The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  “And now we’re going to have the biggest fight you’ve ever seen in your life,” Bobby Murcer, the former Yankee turned broadcaster, said on the air.

  Rodriguez fired off a couple of unanswered punches that knocked down Girardi, and if it looked like the catcher—a devout Christian—had never before struck anyone, there was a good reason: he hadn’t.

  The dugouts and bullpens emptied, and it was immediately clear this would not be any garden-variety scrum. Don Zimmer fell to the ground and got trampled. Jim Leyritz and Shane Spencer and half the Yankee roster were trying to get to Frankie Rodriguez in front of the Seattle bench.

  Bernie Williams slammed Mariners catcher Dan Wilson to the ground, and Chili Davis pinned Steve Smith, a Seattle coach, and wrapped both hands around Smith’s throat as if he were about to squeeze the life out of him. Zimmer staggered back to his feet, but he appeared to be hyperventilating.

  “It was like a war zone out there,” Williams said.

  And on the perimeter of this hand-to-hand combat, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez were enemies acting like the best of friends. They were smiling, pretending to jab each other, just looking like a couple of guys making plans to meet up after the game. A-Rod joked with Jeter that he would come after him in the event of a second brawl.

  “Those two guys aren’t going to fight,” Murcer’s partner, Ken Singleton, said on the air. “They’re probably going somewhere later.”

  A-Rod held his cap and slapped it twice against Jeter’s chest. Just then, Seattle pitcher Jamie Moyer approached A-Rod from behind, pushed Rodriguez’s mitt into his stomach, and nudged him gently while shooting him a look that screamed, “This isn’t the time or place.”

  An umpire wedged himself between Jeter and Rodriguez, not that it was necessary, and fifteen minutes after the clash started, both teams headed back to their benches. As the Yankees spilled into their dugout, Chad Curtis, a forty-fifth-round draft choice hitting .238, decided to confront Jeter.

  The teammates ran in different circles and had little in common. Curtis was a grinder, and Jeter was a star. Curtis was married and devoutly religious, and Jeter was single and a Catholic reticent about expressing his religious views outside of the on-field prayer he whispered to himself following the national anthem, when he crouched low to the field, bowed his head, asked God to protect all players from injury, and made the sign of the cross.

  At the time of the brawl, the Yankees were considering putting Curtis on waivers to make room for Strawberry’s return. The team saw Curtis as an expendable player, in part because he tried to impose his religious beliefs on some teammates who tired of the sell.

  A man who took to wearing a bracelet marked “WWJD” (“What Would Jesus Do?”), Curtis twice approached Jeter about joining him in prayer groups and chapel services, and twice Jeter declined the invitation. “Chad was really confrontational with guys,” said one Yankee official. “He’d take all the porn on the road and in the bathrooms and throw it out . . . It caused problems. You can’t force all of your stuff on people.”

  The Yankees were concerned about rumors Chuck Knoblauch was partying too hard, and Curtis took those concerns to an extreme. “Chad used to knock on [Knoblauch’s] door,” the official said, “and he’d shout, ‘Are you in there? Are you in there? I want to make sure you’re not out.’ Chad was really militant on that.”

  Curtis lived in a black-and-white world with no shades of gray, except when it came to fighting. With grown men rolling in the dirt and acting like silly boys in a schoolyard, Curtis suspended his religious views and let the other guy worry about turning the other cheek.

  So he was appalled by the sight of Jeter and A-Rod fraternizing on the jagged edges of a frightening brawl, especially with Zimmer down and out. Curtis was as old school as Ty Cobb. He did not see a fight as the appropriate time for opposing players to renew their vows of friendship.

  “You are a good player,” Curtis told Jeter, “but you don’t know how to play the game.”

  Jeter reportedly shouted at Curtis, “Get out of my face” several times and appeared a lot closer to punching his teammate than he had been to punching A-Rod or any other Mariner. The confrontation continued in the clubhouse. Curtis approached Jeter and the shortstop kept saying, “Not now . . . not now.” He did not want a starring role in a tabloid spectacle.

  Curtis did not listen. In full view of Yankee beat writers, Curtis again tried to explain to Jeter why he was not playing the game the right way. Jeter was desperate to end the conversation. Sojo came over to help break it up, but by then the damage was as conspicuous as the two welts on Girardi’s forehead.

  “He disagrees with what I have to say,” Curtis said of Jeter. “I disagree with him. We’re allowed to disagree.”

  Jeter said he would have helped up Zimmer had he seen him on the ground and conceded little else. He maintained he was merely talking to A-Rod about the Paniagua pitch from the night before and comparing that to the plunkings that led to the brawl.

  “It’s a situation where, hey, [Curtis] didn’t know what we were talking about,” Jeter would say. “Unless you know what’s going on, then you shouldn’t approach someone in that manner.”

  Curtis called his actions “a small piece of mentoring” and believed he was only helping a younger player understand the consequences of his action, or inaction. “I wasn’t real mad,” Curtis said. “It was just, ‘Dude, you know that’s not the time to go and shadowbox with your buddy.’”

  In the coming days, some Yankees would privately agree that Curtis had a valid point, that Jeter acted irresponsibly given the intensity of the fight. “Chad was right, but he handled it the wrong way,” Leyritz said. “I don’t think Derek and Alex realized the extent of the hostility that was going on because they were pretty far away.”

  One of Torre’s coaches, Willie Randolph, the former second baseman and captain who was instrumental in Jeter’s development, scolded the shortstop for his new-school approach to an old-school fight. But David Cone, among the most respected player voices, said he had seen dozens of friendly exchanges on the fringes of brawls and thought it did not matter whether Curtis had a point.

  “Chad was out of line, and he lost a little face in that situation among the leaders in the clubhouse,” Cone said. “We looked at Jeter, we looked at Chad Curtis, and to me that’s a no-brainer. That’s an easy pick.”

  Curtis eventually apologized; Jeter did not see the need to do the same. He was allergic to the bee sting of criticism, and it was harder for him to forgive and forget than it was to accept an 0-for-4 day at the plate. Curtis was dead to Jeter, and there was no resurrection on the schedule.

  Less than two weeks after the Seattle brawl, Jeter’s reputation took another direct hit, one that could not be blamed on a backup outfielder. Jeter was so busy celebrating the twenty-eighth birthday of his good friend Jorge Posada, and enjoying the spaghetti dish cooked up by Posada’s wife, Laura, that he forgot to show up for the team photo.

  Joe Torre slapped Jeter and Posada with small fines and publicly moved to minimize the impact of their absence. But the manager did not leave two open spaces in the rows of players gathered for the picture, making it more difficult for a graphics designer to Photoshop the shortstop and catcher into the shot. “I’m sure they are [mad],” Jeter said, “but nobody said anything. I forgot, that’s the bottom line.”

  Suddenly Jeter’s uncharacteristic behavior had some asking if he was fit to be the team’s first captain since Don Mattingly, a role his manager wanted him to assume in the near future. Did Jeter still deserve the honor? Or did these two incidents suggest that the role model, star, and spokesman had not yet grown into the role?

  Derek Jeter finished the season with staggering numbers—a .349 batting average, 24 home runs, and 102 RBI—even if he fell slightly short of the sums posted by his Boston rival, Nomar Garciaparra, who had beaten him out for the All-Star Game start at Fenway Park.

  Jeter had mimicked Garciaparra’s hyper
batting ritual in that game to everyone’s delight, but nobody was laughing when the Yankees faced the Red Sox in the 1999 American League Championship Series, the first time these ancient blood rivals had ever met in the postseason (the famous Bucky Dent game in ’78 counted as a regular-season tiebreaker).

  Jeter had batted .455 in the Division Series sweep of Texas, starting the clinching rally in the first inning of Game 3 with a triple to left that led to a three-run homer by Darryl Strawberry, back from his drug suspension with a bang.

  The Rangers had proven to be willing postseason stooges for the Yankees, losing three Division Series to them in four years. The Red Sox? They finished with 94 victories, only 4 behind New York, and with Pedro Martinez at the very top of his game, good enough to strike out 17 Yankees in September in his most indelible start in the Bronx, the Red Sox were a wild card in every literal and figurative way.

  Boston also had the batting champ, Garciaparra, to match against the two-time world champ, Jeter. And when Game 1 at Yankee Stadium was headed Boston’s way, Jeter drew first blood.

  Down 3–2 in the seventh, one out and a man on second, Jeter hit an RBI single to center off Derek Lowe, ultimately allowing Bernie Williams to win it in the tenth with a homer off Rod Beck. When Garciaparra responded with a vengeance in Game 2, delivering a three-hit performance that included a two-out, two-run homer off Cone, the Yanks came from behind again to win by a run.

  Garciaparra exploded one more time in Game 3, exploded for four hits and three RBI on a day when Martinez was his brilliant self and Roger Clemens was reduced to an emotional and physical wreck in his return to Fenway, where fans all but welcomed him with pitchforks and torches. The Yankees lost 13–1, Jeter struck out twice in three at-bats, and the crowd let him hear about it.

  Jeter was used to the abuse in Fenway, where fans chanted, “Nomar’s better” and wore vulgar T-shirts mocking the Yankee star. Jeter arrived at the ballpark the next day in a relaxed state, as always, summoning the name of Boston’s Game 4 starter, Bret Saberhagen, in telling as many teammates as possible, “Sabes says you’ve got nothing.”

  But in the ninth inning of Game 4, after he singled to help ignite a six-run rally that doomed the Red Sox, Jeter was finally fazed by Fenway. He saw the old ballpark turn uglier than it had ever been.

  Boston manager Jimy Williams got ejected for arguing that Garciaparra had beaten out his grounder to third, Nomar threw his helmet and kicked over a water cooler, and the fans flexed their beer muscles and hurled bottles, cans, cups, and coins while the Yankees were pulled from the field.

  The game was delayed eight minutes, during which time a Fenway security guard stationed at the Yankees dugout shouted obscenities at the team he was supposed to be guarding.

  “Man,” Jeter said, “people were animals out there. . . . It was like dodging grenades. That stuff hasn’t even happened in New York since I’ve been here.”

  Jeter put the blood-lusting mob out of its misery the following night, blasting a towering two-run homer off Kent Mercker in the first inning that ensured the Red Sox would not be flying another championship banner next to their 1918 flag.

  Garciaparra won the statistical battle in the series—a .400 batting average and 5 RBI to Jeter’s .350 and 3—but lost four of the five games and committed critical errors in the field. Jeter produced the more decisive hits and ended up feeling about as euphoric at Fenway as one of his favorite all-time shortstops, Dent, had felt twenty-one years earlier.

  In the visitors’ clubhouse at Fenway, Jeter and Torre and Steinbrenner were striking their familiar champagne-soaked poses, heading back to the World Series for the third time in four years.

  Someone asked Jeter about the NLCS matchup between the Mets and Atlanta, and whether he preferred a Subway Series or a sequel to the ’96 Series with the Braves.

  “I don’t care, man,” Jeter said. “Let them beat each other up.”

  The Yankees swept Atlanta to win their twenty-fifth championship, leaving them with victories in the last twelve World Series games in which they had played, including eight straight over the Braves. The triumph was emotional for a Yankee team that weathered Joe Torre’s cancer surgery and much too much death and dying.

  Paul O’Neill’s father died before Game 4, and the right fielder wept as he embraced Torre amid the postgame celebration on the field. Luis Sojo missed the first two games of the Series after his father died in Venezuela, and Scott Brosius was still hurting from the death of his father in September. Once again, the ballpark was the Yankees’ place to escape.

  Within a baseball context, the 1999 title meant more to Roger Clemens than to anyone else. He entered Game 4 with eleven postseason starts and all of two victories to show for them. The Rocket was coming off his disastrous American League Championship Series performance in Boston, and despite carrying to the mound the luxury of a 3–0 World Series lead, he was burdened by the notion he would be the Yankee pitcher to break the streak.

  “I want the Roger Clemens I used to see,” George Steinbrenner had implored him. “I want the pitcher I traded for.”

  So Clemens out-dueled John Smoltz, surrendered one run over seven and two-thirds innings, and finally poked a pin in his ballooning reputation as a postseason choker. “I finally know what it feels like to be a Yankee,” Clemens said after he had climbed on top of the home dugout to slap hands with the delirious fans.

  Derek Jeter first knew that feeling three years earlier, when he had won it all as a rookie. This time around against Atlanta, Jeter turned Game 1 in the Yankees’ favor when his RBI single off Greg Maddux in the eighth made it 1–1 before the Yankees scored three more. In Game 2, Jeter singled and scored in the first inning, doubled and scored in the fourth, and showed why Atlanta manager Bobby Cox was moved to say, “Derek Jeter, to me, happens to be one of the top two or three ballplayers in the game.”

  Jeter could not believe his own never-ending run of good fortune. “If this is a dream,” he said, “don’t wake me up. . . . I don’t know if anyone has a perfect life, but it’s close. It’s getting there.”

  As fate would have it, the Yankee who challenged one of the top two or three ballplayers in the game would assume Jeter’s role of October hero in Game 3. Chad Curtis hit his second homer of the night, this one off Mike Remlinger in the tenth, to complete a dramatic comeback from a 5–0 deficit and make the ultimate Yankee victory a matter of when, not if.

  Of course, Curtis could not bask in his moment without taking a controversial stand. When NBC’s Jim Gray attempted to interview him in the wake of his game-winning blast, Curtis declined. “As a team,” he told Gray, “we kind of decided, because of what happened with Pete [Rose], we’re not going to talk out here on the field.”

  Gray had come under fire before Game 2 for interrupting baseball’s All-Century team festivities with an on-field interrogation of Rose, who had been banned for his alleged gambling on the game. Torre was furious at Curtis and denied the team had voted to snub Gray (the manager was unaware that such a vote had indeed taken place).

  But when Curtis settled under Keith Lockhart’s fly ball and ended the World Series, he had already signed his walking papers. The night he confronted Jeter was the night he guaranteed he would not be wearing pinstripes for long.

  Seven weeks after he helped the Yanks repeat as champions for the first time since 1978, Curtis was traded to Texas for Brandon Knight and Sam Marsonek.

  “Chad just couldn’t stay around any longer because that act gets tired,” a team official said. “Once he became comfortable here, he became a preacher, and it ran its course. He didn’t get voted off the island simply because of Derek Jeter; there were too many other issues with Chad.”

  One Yankee executive said Jeter was indeed among the chief reasons Curtis was dealt, and that the shortstop—who did discuss personnel matters with George Steinbrenner during occasional off-season visits—made it clear he wanted the outfielder gone.

  Either way, Curtis believed Jeter’s
feelings for him represented at least a contributing factor in his exit.

  “Every decision has multiple reasons, and did that have one tiny part?” Curtis said. “I don’t think that was the reason, but I think it adds in.

  “Derek’s the guy that, rightly so, this organization needs to empower to lead. And if I was some affront to that leadership, even if it’s just a little bit, then I needed to go.”

  The following October, David Cone looked across the Shea Stadium field at his old friend John Franco before the start of Game 4 of the World Series between the Yankees and Mets. Cone was in the visiting dugout, flabbergasted over what he was seeing and hearing.

  The Baha Men were on the field playing “Who Let the Dogs Out?,” the Mets’ new anthem, and Cone could not believe his former team would deface the Fall Classic with such a mind-numbing song.

  Cone locked on Franco, sitting in the Mets’ dugout, and mouthed the words, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Franco shrugged his shoulders and opened his palms toward the sky in what-can-I-say form.

  The Baha Men were blaring their woo, woo, woos, and Cone turned to face his teammate Derek Jeter. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he told the shortstop.

  The Mets had won Game 3 of the Series to cut the Yankees’ lead to 2–1, and they had two more games at Shea to play with. So the visiting side was looking for an edge, a reason to get amped up, and Cone thought the Yanks had found it in the on-field presence of the Baha Men and their dumb little song.

  “It crystallized the difference between the Mets and Yankees,” Cone said, “because you’d never see that at Yankee Stadium. I remember our whole bench going, ‘This is bush,’ because we were looking for things to grab on to use as motivation.”

  Cone also remembered a silent statement made by Jeter’s pale green eyes. The shortstop had more to lose in this 2000 Subway Series than anyone on the active roster, Brooklyn-born Joe Torre included.