The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Either way, the equipment manager decided to change Jeter’s number to 19. His assistant, Rob Cucuzza, wrote down the number on a card and posted it above Jeter’s locker.

  “Robin Yount wore 19,” Priore said, “and he started his career as a shortstop.” If 19 was good enough for Robin Yount, the equipment manager reasoned, it would be good enough for Derek Jeter.

  Only Derek saw it differently. “He came to me and said, ‘You’ve got to get me number 2 back, you’ve got to get me number 2 back,’” Cucuzza said. “I think Derek was a little scared to go to Nick. I was caught by surprise that he was so locked in on number 2.”

  Was Jeter suddenly locked in because he realized the historical significance of number 2?

  “Oh, I know Derek had that in mind,” Cucuzza said.

  Jeter was given number 2 and Torre number 6, and the odds were not good that both of these legacy gambles would pay off. The manager and shortstop were in this together, joined at the hip as they faced their greatest baseball challenge.

  Jeter was batting ninth in Torre’s order, and he represented the Yankees’ sixth different Opening Day shortstop in six years. Jeter was facing a forty-year-old Cleveland pitcher, Dennis Martinez, who had been signed by the Baltimore Orioles before Derek was born. The rookie felt the butterflies in his stomach, butterflies with condor wings.

  He struck out looking in his first at-bat when Martinez used a sidearm delivery that caught Jeter by surprise. Up again in the fifth inning, Jeter got ahead 2-0 in the count and waited to see if the ageless Cleveland starter would make a mistake. Sure enough, Martinez threw a high fastball, and Jeter turned on it as few thought he could.

  He hit it 395 feet and into the left-field stands, giving the Yankees a 2–0 lead. “Wow!” Torre said. “I didn’t see that all spring.”

  Joe Girardi had the same reaction, as did most of the Yanks. Clyde King, watching on TV, suddenly had an appraisal that sounded nothing like the one he had issued in Torre’s Tampa office.

  “When he hit that home run,” King said, “I went, ‘Wow, this could be some kind of player.’”

  Of course, King and others were always more worried about Jeter’s glove than his bat, and the rookie quieted those concerns, too. In the seventh inning, after he had already made a couple of fine plays in the field, including one in the hole in the second, Jeter used that glove of his to silence a gathering Indians threat.

  Cone had kept Cleveland without a hit until Julio Franco’s sixth-inning single, and he was still protecting a shutout in the seventh when Sandy Alomar Jr. laced a two-out double into the right-field corner. With Cone tiring, Omar Vizquel lifted a bloop into short center that had the unmistakable look of a run-scoring single.

  “It’s 2–1,” Cone thought to himself, “and I’m out of the game.”

  Only Jeter turned his shoulders and ran a mad dash against the ball. If he lost this race, Jacobs Field would have erupted, Cone would have been done, and the 1995 World Series runners-up would have seized enough momentum to finish first on Opening Day.

  But as much as Rey Ordonez reminded Ozzie Smith of Ozzie Smith at Shea, Jeter would remind Omar Vizquel of Omar Vizquel in Cleveland. On the dead run, his back to the plate, Jeter beat the batted ball to its preferred landing spot.

  His lunging catch made those 56 errors in Greensboro seem like two lifetimes in the past. “This kid’s got some skills,” Cone told himself.

  “I had it all the way,” Jeter said.

  He had a highlight play to match Ordonez’s, but the Yankees knew this catch meant so much more. The moment that ball landed in the webbing of Jeter’s glove, the Yankees knew they would win the game.

  Bernie Williams belted a three-run homer in the eighth, and Torre would celebrate a 7–1 victory by kicking up his feet on a desk and lighting a cigar in Red Auerbach form.

  “He was everything you could ask for today,” Torre said of Jeter.

  Nobody cared about the kid’s two strikeouts, not when Jeter gave the Yankees the two things he was not supposed to give them: power and world-class defense. On the home-run front, Jeter was telling those who asked that they should not expect too many more.

  A clubhouse full of giddy Yanks did not want to hear it. When it counted, Jeter showed up as an entirely different player from the one who nearly lost his job in the preseason, and nobody on the visiting side rushed to throw cold water on that.

  But one Yankee did not understand all the fuss. Matt Luke, Jeter’s old friend and Greensboro teammate, had seen this movie dozens of times before. Luke replaced an injured Tim Raines on the Opening Day roster, and what he saw from the dugout was the same thing he had seen on so many minor league nights in so many backwater towns.

  “Derek just walked into that Yankee locker room in ’96 with the same laid-back swagger he always had,” Luke said. “When you’re a teammate of Derek Jeter’s, he emboldens you, and that’s a powerful thing. He gives you that confidence and ability to say, ‘Hey, I can do this, too. I can get it done.’”

  On the night Jeter got it done as the Yankees’ full-time shortstop, he phoned another Greensboro teammate, Jeff Antolick, who had roomed with him in Tampa. Jeter was not calling to boast about his breakthrough moment in Cleveland.

  He was calling to make sure Antolick did not have any problems closing the apartment they had rented from October through March. Jeter said he was happy the Yanks had won and did not mention a thing about himself, Antolick said, “and I had to finally say, ‘Hey, you hit one out today.’ He just said, ‘Yeah, I got a good pitch to hit.’ That’s just how Jeet is.”

  Jeter had three hits and a walk and scored three runs in the Yankees’ second game in Cleveland, a 5–1 victory for the pitcher who had “big-leagued” him in Greensboro in ’92, Andy Pettitte. In that same game, Luke made his major league debut as a pinch runner for Ruben Sierra.

  Derek was thrilled his friend from that special Sally League team of 1993 got in the game and scored on a headfirst slide past Alomar, if a bit disappointed that Torre pinch-hit for Luke in the seventh, denying him his first major league at-bat. The following day, when he reported to Jacobs Field, Luke forgot all about his near miss.

  He was in the starting lineup in place of the hamstrung Sierra. He was finally going to get his cuts as a Yankee.

  But in the cruelest twist of fate, the heavy rains and wind wiped out the game and—as it turned out—Matt Luke’s career ambition. The Yanks re-signed Dion James and sent Luke back to the minors. Luke was waiting on deck to hit in the second game, and he was waiting for the skies to clear so he could serve as the designated hitter in the third game. So close, so far.

  Luke never got an at-bat as a Yankee.

  His friend at shortstop would get more than he ever imagined.

  Surprise, surprise; Joe Torre had inherited a heck of a team. Don Mattingly’s replacement, Tino Martinez, would overcome a hell-on-earth start to win over the jeering fans with the kind of power season (25 homers, 117 RBI) Mattingly had not even approached since 1989.

  Martinez was able to weather the Bronx storm because a teammate kept talking him through it over their daily lunches. “Derek Jeter, a twenty-one-year-old kid,” Tino said. “He kept telling me to relax, have fun, and play my game and the people will love me.

  “Derek would be laughing at me, and it wasn’t funny. But he’d say, ‘Hey, we’re playing baseball for the New York Yankees. Just enjoy it.’ And I thought, ‘You know what, this guy’s right.’ And I started relaxing and hitting the ball.”

  Joe Girardi overcame his own share of boos and the resentment over Mike Stanley’s departure to hit .294 and establish himself as a coach behind the plate. Against the odds, Mariano Duncan, the journeyman who had batted .300 or better all of once in his ten-year career, hit .340 as the last-ditch starter at second base.

  Bernie Williams arrived as a dynamic offensive force, batting .305 with 29 homers and 102 RBI and reminding everyone of the good work Stick Michael and Buck Showalter had done durin
g George Steinbrenner’s suspension, and after the Boss’s return.

  The Big Ten football coach in Steinbrenner had no use for those he deemed meek. Williams had the demeanor of a classical pianist, and he had allowed a taunting teammate named Mel Hall to reduce him to a quivering wreck—Hall had nicknamed Bernie “Zero” in Williams’s rookie year of 1991 and reveled in his freedom to berate the young center fielder with impunity.

  Williams never fought back, as he had been taught by his parents to maintain his dignity at all times. Instead of seeing Bernie as the stronger man for turning the other cheek, the Boss saw Williams as timid and soft. If Steinbrenner could have summoned the spirit of one of his heroes, George S. Patton, he would have slapped Williams’s face with his batting gloves.

  As it was, the old football coach wanted this blue-chip recruit from Puerto Rico stripped of his scholarship. Steinbrenner was not happy with the pace of Williams’s development as a hitter. The Yankees had so much time and energy invested in the center fielder—they had stashed him in a Connecticut baseball camp before signing him for $16,000 on his seventeenth birthday—and yet Steinbrenner wanted to cut his losses.

  He ordered Michael to call every single team until he found an executive who would take Williams off the Yanks’ hands. Michael called his fellow general managers, left intentionally vague messages, exchanged fruitless banter about the weather and the cost of gas, and reported back to Steinbrenner that nobody, but nobody, wanted Williams.

  And now Bernie was driving the ball all over the Bronx along with Martinez and Paul O’Neill, whom Michael acquired in a one-sided deal with Cincinnati in November of 1992, when Lou Piniella was sick of beating on O’Neill and saw something in Roberto Kelly that wasn’t there.

  In Mariano Rivera and John Wetteland, the Yankees had a devastating one-two punch in the bullpen and all the evidence needed to prove Michael and Bob Watson had been right to avoid trading Rivera for Felix Fermin, the would-be Jeter replacement who was released by Seattle before being signed and dumped by the Yanks for kicks.

  Rivera’s velocity had suddenly jumped 5 to 7 miles per hour and into the mid-90s in 1995, and the pitcher had transformed himself from a mediocre starter with no movement and no cutter into an indestructible setup man for Wetteland.

  Andy Pettitte would go 21-8 in his second season in the bigs and would also make a sage out of Michael. When he was in trade talks with Seattle for Tino Martinez and reliever Jeff Nelson, Michael was told he needed to include one of the Yankees’ two young lefties—Pettitte or Sterling Hitchcock—to make the deal work.

  Michael liked Hitchcock and Pettitte. He elected to keep Pettitte.

  Michael kept and acquired the right guys, Yankees who were tough enough to weather almost anything. David Cone, the heart of the rotation, was struck down in May by an aneurysm in his right shoulder that Watson would call potentially “life-threatening” before scrambling to retract those words.

  In Columbia-Presbyterian, Cone was frustrated by his condition and by the fact that the hospital did not have cable TV. He had to listen to his Yankees on radio, and he wept when he heard his old Mets teammate, Dwight Gooden, throw a no-hitter against Seattle in his place.

  Banned from baseball the previous year for his drug use, Gooden won the game for his father, who was facing heart surgery the following day. “I got a very good feeling about our season that night,” Cone said. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, Doc’s back. We’re going to be OK.’ I felt a responsibility to the team to be the number-one guy, and when Doc covered for me, that made me feel we might have something special here.”

  The players were as resilient as their manager. In June, Torre was grinding hard for a come-from-behind victory in the first game of a critical double-header in Cleveland when Jeter stepped to the plate for the sixth time, the Yankees having turned a 6–1 deficit in the eighth into a 6–6 game in the tenth.

  Jeter had already stunned the veterans around him with his unyielding belief in himself, and with his ability to focus under any circumstances. O’Neill was amazed that Jeter could be talking to front-row fans from the on-deck circle fifteen seconds before he would go up to hit, and that he could flip a switch once he arrived at the plate.

  “Derek had so much confidence in himself,” O’Neill said. “Tino and I thought that when you had a horrible day and you’re 0 for 4, do you really want to get up in the bottom of the ninth and go 0 for 5, or are you just like, ‘Hey, let’s get ’em tomorrow’? Jeet was always sure he’d get up there to go 1 for 5.”

  This time Jeet only wanted to go 1 for 6. Sure enough, after he struck out with the bases loaded in the ninth, Jeter came up with the bases loaded in the tenth. He ripped a Jim Poole pitch to center for a two-run single.

  Torre was feeling the rush of a dramatic victory over the defending American League champs in the first game when he took a phone call from his wife, Ali. Joe’s older brother, Rocco, had dropped dead of a heart attack while watching the Yankees’ victory from his home in Queens. Torre had been fearing this very bulletin about another brother, Frank, who had been in poor health and whose heart problems left him dependent on a pacemaker.

  The logical choice for Torre was to hand over the second game and his injury-ravaged pitching staff to his bench coach, Don Zimmer, and catch the next flight home. Only Joe did not return to New York. He got three hits from Jeter and three innings from Rivera, managed the Yankees to a 9–3 victory, and completed a double-header sweep over the Indians with Brian Boehringer and Ramiro Mendoza as his starting pitchers.

  Nothing stopped Torre’s Yankees, not mounting injuries, not life-threatening aneurysms, not even death itself.

  They held a twelve-game lead in the American League East near the end of July, and Jeter had added more than 40 points to a season-low batting average of .256. The rookie was thriving under Torre, who managed Derek with the Charles Jeter approach—almost always nurturing and understanding, but tough when tough was required.

  Joe Torre was the father Derek Jeter always had.

  “Derek was the kid Joe took under his wing,” said Jim Leyritz, a second-string catcher with a first-string ego that annoyed Torre. “Joe loved the people who were somewhat perfect, who did the right things and said the right words. Derek was his kind of player.”

  As a rookie, Jeter needed less direction than most ten-year veterans. But when he needed it, Torre handled him with caution. “When Derek messed up, Joe would get on him, but he was always discreet about it,” Andy Fox said. “Joe handled Derek the way he handled a lot of guys, but it was beneficial to Derek because he did it with a tone that said, ‘Hey, I’m on your side. I’m with you.’

  “Joe handled his stuff on the field. He would stand at shortstop during BP, and it would look like he was talking about the weather or the playing surface, but he was really getting on you about something from the night before. Derek responded to that. He never needed a lot of counseling, just a friendly pat on the ass, and Joe really connected with him.”

  Their temporary disconnects were kept to a minimum; Jeter made sure of that by constantly referring to his manager as Mr. Torre or Mr. T. But on August 12, while playing the White Sox in Chicago, Jeter hurt Mr. Torre through a rare lapse in judgment. With Cecil Fielder at the plate and Jeter on second in the eighth inning of a 2–2 game, Torre had one thought on his mind as he surveyed the scene:

  This is exactly why we traded Ruben Sierra for Fielder, this two-out situation right here.

  Of course, major leaguers are not supposed to make the third out at third base, not when dangerous hitters such as Fielder are planted in the box. But Jeter noticed that Chicago’s middle infielders were ignoring him, and that third baseman Robin Ventura was playing back.

  So on Alex Fernandez’s first pitch, Jeter took off and lost his reckless gamble—Chicago’s Ron Karkovice threw him out. Derek knew Torre had to rip into him the way the old Fisk University coach, James Smith, had ripped into Charles Jeter when he tried and failed to steal second—w
ithout Smith giving him the steal sign—on the first and last baserunning mistake of Charles’s college career.

  Rather than find a place to hide from his steamed manager, Derek Jeter sat right down next to Torre, temporarily disarming him. The manager rubbed the shortstop’s head and, without malice, told him to get lost. But after the White Sox won on Harold Baines’s tenth-inning homer off Wetteland, Torre was not cutting Jeter any breaks.

  “You don’t trade for Cecil Fielder to take the bat out of his hands,” he said. “That’s a play that stunned me. Coming from him, it really stunned me. He’s a kid, and so you give him a certain amount of rope, but it’s not a smart play.”

  Torre was normally reluctant to criticize his players in front of notebooks, microphones, and cameras, especially team-first achievers like Jeter. But on this one Derek had given him no choice.

  Jeter got over it, and Torre was eager to move on. The manager knew he had something good going on in his clubhouse. Even after his best friend, Gerald Williams, was traded off to Milwaukee, Jeter was surrounded by Yankees who did not resent his teacher’s-pet standing with Torre, or his boy-band popularity among the teenage girls in the stands.

  The team’s hardened veterans “rallied around Jeter, made him feel at home,” said thirty-six-year-old Tim Raines. “It wasn’t like back in the day when veteran players messed around with the rookie players and had them doing all kinds of crazy crap.”

  When healthy, Raines was a comforting presence to Jeter. Raines was twenty when his idol, Joe Morgan, was quick to offer him encouraging words, and now the aging Yankee wanted to give back to Jeter.

  Derek did not have to endure what a young Bernie Williams endured in the form of Mel Hall, a bully’s bully who tried to break Bernie down. A mid-season acquisition who had played thirty-two games for Showalter the year before, Darryl Strawberry joined the endless procession of big-brother types in Jeter’s clubhouse. Strawberry re-signed with the Yanks on Steinbrenner’s birthday, the Fourth of July, when the owner decided to buy a present for himself against Watson’s wishes.