The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Rodriguez stood in the Garden corridor, near a concession stand, and waited patiently for his friend to return. A-Rod, as he was known, was not accustomed to playing Robin to anyone’s Batman. A year after Jeter was chosen sixth in the 1992 draft, Seattle made the six-foot-three Rodriguez the first overall choice out of Miami’s Westminster Christian High.

  Rodriguez was an amateur prospect described by some scouts and agents as the best they had ever seen—an opinion shared by the man who drafted Jeter, Bill Livesey, and the agent who represented Jeter in his first contract negotiations with the Yankees, Steve Caruso.

  “Derek’s the second-best high school player I ever saw, and Alex was easily the best,” Caruso said. “Alex was the same height as Derek, but his body was much more developed. With Derek, you sensed he could be a star. With Alex, you knew he’d be a star.”

  Caruso was among the finalists to represent Rodriguez before he lost out to Scott Boras. The teenage A-Rod was cocky, of course, “but it was an act,” Caruso said. “That’s what struck me about him. He did not have a lot of self-esteem. . . . You’d tell Alex, ‘You’re a very good player,’ and he’d say, ‘You think so?’ He needed to hear it all the time, where Derek was more confident in himself.”

  During his talks with Rodriguez, Caruso found A-Rod to be fascinated with Jeter, or at least with what he would read about Derek in Baseball America. “Oh, man, I love Derek Jeter,” Rodriguez told Caruso. Alex said he wanted to be introduced to the Yankee farmhand.

  So the agent gave A-Rod’s number to Jeter and had his client give him a ring. Jeter and Rodriguez met face-to-face at a Michigan-Miami baseball game during Jeter’s first spring training, and one nearly became interchangeable with the other.

  Over time America discovered they shared the same height, the same complexion, the same green eyes, the same short-cropped haircut, the same leg-buckling effect on women, and, of course, the same passion for being great.

  “Looking at him is almost like looking in the mirror,” Rodriguez would say of Jeter. “We are often mistaken for related, for brothers, when we’re together. And now, we spend a lot of time together. We’ve grown close, to be special friends.”

  As major leaguers, Jeter stayed in A-Rod’s Pike Place apartment when the Yankees were in Seattle, and Rodriguez stayed in Derek’s Upper East Side apartment when the Mariners were in New York. In those weeks when the American League schedule makers left them miles and miles apart, Jeter and Rodriguez checked each other’s box scores first thing in the morning.

  Their love-love relationship was the source of constant clubhouse teasing. When Rodriguez’s high school teammate Doug Mientkiewicz would run into A-Rod, he would jokingly ask him, “Are you going over your boyfriend’s house?”

  Jeter heard it, too. “I talk about Alex around here,” the Yankee shortstop said of his home locker room, “my own teammates tell me to shut up.” Jeter’s teammate in ’96, Jim Leyritz, confirmed as much. “We used to give Derek a hard time about it,” Leyritz said of the shortstop’s relationship with Rodriguez. “It was like, ‘Hey, dude, he’s on the other team.’”

  Alex and Derek. Derek and Alex. The mention of one automatically inspired the mention of the other.

  Jeter won a championship and the American League Rookie of the Year award in ’96. That same season, as he was closing on his twenty-first birthday, Rodriguez became the youngest shortstop ever to make an All-Star team. A-Rod nearly won the AL MVP award (he finished a very close second to Juan Gonzalez of Texas) and became the first AL shortstop in more than half a century to win a batting title with his .358 average, a stat enhanced by his 36 homers and 123 RBI.

  A-Rod had the far greater individual season—in fact, it was the greatest offensive season by any shortstop—but he already lusted for what Jeter owned in New York. “I want [a championship] very bad,” he said. “I would trade everything about my year for what [Jeter] had.”

  They appeared together on the cover of Sports Illustrated in February of ’97, a smiling Jeter wrapping his right arm around a smiling and kneeling A-Rod. The headline announced that the friends were heading “the finest group of shortstops since World War II.”

  Their numbers took something of a plunge that year, as Rodriguez lost 58 points from his batting average and Jeter lost 23 points from his. They both reached the playoffs, where Jeter hit for a higher average against Cleveland (.333) than Rodriguez batted against Baltimore (.313) and actually out-homered the more powerful A-Rod in the postseason, slamming two to Alex’s one.

  But like Rodriguez’s Mariners, Jeter’s Yankees were eliminated in the first round, and that was the way Jeter preferred to keep score. It did not matter that Mariano Rivera surrendered the big Game 4 homer to Sandy Alomar Jr., or that Bernie Williams was the Yankee star who did not come through. The Yankees failed to win it all, leaving Jeter to view the season as a waste of time.

  George Steinbrenner reached the same conclusion. Already steamed over the fact that his defending champs were eliminated by his hometown team, Steinbrenner blew a fuse when he read a New York Post story that said his Yanks went right from their Game 5 defeat to the airport to a Greenwich Village club, where they partied through the night.

  Steinbrenner immediately picked up the phone and began blasting away. David Cone had organized the boys’ night out, figuring his team needed some cheering up. The Boss told Cone he was extremely disappointed in him, told him he had let down the organization. “I completely agree,” Cone replied. “I apologize. It’s my responsibility. I’m the one who put that thing together, and it won’t happen again.”

  It was a fitting punctuation mark on a season shaped by none of the feel-good karma that had inspired a title in ’96. The disagreeable tone was set by Cecil Fielder, who interrupted the Yankees’ otherwise charmed off-season by demanding a trade, ripping Joe Torre for benching him in Game 1 of the Texas series, ignoring Torre’s several phone messages, and demanding a contract extension.

  The ’97 team was doomed before the close of spring training. The ’96 team, Tim Raines said, “wasn’t concerned about ‘me’ and ‘I.’ It was a team and that’s why we won the World Series. Everybody pulled for each other and the team actually liked each other, and that’s hard to find in baseball because you usually have different cliques.

  “You have a lot of Latinos hanging together. You’ve got the white guys hanging together. You’ve got the black guys hanging together. You’ve got the pitchers hanging together, the infielders, the outfielders, and there was none of that on our [’96 team].”

  Jeter moved easily from group to group, clique to clique, race to race, and yet the sturdy bridges connecting the diverse clubhouse groups began to rot in ’97. “We basically came back with the same team, minus John Wetteland, but we weren’t a band of brothers anymore,” said Brian Cashman, who would replace Bob Watson as general manager before the ’98 season.

  “Cecil started it off in spring training, and then Charlie Hayes and Wade Boggs were fighting like they weren’t the year before. All the guys who put aside their personal interests in ’96 decided it was time for me, and it really changed the dynamic of our clubhouse. So we purged our clubhouse of a lot of guys guilty of that.”

  Club officials wanted the Yanks built around Jeter and his team-centric goals, and they were concerned that too many players with self-absorbed pursuits would hurt the cause. So Fielder, Boggs, and Hayes were among those out, along with Kenny Rogers and Doc Gooden.

  Watson was another casualty of the ’97 season. He had no problem trading a left-handed starter, Rogers, for a third baseman hitting .203 in Oakland, Scott Brosius. But Watson refused to deal a left-handed first-round pick, Eric Milton, and a highly rated infield prospect, Cristian Guzman, for Minnesota’s All-Star second baseman, Chuck Knoblauch, whose required wage was too rich for the Twins’ small-market blood.

  Minnesota initially asked for Williams and Andy Pettitte, “and I told Mr. Steinbrenner that if we waited there was a good possibility w
e’d get [Knoblauch] for two broken fungo bats and a bag of BP balls,” Watson said. “Minnesota wasn’t going to spring training with Knoblauch contract-wise, so they would’ve come off Milton and Guzman, too.”

  From afar, Steinbrenner had fallen in love with Knoblauch, and once Steinbrenner fell in love with someone else’s player he would not be denied. Knoblauch had speed (62 stolen bases in ’97), a little pop in his bat, and sure enough hands to win a Gold Glove. Steinbrenner saw Minnesota’s second baseman as the perfect long-term partner for Jeter.

  So he ordered Watson to do the deal for Milton and Guzman, and the GM refused, telling the Boss he had been hired to protect the franchise’s assets. Steinbrenner would not back down, and neither would Watson.

  “Mr. Steinbrenner told me someone else would make the deal, and I told him I’d have to respectfully resign,” Watson said. “He had the trade made, and I packed my little box under my desk and that was it.”

  Watson was a burned-out mess, beaten down by Steinbrenner’s relentless verbal assaults. So he stepped down, compelling the Boss to promote the thirty-year-old Cashman. The new GM was ordered to give the Twins what they wanted, and Steinbrenner got his man, a natural leadoff hitter who could move Jeter to the two-hole.

  “Joe Montana,” A-Rod said of Jeter, “just found his Jerry Rice.”

  Rodriguez had played with Knoblauch in some exhibition games in Japan. “Chuck Knoblauch is such a good player I’m not even sure New York knows what it has,” A-Rod gushed. “Chuck and Derek are both Gold Glove–type guys on defense and great offensive players. I think this probably gives the Yankees the best shortstop–second base combination in the whole league.”

  Publicly, A-Rod was saying he wanted Jeter to forge a perfect union with Knoblauch and to watch them live happily ever after. Privately, according to a friend of A-Rod’s, Rodriguez was already jealous of the off-the-charts popularity Jeter enjoyed in the world’s biggest market while he was posting far superior numbers in Seattle.

  The self-esteem issues identified by Caruso four years earlier fed A-Rod’s Jeter envy. Rodriguez had once said of the Yankee shortstop, “He’s smarter than me, though. He got 1,200 on his SATs. I got 910. My reading comprehension held me back, because we speak only Spanish at home.”

  A-Rod would marvel over the way Jeter handled the New York traffic and the scores of fans who approached his car to request/demand an autograph, and would suggest he could not possibly manage the same hectic pace. For his part, Jeter would say Rodriguez deserved the AL MVP award for setting an offensive standard at short that could not be touched.

  “I think we bring out the best in one another,” Jeter said.

  At the time Jeter respected Rodriguez’s opinion as much as his game, and so he accepted his February 1998 endorsement of Knoblauch as gospel. Jeter did not want to knock his previous partners, Mariano Duncan and Luis Sojo and Rey Sanchez. “But Chuck can hit, steal bases, turn a double play,” Jeter said, “everything you could want in a second baseman. . . . I’m looking forward to it. We all think we have a shot at winning another championship.”

  A shot? As the Yankees gathered at their spring training base in Tampa, Steinbrenner did not want to believe he had made a $72 million payroll investment in a shot. The Boss thought he was paying for a sure thing.

  So it was fully expected that Torre would face the kind of win-or-else mandate that came with one of those fat Steinbrenner paychecks. “When I was a football coach at Northwestern,” the Boss said, “we had no materials and couldn’t do a thing. When I was at Purdue we had Lenny Dawson, other horses, and we won.

  “Now we’ve given Joe Torre the horses.”

  Steinbrenner said that he did not want Torre to feel any pressure, that their relationship might be the best he ever had with a manager. But the Boss also maintained he had never worked harder to put together a roster, a clear message he expected that hard work to be honored.

  Steinbrenner also went public with the unnecessary reminder that he had pulled the thrice-fired Torre from the scrap heap. “When we hired Joe,” the Boss said, “everyone said, ‘What the hell are you doing? This guy’s a loser.’”

  If that comment did not dent Torre’s faith in himself, Steinbrenner’s guarantee that his manager would remain gainfully employed for the entire season—regardless of the Yanks’ record—did not comfort him, either.

  Torre understood Steinbrenner’s terms of engagement. After getting eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, Torre knew only a second title in three years would ensure his return for the 1999 season.

  “At least when you get fired here,” the manager said, “you had a chance to win. When I got fired in St. Louis, I was told I needed to do more of this and that. Of course, it came down to the fact we didn’t have the team. That bothered me. Here, you’re going to get a better-than-honest chance because George isn’t playing for second place.”

  Torre looked around his clubhouse and liked what he saw. By and large, the malcontents were going, going, gone, including Gooden, who trashed Torre on exit. Chili Davis was a likable addition and a powerful force from both sides of the plate. Knoblauch added an element of speed to a franchise often lacking it.

  Torre was concerned about his starting pitching, even though he rejoiced over the subtraction of Rogers. David Cone, David Wells, and Andy Pettitte gave him a formidable top three, but Ramiro Mendoza was not a proven starter and the acclaimed Japanese pitcher acquired in a trade with San Diego, Hideki Irabu, was a proven pain in the ass.

  Irabu did nothing to ease Torre’s concerns about him or the Yankees’ $12.8 million investment in him when the pitcher confronted a Japanese cameraman for the crime of shooting video of him, stomped on the man’s foot, and seized and destroyed his tape.

  “You can take that up with the gossip writers,” an annoyed Torre told reporters.

  Only the gossip writers had not come to Tampa to write about the overweight, overheated, and overrated Hideki Irabu.

  They had come to write about Derek Jeter and Mariah Carey.

  The first reports of their romance had surfaced the year before, around the time Carey split from her much older husband, Tommy Mottola, the Sony Music Entertainment president who discovered her. Jeter denied those initial reports, saying, “Man, I’m supposed to be dating everybody. First it was Tyra Banks. Now it’s Mariah Carey.”

  Now that Carey was sitting in the Legends Field stands, fresh off her quickie Caribbean divorce of Mottola, there was no denying it anymore.

  Jeter had done it again. As a child he had predicted he would grow up to become the shortstop of the New York Yankees, and talent and luck conspired to make it happen. As a teenager he had predicted he would marry Mariah Carey, and his fame and fortune and looks put him in play to become the songbird’s second spouse.

  Like Jeter, Carey was the child of an African-American father and Irish-American mother. But her parents went through a bitter divorce when she was three. Mariah was raised by her mother in Huntington, New York, where she said she “grew up with nothing.” She encountered the same racism Jeter faced in his Kalamazoo youth, and she said she felt like an outcast in high school.

  “So when I saw how great [Jeter’s] family was,” Carey would say, “it gave me hope. I realized that I was blaming all the problems of my life on growing up biracial. Derek’s family functioned great as a unit, and I’d never seen that before. I looked at Derek, and it changed my perception.”

  They were very much a spring training item, and back in Kalamazoo, Jeter’s old friends and teammates could not get over the news. “It was unbelievable,” said Chad Casserly, one summer league teammate who had heard Jeter predict he would wed Carey. “Everything Derek said he’d do he followed through on.”

  Only he had not married Mariah just yet. Jeter and Carey were seen in Tampa restaurants, seen leaving Legends Field arm in arm. They had so much in common—they were young, biracial, and blessed with gifts that captivated millions. The shortstop and the songbird we
re falling in love, and Jeter found it hard to believe.

  He used to sing Mariah’s hits on minor league buses, and here she was showing up to watch Jeter perform on his stage. She would sign autographs between innings, spend a little time in the players’ family lounge, and join Jeter for a dinner with Tino and Marie Martinez.

  Naturally, a curious public wanted to know if the relationship had staying power. “Baseball is baseball and my personal life is separate from that,” Jeter said. “I don’t talk about that stuff.”

  Only it was not that simple. The New York Post was about to report that Jeter and Carey were getting married, and the Post’s new Yankee beat writer, George King, drew the assignment of asking the shortstop for a confirmation.

  Jeter angrily denied the story. “I am not getting married,” he said. He also reportedly rebuked a teammate who was teasing him about Carey before a spring training game in Clearwater.

  Mariah-mania was taking its toll; the shortstop did not want to talk about his fantasy girl with his teammates or the press. “I’m here to answer baseball questions,” Jeter said. “Nobody asks Tim Raines where he ate with his wife last night.”

  Nobody cared where Mr. and Mrs. Raines went to dinner, other than Mr. and Mrs. Raines. But Derek and Mariah represented the most fascinating Yankee romance since DiMaggio and Monroe.

  Jeter was no longer the semi-famous rookie walking through New Jersey’s Garden State Plaza, trying and failing to pick up an attractive brunette who did not recognize him and who told him she was not interested (to his credit, Jeter never told the woman he was a Yankee).

  He had become a full-blown international celebrity, something he never desired. “That’s the reason why I never want to talk about it,” Jeter would say. “They say I’ve bought a ring. They have us getting married on an off day. It doesn’t matter what I say. People start making stuff up out of the blue and write whatever they want.

  “I am not engaged. I am not getting married.”