The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  “Derek is a tough personality when it comes to who he lets in. And if he lets you in and you kind of screw him, for lack of a better term, hey, you were in. You had your chance.”

  The 2001 regular season did not come easily to Derek Jeter, not after he missed some spring training time with shoulder inflammation, and not after he started the regular season on the disabled list with a strained right quad. Jeter also was weighed down by a burden far greater than those tethered to any $189 million deal.

  His sister, Sharlee, was fighting cancer.

  Jeter had kept his sister’s illness out of the press; he had confided in only a small number of teammates and friends. Sharlee had been watching the Yankees’ playoff victory over Seattle from her Spelman College room in Atlanta the previous fall when her brother’s home run made her jump so suddenly she fell from her bed and onto the floor.

  Her bruised neck was initially diagnosed as a sprain, but when the swelling and pain did not subside, additional tests confirmed Derek Jeter’s sister had Hodgkin’s disease. The doctors believed they had caught it early, but Sharlee had to endure six months of chemotherapy treatments that caused fatigue, sleeplessness, nausea, and hair loss.

  Dot Jeter called her daughter in Atlanta and sang her the same lullabies she had sung when Sharlee was a baby. “It was horrible,” Dot said. “She’d be sick on a Saturday and I’d be sending her back to college from our home [in New Jersey]. I mean, she’s a great kid. We prayed a lot and put it in God’s hands. . . . We just knew there would be more to her life than twenty-one years.”

  Through the crisis, Sharlee was Jeter tough. Derek often called his sister in the middle of the night, with Sharlee in extreme pain, and she still found the strength to attend morning classes.

  “Hearing I had cancer was surprising, something I never expected,” she said, “but not impossible to believe. My parents always taught me to make the best out of the worst, so that’s what I did.”

  After the chemo treatments ended in May, doctors decided radiation was not necessary. They declared Sharlee cancer-free, and her big brother approached another cancer survivor, Joe Torre, in the home dugout and said, “It’s a good day today.” The manager was floored when his shortstop told him why.

  The extended Yankees family was already too well versed in the language of cancer. Torre’s pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre, was the most recent victim; he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma the previous spring.

  The following morning, Jeter revealed the news to reporters and assured them the experience was far more difficult for Sharlee than it was for him. He promptly went out and smashed a three-run homer in the eighth inning to beat the Baltimore Orioles.

  Sharlee and her parents, Dot and Charles, were in the stands the next day, Mother’s Day, and it didn’t much matter that Derek booted a potential inning-ending double-play ball in the eleventh that led to a shocking Mariano Rivera meltdown and five Orioles runs.

  Jeter had made eye contact with Sharlee and his parents, sitting as always on the first-base side and looking like the ultimate Little League clan. The shortstop never started a game without first finding his family members in the crowd and acknowledging them with a smile and a wave.

  Sharlee was wearing a blue bandanna over her scalp to cover the hair loss, but on this game day cancer had struck out. “I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a better Mother’s Day present,” Dot said of her daughter’s prognosis.

  This victory on a day of defeat encouraged Derek Jeter’s Yankees for only so long. That night, Bernie Williams’s father, Bernabe, died in Puerto Rico hours after suffering a massive heart attack. Bernie had left the Yankees to be with his hospitalized father in April; this time he arrived too late to bid his hero one last goodbye.

  Williams returned to the team after missing a three-game series in Oakland and helped the Yanks regain first place at the All-Star break by lifting his batting average from .221 to .321. Jeter was hitting .292, substandard for him, and there was some doubt about whether he would be picked for his fourth All-Star Game appearance as a reserve behind Alex Rodriguez, the voted-in starter.

  Jeter was already being used in television promos for the game, and he had a decided home-court advantage—Torre was the one filling out the roster. But the day before Torre revealed his picks, Buster Olney of the Times asked Jeter if he was comfortable with the promos, the question framed by the premise that Jeter was not a mortal lock to make the team.

  “And a flash of anger came across his face,” Olney said.

  The following day, after Torre named Jeter among his seven Yankee All-Stars, Jeter saw Olney enter the clubhouse. “Hey, Buster,” he yelled. “I guess that answers your question.”

  Like most ballplayers, Jeter rarely referred to writers by name, unless he wanted to make a point. Jeter had made his point.

  But later that month, with his batting average still a bit south of .300, with his fielding percentage (.963) still the second-worst among American League starting shortstops, and with his contract still the second-largest in the history of American team sports, Jeter was facing more published questions about his post-megadeal contributions to the cause.

  Jeter maintained he didn’t often read the papers or listen to sports talk radio. But nobody who knew the shortstop ever bought it. If Jeter did not read a critical column, his ever-protective parents read it for him and filled in the blanks.

  From Muhammad Ali to Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods, the greatest athletes were forever motivated by their critics, and Jeter was no different. In one breath he would say, “Does [criticism] bother me? No, I don’t care what somebody writes.” And in the next he would concede, “I think you take criticism as a challenge.”

  In the immediate wake of some printed and pointed criticism, Jeter had eight hits in eleven at-bats, scored seven runs, and drove in three in a three-game sweep of Detroit. He carried a .317 average into September and helped the Yanks build a nine-and-a-half-game divisional lead before injuring his hamstring running out a ground ball.

  Six days later, September 10, Jeter was testing his hamstring in some easy backpedaling drills in a rain-soaked Yankee Stadium outfield before another storm forced him inside. Jeter was not ready to return, and missing this kind of big-game event—Roger Clemens going for his twentieth victory of the year against his former team, the Red Sox—made the shortstop hurt in a way that had nothing to do with his leg.

  As it turned out, Clemens’s bid for his sixth 20-win season and first as a Yankee was washed away, along with a crowd of 50,000. Now up thirteen games in the American League East, Torre was not sweating the small stuff. He said he might keep Jeter benched another week, just to ensure he was ready for the postseason, and it did not matter that the shortstop was growing more anxious by the hour.

  “I’m honest when I say they don’t tell me anything,” Jeter said of Torre and the training staff. “[The hamstring] felt good. I guess tomorrow we’ll know more, I would assume.”

  Only tomorrow would never come for Jeter and the Yankees and the rest of baseball. Clemens was scheduled to throw his 19-1 record at the White Sox on the night of September 11, 2001, and this time the game was not canceled by a force of nature but by a man-made event.

  The Yankees knew there would be no baseball for a while the instant they started making sense of the apocalyptic scenes downtown. Jorge Posada was in the hospital with his young son, who was recovering from surgery on his skull condition, craniosynostosis, when the catcher left a message for his close friend telling him to turn on the TV.

  Derek Jeter awoke to see the World Trade Center burning, to see legions of soot-covered New Yorkers fleeing the billowing clouds of smoke raging through the streets. Terrorists had flown commercial jets into the towers, and the bodies and body parts plummeting to the street began what President Bush would call “a monumental struggle of good against evil.”

  Hours later Jeter left his Upper East Side apartment to buy something to eat. “I felt like I
was on a movie set,” he said. “There were no cars on the streets of Manhattan.” New York, Jeter would say, “is a ghost town.”

  Baseball commissioner Bud Selig would not make the same mistake made by the late National Football League commissioner Pete Rozelle, who decided against canceling games after President Kennedy’s assassination and carried that regret to his grave.

  Baseball was shut down, and in the days to come Jeter joined a group of Yankees—Joe Torre, Bernie Williams, Paul O’Neill, and Mariano Rivera among them—for a trip into the petrified remains of the area surrounding Ground Zero. They visited with rescue workers at the Javits Center, where cops and firefighters told the Yanks they wanted another title.

  “They were asking for autographs,” Jeter said, “and you felt like you should be asking for their autographs.”

  The Yankees comforted burn victims at St. Vincent’s Hospital, and they traveled to the armory where family members waited for DNA matches to identify their loved ones. Williams told a woman it looked like she needed a hug, then gave her one.

  “Nobody really talked about baseball,” Torre said. “Of course, they were all asking for Jeter. There was one youngster who had lost his dad and he was looking for Jeter.”

  The Yankees had a visit scheduled for a firehouse, and they had given advance notice to news media outlets they would be available there to talk about the day. But Jeter balked. If he was not the official captain of the Yankees, he was the assumed future captain and current leader of the team.

  And Jeter did not believe the Yankees should be publicizing their visits with exhausted rescue workers and distraught families of the injured and dead. The shortstop felt a photo op and news conference would trivialize the devastation and make it appear the team was trying to use a catastrophic event to enhance its image.

  One of the Yankees’ public relations officials, Jason Zillo, began going back and forth with Jeter over his stand. “This isn’t about making the Yankees look good,” Zillo told him. “This isn’t that type of publicity. To see Derek Jeter and the Yankees out there lending a hand is inspirational, so people might say, ‘I need to get off my ass and do something.’”

  Jeter and Zillo maintained a strong working relationship, and this was the most heated exchange they had ever had. Jeter prevailed, as franchise players often do, and the Yankees returned to the firehouse on a day when no media outlets were given a heads up.

  Jeter was among those who set a private Yankee tone for an extremely public crisis, while the local-boy Mets of John Franco (Brooklyn), Al Leiter (Jersey), and Bobby Valentine (Connecticut) joined forces with adopted Manhattan son Mike Piazza and others to practically march through the city streets playing the bagpipes behind the biggest Yankee fan of all, Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

  Forever New York’s secondary baseball tenants, the Mets were out front and center in the wake of this mass murder of unspeakable depths. They slapped on NYPD and FDNY caps, dared someone in the commissioner’s office to try to remove them, and donated a day’s pay (about $450,000) to the 9/11 victims.

  Though George Steinbrenner had already publicly committed $1 million to the cause, Yankees reliever Mike Stanton responded that his team would make its donations “quietly and privately, not because you want someone to know that you’re [making] them,” a comment that angered the Mets and set off an embarrassing debate that bathed neither side in glory.

  On the night of September 21, the Mets hosted Atlanta in the first post-9/11 game in New York, a game decided by Mike Piazza’s eighth-inning homer off Steve Karsay, only the biggest swing the Mets’ biggest star would ever take. “It was like Casey coming to the plate,” said teammate Todd Zeile.

  Three nights earlier, after a moving ceremony in Chicago, the Yankees had played their first game since the terrorist attacks and saw their own biggest star, Jeter, shake off his hamstring injury and thirteen days of rust to go 3 for 4 in an 11–3 victory over the White Sox. Jeter followed the next night with two home runs—his first multiple-homer game in three years—in a 6–3 victory that gave his team a fourteen-game divisional lead.

  The Yankees staged their own emotional homecoming in the Bronx on September 25, arriving at Yankee Stadium as humbled ambassadors of their broken city. Their longtime VP of ticket operations, Frank Swaine, had lost a son at the World Trade Center, and one of the team’s advance ticket sellers, Hank Grazioso, had lost one son on the 104th floor of Tower 1 and a second son on the 105th floor.

  The world had changed for keeps. Police were keeping cars away from Stadium service roads, and everyone’s bags were being searched on the way in, Jeter’s and Torre’s included.

  Torre had spent enough time with pregnant widows and children of lost heroes to know the season’s mission statement—win a fourth consecutive championship—had been replaced with a mission of mercy. The manager had already told his players, “We’re not here to save civilization. But our job is to relieve some tension and give everyone something to enjoy.”

  Jeter had already done his part before the Yankees took the field. He had called ten-year-old Brielle Saracini in Yardley, Pennsylvania, a fan who had written him a letter, a girl who had told him her father, Victor, was the United Airlines pilot whose plane was crashed into the South Tower.

  Brielle wanted to know why her favorite player stood up so straight when he hit; her favorite player wanted to know if Brielle and her sister, Kirsten, and mother, Ellen, would be his guests at the following night’s game against the Devil Rays.

  So Brielle and Kirsten talked to Jeter and Williams and El Duque Hernandez during batting practice, and then they watched the game from the shortstop’s seats behind home plate. After Jeter delivered two hits and scored a run in the 5–1 victory, Brielle and Kirsten were ushered onto the field to tap fists with the winners.

  Torre gave Brielle the lineup card. “We made her smile,” Jeter said. “At least for today.”

  The Yankees won the American League East by thirteen and a half games, and as they entered the postseason they were constantly reminded they were representing a charred, bloodstained city. New York needed something to cheer about, something to serve as a temporary sanctuary from the pain.

  A long and prosperous postseason run was in order. But in the seventh inning of the third game of the American League Division Series, when Shane Spencer cut loose his throw from the right-field corner of Network Associates Coliseum and watched it sail like a child’s lost balloon, the Yankees had the sick feeling their season was drifting away with it.

  They were clinging desperately to a 1–0 lead over the Oakland A’s, who had taken the first two games of this best-of-five in the Bronx. With a payroll of $38 million, the A’s were about to sweep George Steinbrenner’s dynastic $112 million champs.

  Sure, Jorge Posada’s homer had given the Yankees their first lead over these A’s in eighty regular-season and postseason innings, and sure, Mike Mussina was painting a masterpiece in his first playoff start as a Yank.

  But Oakland’s precocious and gifted young lefty, Barry Zito, had held the visitors to two lousy hits. Terrence Long had just ripped Mussina’s hundredth pitch for a double down the first-base line that would surely score Jeremy Giambi from first, tie the game, and ultimately leave an eliminated Torre to negotiate a new contract with Steinbrenner on the worst possible terms.

  The brother of Oakland superstar Jason Giambi, the Ozzie Canseco to Jason’s Jose, Jeremy Giambi had the two-out benefit of running on contact. But he was something of a lead foot and he had taken a lazy secondary lead off first.

  Playing for the benched Paul O’Neill, Spencer gathered Long’s laser and fired toward second baseman Alfonso Soriano, who had run onto the outfield grass as the first cutoff man, and first baseman Tino Martinez, who had pulled himself up from the dirt—he had made a failed dive for Long’s shot—and stationed himself near the bag.

  On release, Spencer thought he had made a good throw to the cutoff men in line with Posada at the plate. A second later, the ri
ght fielder whispered to himself, “Uh-oh.”

  Derek Jeter was too busy to say “Uh-oh.” In the event Long tried for a triple, Jeter was positioned as a potential cutoff man on a throw to third, his head on a swivel. Jeter was watching the exaggerated arc of Spencer’s throw, watching Long’s stride on his way to second, and watching Oakland’s third-base coach, Ron Washington, to see if he was waving Giambi home.

  Almost directly behind Washington, up in his executive suite, A’s architect Billy Beane surveyed the scene with great expectations. Beane had been a high school phenom drafted by the Mets in the first round, but he never amounted to more than a bit major league player. Now in the general manager’s seat of a small-market, smaller-budget team, Beane used the A’s as his vehicle of retribution against a sport that had denied him stardom.

  Beane had three starting pitchers twenty-six or younger: Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder. Together they went a combined 56-25 in the regular season, and they had held the mighty Yanks to four runs in the first twenty-five innings of the Division Series. The A’s had a young left side of the infield in Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez, who combined for 63 homers and 227 RBI. Meanwhile, the reigning league MVP, first baseman Jason Giambi, was carrying a .342 batting average and 38 homers and 120 RBI into free agency.

  On a payroll south of $40 million, Beane had become the superstar in the front office that he could not be on the field, the maker of a 102-win team. He was the handsome, big-man-on-campus face of a movement that would forever change the way teams measured prospects, emphasizing on-base percentages over batting averages and replacing the “gut feel” of a road-weary scout with mathematical and statistical analysis of a player’s contributions—or lack thereof—to his team.

  The writer, historian, and statistician Bill James would name this approach “sabermetrics” as a nod to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), and Beane’s use of this tool to compete with Steinbrenner’s budget—or lack thereof—would inspire the Michael Lewis bestseller Moneyball.