The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Jeter was among the leading citizens of New York. He was taking this Series personally, because he knew he would have to live with an intracity defeat every day for the rest of his life.

  Torre made him the leadoff hitter for the first time in the Series; the manager did not have the luxury of a designated hitter at Shea, and he could not keep Chuck Knoblauch in the lineup, not when his throws from second were maiming women and children in the stands.

  So with Knoblauch out, and with second baseman Luis Sojo more suited for the two-hole, Jeter was asked to make an opening statement against the Mets. And as the Baha Men played at earsplitting decibels in the moments before the first pitch, Cone surveyed the Yankees’ best player and his bloodless gaze.

  “Derek Jeter was ready for that game,” Cone said. “He was ready for that first at-bat.”

  What a long, strange trip it had been to that Game 4 moment. Derek Jeter had made $10 million for the 2000 season, double his previous arbitration award, but only after he nearly reached agreement on a record seven-year, $118.5 million deal with the Yankees before George Steinbrenner got cold feet.

  Steinbrenner decided he was against flipping baseball’s salary structure onto its ear, and for doing the one-year deal that canceled a return trip to the arbitration table. But the dynamic between employer and employee had changed dramatically from that spring day in ’97 when Jeter asked Steinbrenner for a five-year contract in the presence of team official Ray Negron, only to have the Boss advise him to hold out for a better deal in the coming years.

  Steinbrenner bounced back with a five-year, $31 million offer in the summer of ’98, a bid rejected by Jeter. Suddenly the shortstop had Steinbrenner close to breaking the $100 million barrier, at least until the Boss put off the inevitable nine-figure contract for one more year.

  Down in Tampa, Jeter gladly took the $10 million and shelved his long-term financial ambitions until the following winter. He pieced together another All-Star year in 2000 by hardening his body at the International Performance Institute in Bradenton, where Nomar Garciaparra worked out. Jeter had lost weight during the ’99 season, finishing the year at 185 pounds. He arrived at spring training 18 pounds heavier.

  Pitcher Mike Buddie, Jeter’s teammate as far back as Greensboro, said the shortstop “went from being Kevin Garnett to Shaquille O’Neal.” Such physical transformations in baseball often encouraged whispers of steroid suspicion, but Jeter’s integrity was never called into question, a testament to his standing in the game.

  He worked his legs for the first time, strengthened the middle of his body with core exercises, and added muscle definition to his upper torso. He wanted to become a more explosive offensive force. He wanted to hit 30 home runs.

  Jeter’s goals would be compromised by a left abdominal strain in May, when he took too many batting practice swings in an attempt to bust out of a slump. Jeter missed a dozen games, returned to go 3 for 4 in a victory over the Red Sox, and got on with the season while his double-play partner unraveled.

  For reasons unknown, Chuck Knoblauch could no longer make the most elementary of baseball throws—from second to first. He made three errant throws in the first six innings of a 12–3 loss to the White Sox on the night of June 15, stood as the loneliest man on the face of the earth—near second base—while his fellow infielders gathered at the mound during a pitching change, and finally asked Joe Torre to remove him from the game.

  Knoblauch told Torre he was tired of hurting the team, and the manager sent the second baseman home so he would not have to face reporters postgame at his locker. Knoblauch had been struggling on his throws for the better part of two years, sometimes lobbing the ball, sometimes shoveling it underhanded, sometimes letting it rip without eyeing his target.

  Knoblauch had suggested he might quit the game, or at least escape to the Cayman Islands or Martha’s Vineyard. This time around, after Torre had someone drive him away from Yankee Stadium in the middle of a game, Knoblauch did what most lost souls do—he called his mom.

  Some Yankees were concerned Knoblauch might do something rash, something more serious than quitting the team. Jeter said he was among those who called Knoblauch to offer reassurance. “By the time I talked to him,” Jeter said, “he was doing OK. I knew he’d be all right. . . . We need him.”

  Knoblauch returned to the Stadium the following day wearing a sunshiny disposition. He joked with teammates and told reporters his mother wanted to give him a hug. While backpedaling during pregame warm-ups, Jeter gave him a playful push forward.

  But some Yankees noticed there had been a recent chill between Jeter and Knoblauch. The two had been close friends and, after Knoblauch’s divorce, running mates at night, but they didn’t talk or tease each other nearly as much in the clubhouse anymore. It appeared the Joe Montana–Jerry Rice partnership Alex Rodriguez had predicted two years earlier was fraying at the seams.

  On his return to the lineup, Knoblauch did receive a loud ovation from the fans, and Jeter did say on his behalf, “They treated him well and deservedly so. I’ve said before that we’re not going to win without Chuck, and it’s about time the fans got behind him.”

  Jeter had offered a mild rebuke of the very fans who adored him, and it would not be the last time he would do that in defense of a struggling teammate. Only Knoblauch’s demons would not be silenced without a fight. The following day, the second baseman unleashed a throw that sailed seven rows deep into the stands behind first base, where it hit Marie Olbermann, mother of Fox broadcaster Keith Olbermann, knocking a lens out of her glasses.

  Nothing came easily for Knoblauch, who would end up on the disabled list with an elbow injury before George Steinbrenner ripped him for allegedly exaggerating the depth of his pain. Nothing came easily for Knoblauch’s two-time defending champ of a team, either.

  Roger Clemens would nearly incite a riot by crashing a fastball against the padded head belonging to the Mets’ Mike Piazza, a slugger who had his number. With a nine-game divisional lead in the middle of September, the Yankees would give their fan base a coronary by losing fifteen of their last eighteen to free-fall into the playoffs.

  On the eve of that near-fatal collapse, Jeter was again reminded of his overriding good luck. The Blue Jays were in the Bronx, and they brought along a recent call-up, Chad Mottola, who had been reduced to a minor league journeyman. Mottola was made the fifth overall pick of the ’92 draft by the Reds, who had traded him to Texas in ’98 before watching him bounce from one Class AAA outpost to the next while the prospect they bypassed, Jeter, collected trophies like others collected lint.

  Mottola’s first and last appearance in Yankee Stadium would go down as an 0 for 4 at the plate with two strikeouts in a 10–2 loss; Toronto actually batted him third in the lineup. But Mottola was not resentful of Jeter. In fact, he had family members in New York who counted the Yankee shortstop as their favorite player.

  “They all ended up with Jeter jerseys,” Mottola would say. “They could never comprehend that I was picked before him.”

  Nor could Reds GM Jim Bowden, who was not in charge at the time scouting director Julian Mock decided Mottola was destined for the kind of stardom Jeter would never reach.

  “Mottola didn’t develop into anything and Jeter ends up one of the best players of his era,” Bowden would say. “Derek Jeter became what you dream about in player personnel. He would’ve changed the history of our franchise.”

  Instead Jeter was adding to the history of the Yankees franchise while Mottola had not even earned 100 big league at-bats.

  Jeter finished the 2000 regular season with a .339 batting average, but given his added muscle, he was disappointed in his number of homers (15) and RBI (73). His consolation prize? After Alex Rodriguez vacated his starting position in the All-Star Game because of the lingering effects of a concussion, Jeter became the first Yankee to be named All-Star MVP. He won the award in Atlanta, his personal gateway to World Series parades.

  On their way back to baseball
’s biggest stage, the Yankees proved to be the most dangerous eighty-seven-win team in baseball history. They survived a tense five-game series with the Oakland A’s, and then an equally tense six-game series with A-Rod’s Mariners for the American League pennant. The ALCS was defined by the performance of Clemens’s Yankee life, a fifteen-strikeout, one-hit shutout in Game 4 that included a near decapitation of A-Rod, who was left to watch Jeter break a scoreless tie in the fifth with a two-out, three-run homer off Paul Abbott that would give the Yankees a 3–1 series lead.

  A-Rod was A-Rod against the Yanks, hitting .409 with two homers and five RBI for the series and raging against any suggestion he would someday be known as a postseason gagger. But no matter what Rodriguez did, no matter how many hanging sliders he hammered, he could not escape the sinking feeling that his dear friend Jeter was living a charmed baseball life, and he was not.

  Rodriguez could not beat Jeter, or Jeter’s team. He could not even skip an All-Star Game with a head injury without his friend taking his place and being named MVP. So A-Rod needed a different vehicle of retribution, a fresh plan of attack.

  With an expiring contract and a representative (Scott Boras) eager to swing for the moon, Rodriguez would beat Jeter for the one title the Yankee could not win: Lord and Master of the Free Agent Universe.

  Only Jeter was not thinking about the off-season arms race, not when he was about to step into the cauldron of the first all–New York World Series since the Yanks beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1956.

  Steinbrenner used to get hot when his team lost the Mayor’s Trophy Game exhibition to the Mets, so the vision of a World Series defeat at the hands of his less prominent neighbors in Queens was one colored in apocalyptic shades.

  Far more than interborough bragging rights was at stake here. Steinbrenner’s twelve-year TV rights deal with the Madison Square Garden Network was set to expire; it was a half-a-billion-dollar deal that helped make the Yankees the first team to hurdle the $100 million payroll barrier and helped inflate the value of the franchise to $700 million (Steinbrenner’s group had purchased it from CBS for $8.7 million in 1973). The Boss had joined with the NBA’s New Jersey Nets, an unworthy partner, in the hope of starting his own network.

  Steinbrenner had abandoned his earlier efforts to sell the Yankees to Cablevision when its founder and chairman, Charles Dolan, refused to let him run the ball club, never mind Steinbrenner’s additional request to run the Cablevision-owned New York Knicks and Rangers. When Steinbrenner entered into a July agreement with the International Management Group to form a regional cable network, MSG sued for breach of contract.

  So no, this was not any time for the Yankees to lose leverage, prestige, or a seven-game series for the championship of the baseball world to the second-rate Mets.

  “From a company standpoint, the city was ours,” said Brian Cashman, the GM who was in the stress-induced habit of gnashing his teeth in his sleep. “The city was at stake, the television contract was at stake, the entire financial power of the business was at stake. We went into that with so much pressure, and the Mets were a good enough team to beat us.

  “The Boss told me, ‘You’d better win or else.’ I felt like if we lost to the Mets, it would’ve diminished our three championships. It would’ve been like they didn’t count. I was always proud of what we’d done, and I’d never before been scared of losing. But I was scared of losing to the Mets.”

  Derek Jeter was not.

  “I’ve never been afraid to fail,” he maintained. And here, Jeter said, was why:

  “People put too much pressure on themselves and try to make things bigger than they really are. No matter how you look at it, whether you’re in the World Series or a spring training game, it’s still baseball. I’ve gotten a hit before. I’ve struck out before. I’ve made a play. I’ve made an error. I mean everything that you can think of has happened to every player. It’s just a matter of, are you afraid to fail? I’m not.”

  This was why Jeter outlasted all the doubters and haters, including the Mets fans who used to see him around town and tell him he was no Rey Ordonez, with a profanity or three thrown in for the hell of it.

  Ordonez was supposed to be the measuring stick right from Opening Day in ’96, when he made that throw to the plate from his knees the day before Jeter answered in Cleveland with his homer and over-the-shoulder catch. But for all his defensive wizardry, Ordonez could not hit a lick. He had fractured his arm in May, a season-ending injury, and so he would not be presenting a challenge to Jeter in the World Series or anywhere else.

  In fact, in Game 1 against the Mets, Jeter did his own little Ozzie Smith impression. Timo Perez was on first with no score and two outs in the sixth when Todd Zeile sent a blast to left that appeared to be leaving the park to every witness, most notably Timo Perez, who decided to do a home-run trot in case Zeile did not.

  The ball hit the top of the Yankee Stadium wall, a couple of inches short of pay dirt, and Justice fired it into the cutoff man, Jeter. Mets third-base coach Cookie Rojas waved home Perez, who was not trotting anymore. Jeter ran toward the stands to catch Justice’s throw, jumped as if he were making his signature play in the hole, and fired to Jorge Posada at the plate.

  Mets officials watching from near their dugout could not believe Zeile’s shot stayed in the park, could not believe how quickly Jeter got rid of the ball, and could not believe he avoided hitting Perez with the throw from his restricted angle. Mostly, they could not believe Perez was a second away from being called out at home.

  “One of those Derek Jeter moments,” Mets manager Bobby Valentine said.

  By the time the Subway Series reached Game 4 at Shea, that seminal moment was lost in a pile of many. Paul O’Neill still had to win an epic ten-pitch battle with Armando Benitez in the ninth inning of Game 1 just to give the Yanks a shot at playing extra innings and winning on Jose Vizcaino’s single in the twelfth.

  The Roger Clemens–Mike Piazza heavyweight championship rematch framed Game 2, and when the overcaffeinated Rocket took the jagged remains of Piazza’s bat and threw it at the Mets’ catcher, it was clear this was one fight that outdid the hype. Clemens explained he thought the bat was the ball—who throws the ball at a base runner, anyway?—and Joe Torre nearly stormed out of his postgame news conference when the Rocket put him in the position of defending the indefensible.

  After they were shut down by Clemens, who allowed two hits over eight scoreless innings, and after Jeter doubled and scored what would be the winning run in the eighth, the Mets recovered at home to beat El Duque Hernandez in Game 3, snapping the Yankees’ remarkable fourteen-game World Series winning streak and setting up the delicious theater that was Game 4.

  The pressure was all on the Yankees, as Game 5 would be played at Shea as well. “It was very easy to get away from the other World Series we played in,” Paul O’Neill said. “But because it was the Mets, we couldn’t get away from this one.”

  Steinbrenner started the day by sending a truck over the river to Shea filled with couches and chairs for the visiting clubhouse—the Yankee owner was appalled by the furniture provided his team, and he was seen lecturing Mets owner Fred Wilpon in the hours before the first pitch.

  A first pitch that would leave the neighboring Yanks and Mets an entire world apart.

  After the Baha Men were done screeching and the field was cleared, Derek Jeter stepped into the box with an encouraging recent history against the Mets. In nine regular-season and World Series games that year, he had hit .425 with nine runs scored.

  Jeter loved playing against the Mets, he said, “just because the fans get into it, and that makes it fun. It’s like you’re playing in high school. I used to like playing our rivals in high school basketball games because there were more fans and excitement in the stands.”

  But Jeter did not have a warm spot for the leaky, creaky mess that was Shea. He could not stand the choppy infield, for one. “I’m not trying to be disrespectful,” he would say. “I just didn
’t like the stadium. The field conditions were not good. Hitting at that stadium was a lot different than playing defense.”

  Jeter was not playing defense at 8:32 p.m., when he dug in against Mets starter Bobby Jones. Chuck Knoblauch had predicted in the dugout that Jeter would belt a homer, but Jones had other ideas.

  “I wasn’t expecting him to swing,” he said of his first pitch.

  Jones threw a fastball for openers, just as he had done nearly every game all year. “Bobby danced with the girl he brought to the dance,” Valentine said.

  The fastball tailed in on Jeter’s hands, and the shortstop beat the pitch to the punch, getting the barrel to the ball and landing it over the left-field wall. Jeter blew a bubble with his gum as he rounded first base, and by 8:33 p.m. the Mets’ bubble had burst. “We win Game 3, we’re home for Game 4, and we couldn’t even get comfortable in our goddamn chair,” said Mets executive Jim Duquette. “To have it go up in smoke like that so fast, it was more deflating than the Timo play.”

  Jeter tripled in his next at-bat, scored to give his team a 3–0 lead, and the rest of the Subway Series was colored by inevitability. Suddenly the Yanks were not so jittery about the Mets. Cone was sitting out in the bullpen and shaking his head.

  “I was looking around that Mets lineup and going, ‘Man, Bobby Valentine must be a really good manager,’” Cone said. “We had Bernie [Williams] and [Paul] O’Neill and [David] Justice in our outfield, and they had Benny Agbayani, Jay Payton, and Timo Perez in theirs. I remember thinking, ‘No, they’re not going to beat us. It’s not going to happen.’”

  Steinbrenner was not so sure. He spent the entire World Series in the Yankee clubhouse, snapping at anyone and everyone who crossed his path. He ordered Rob Cucuzza, equipment manager, to sit next to him without moving a muscle; Steinbrenner was angry that Tino Martinez had come into the clubhouse needing his ripped pants replaced and Cucuzza was nowhere to be found.