colonie, where he batted an astounding .377 before playing his final thirty-five games in Class AAA Columbus, where he batted .349.

  Jeter left a lasting mark on his old Greensboro and Tampa teammates when he flew back into town to support them in the Florida State League playoffs, but there was no turning back now.

  He would finish the season with 50 steals, 68 RBI, 5 homers, and a .344 batting average, and he was named everyone’s minor league player of the year. He would pull off the rare jump from Class A to Class AAA in a single summer, in part because of his defensive work with Butterfield. In 616 combined chances at the three levels in ’94, Jeter committed 25 errors, or 31 fewer than he committed in 506 chances at Greensboro.

  The word was out, and the Hall of Fame likes of Reggie Jackson were moved to watch Jeter in person. “But every time I went to see him,” Jackson said, “he was already gone to the next level. I couldn’t catch up to him.”

  Big league teams kept calling Yankees general manager Gene “Stick” Michael to see if Jeter was available. “Stick had to say no so many times it was ridiculous,” said his assistant, Brian Cashman. “He was frustrated as hell. It was like, ‘NO, I’M NOT TRADING DEREK JETER.’”

  Jeter appeared ninety feet away from the majors, maybe less, when he arrived back in Greensboro with Long in December of ’94, with baseball locked in the death grip of a strike that had killed off the World Series. The former Hornets were returning to attend Earl Clary’s annual Christmas bash, and Clary picked them up at the airport.

  “Hey, Jeet,” Big Earl said, “you seen SportsCenter yet?”

  “What do you mean?” Jeter responded.

  “Well, the Yankees signed Tony Fernandez.”

  “Oh, yeah, Stick called me today and told me. That’s OK. If I don’t play for the Yankees soon, I’ll call Steve Fisher. I’ll go play college basketball and I’ll quit baseball.”

  Clary laughed over the thought of Jeter replacing Jalen Rose in Fisher’s Michigan backcourt and following up the Wolverines’ Fab Five act.

  “Jeet might’ve been joking,” Clary said, “but he sure didn’t sound like he was joking.”

  Baseball’s labor war ended and Jeter started the 1995 season dead serious about landing in the Bronx for keeps. R. D. Long? He had stolen 37 bases for Tampa in ’94 and was hoping to advance all the way to Class AAA Columbus the way his buddy had the year before.

  Even as a thirty-eighth-round draft choice, Long was frustrated by his failed attempt to keep pace with Jeter. He had made tremendous strides in his game, earning a mention in Baseball America as a sleeper prospect to watch, but he was best known in Yankeedom as Jeter’s good bud.

  In 1995, Long was telling teammates that Jeter would become the highest-paid player in baseball, and that he would win more than one championship for George Steinbrenner. Not everyone was so convinced Jeter would end up as a multimillionaire or as a multichampion.

  As late as 1995, some veteran baseball observers still were not sure he would even make a successful major league shortstop. “I wrote him up as being a third baseman, not no goddamn shortstop,” said Ron Washington, the former big league shortstop who was a coach with the Mets’ Class AAA affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia, when he evaluated Jeter.

  “He used to go to his knees and catch balls. . . . But at the plate, Derek still had that winning aura about him.”

  That aura served Jeter well on the morning of May 28, 1995. With the Yankees’ Fernandez down with a pulled rib cage muscle and with Kevin Elster hitting .118, Jeter got his first chance to make a fool out of Washington and a prophet out of Long.

  His Columbus manager, Bill Evers, his first manager in Greensboro, called Jeter in his hotel room around 6:00 a.m.

  “Put some water on your face and I’ll be in your room in a minute,” Evers said.

  A terrible thought consumed Jeter’s sleep-deprived brain. After reading all the trade rumors, after hearing the year before that he might get sent to the Marlins for Bryan Harvey, Jeter thought he had finally been dealt.

  “I thought I was done,” he said.

  Evers knocked on his player’s door, and Derek answered.

  “Congratulations,” the manager said. “You’re going to the big leagues.”

  Jeter was stunned. He thought it might be a cruel practical joke, but Evers assured him Yankees manager Buck Showalter needed him to report to Seattle immediately.

  Derek called home. “I’m out of here,” he shouted to his father, Charles, the old middle infielder out of Fisk University who had been overlooked by the scouts.

  “I’m going to the big leagues.”

  Derek packed his .354 Columbus batting average and headed for the Kingdome; Charles rose at 3:00 a.m. in Kalamazoo the next morning and headed west himself, while Dot stayed back to watch Sharlee’s softball game.

  Jeter found jersey number 2 waiting for him at his locker and was hit by the historical significance—the single-digit numbers were reserved for the Ruths and Gehrigs, the Mantles and DiMaggios.

  Showalter threw him into the starting lineup, threw the twenty-year-old into the same infield as Don Mattingly and Wade Boggs. On May 29, 1995, Charles Jeter was among the 18,948 Kingdome fans watching as Derek went 0 for 5 and struck out in the eleventh inning with two outs and his friend Gerald Williams, representing the go-ahead run, on third. After the 8–7 loss, Derek and Charles could not find a restaurant that was still open and settled for McDonald’s. Father and son were living the dream over Big Macs and fries.

  The following night, with Seattle’s Tim Belcher on the mound, Jeter struck out in his first at-bat before digging in for his second. This time Belcher threw a splitter that Jeter ripped through the left side of the infield.

  Derek rounded first and felt an overwhelming sense of relief. An 0-for-6 start that felt like a biblical drought was finally over. When Jeter returned to the bag, Seattle first baseman Tino Martinez sized up the Yankee rookie and figured he looked about twelve years old.

  Martinez was kind enough to add a gentle touch to the Little Leaguer’s big league moment.

  “Congratulations,” he told Jeter.

  “That’s the first of many to come.”

  4. Rookie of the Year

  Joe Torre was sitting in what was supposed to be Buck Showalter’s chair, engaged in the most critical meeting of his new Yankee life. Torre had been fired by the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals, and his fourth time around was already being interrupted by a crisis of Defcon 1 angst.

  George Steinbrenner worried that Derek Jeter was not ready to be a full-time Yankee at short.

  The banned Boss had been reinstated by Commissioner Bud Selig in 1993, and he had long reinforced his own ideas on law and order. In the wake of his team’s epic five-game playoff loss to Seattle in October of �
��95, the old shipbuilder had turned his ocean liner upside down, nudging the captain, Don Mattingly, into retirement, forcing out Showalter and his coaches, and replacing general manager Gene Michael with Bob Watson.

  Steinbrenner fired his PR man, Rob Butcher, for having the nerve to go home for the Christmas holiday. Steinbrenner sacked Bill Livesey, the man who had drafted Jeter, and other minor league and development officials for allegedly failing to identify and develop enough winning prospects.

  The Boss was no longer a diminished threat, sneaking around the edges of the commissioner’s ban. The liberated Steinbrenner had been a tsunami of negative energy since Game 5 in the Kingdome, a game he spent trashing Showalter and praising his former player, manager, and GM, Seattle’s Lou Piniella, in the visiting owner’s suite.

  It did not matter that the Yankees had not reached the postseason since 1981, or that they had rallied late in the year to earn the first American League wild card awarded under a newfangled playoff format. It did not matter that this Yankees-Mariners series was helping to win back baseball fans who had sworn off the sport after the players’ strike wiped out the ’94 World Series.

  Once an assistant football coach at Northwestern and Purdue, Steinbrenner preferred an up-the-gut, cloud-of-dust managing style best suited to a Big Ten Saturday in the fall. He was never comfortable with Showalter’s cerebral and detailed approach. At his core, Steinbrenner loved the passion and fire of the Billy Martins and Piniellas, no matter how often he fired them.

  So during Game 5 in the Kingdome, Showalter was the easiest tackling dummy to hit.

  “It was a combination of George second-guessing everything Buck was doing and elevating everything Lou was doing,” said David Sussman, the Yankees’ general counsel and COO who was seated next to Steinbrenner. “George’s consistent theme was ‘Our guy can’t hold a candle to Lou. Lou is a much more experienced manager than our guy. This kid Buck doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ It was very painful to listen to.”