The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter
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Jeter was given that chance by Tino Martinez, who batted with two outs and one on in the ninth, Arizona up 3–1 and closer Byung-Hyun Kim on the mound. Martinez had nearly been traded to Atlanta the year before, a trade supported by Joe Torre and other club officials before Brian Cashman killed it. The GM decided Martinez was too valuable in the clubhouse and in the lineup to part with, and the first baseman was about to make Cashman a prophet.
Martinez had watched Kim throw first-pitch fastballs in the eighth before turning to his slider. “So I was going to look for that first fastball and hammer it,” Martinez said.
Hammer it the first baseman did, nearly bringing down the Stadium as he rounded the bases. Rivera pitched a 1-2-3 tenth, and the Yankees’ leadoff hitter for the night, Jeter, made a dramatic claim.
“Derek came back to the dugout, put down his glove, and said, ‘This game is over,’” Martinez said. “He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to hit a home run and end it.’ He just meant he was going to find a way to win the game.”
Kim retired Scott Brosius and Alfonso Soriano before Jeter stepped in, the scoreboard flashing his .067 World Series average in big, bright lights. In the dugout, with Torre holding his bat for good luck, Jeter had made a playful reference to Torre’s contract—due to expire at 11:59 p.m., October 31.
“This is the last time I have to listen to you,” the shortstop said, “because once it turns midnight you don’t have a job.”
It was still October when Jeter was getting set in the box. He fouled off the first pitch, the clock struck midnight, and Jeter shot a half smile at the manager he still called Mr. Torre. The scoreboard announced, “attention fans: welcome to november baseball,” and Jeter and Kim engaged in the longest duel of the night—nine pitches, four foul balls, and a full count.
As he fought to stay alive in the at-bat, Jeter represented the battered state of the Yankee offense. Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius were planning to retire, Martinez was approaching free agency and the realization the Yanks weren’t bringing him back, and the benched Chuck Knoblauch knew he was done in the Bronx, too.
This was a dynasty running on fumes, trying to sputter its way home one last time. So the shortstop who had been hearing his mother implore him to “do something” all week finally did something no major leaguer had ever done: he hit a home run in November.
At 12:04 a.m., Kim’s 3-2 pitch had landed on the other side of the 314-foot sign in right, not far from Jeffrey Maier–ville. The Giants’ Barry Bonds had belted a record 73 homers in the regular season, and none of them packed a wallop like this Jeter shot that cleared the wall by a matter of inches.
A fan held up a sign that read “Mr. November,” and as Jeter approached the plate and the manic pile of teammates surrounding it, he decided to take the kind of lunar leap Bobby Thomson took to punctuate his Shot Heard ’Round the World half a century earlier; Jeter had better hang time.
“It was the only showboating thing I ever did,” Thomson had said.
Jeter could have made the same claim. One of his biggest fans, John Wooden, who likened Jeter to his championship point guards at UCLA, watched from his California home and said he was surprised that baseball’s most selfless superstar engaged in this celebration of self.
“Joe DiMaggio would’ve just rounded the bases and touched the plate,” Wooden said.
Jeter joked that he nearly broke his foot on the plate, but he had his reasons to fly. “I’ve never hit a walk-off home run,” he said. “Not even in Little League.”
The following night, Brosius did in Game 5 exactly what Martinez had done in Game 4: hit a two-out, two-run homer off Kim in the ninth to send the Yankees barreling into extra innings, and to ensure this edition would go down among the greatest World Series of all time.
The remarkable Brosius homer was sandwiched between the Stadium chant for the retiring O’Neill when defeat seemed imminent, and Soriano’s RBI single in the twelfth (after his diving, bases-loaded catch in the eleventh) when defeat seemed impossible to fathom. Under a full moon, Torre called this absurd event “Groundhog Day.”
The Diamondbacks were as devastated as their closer, Kim, who appeared intent on winning as many World Series games for the Yankees as Whitey Ford did. Before the Series, when asked about the Yanks’ dominance, Schilling said, “When you use the words mystique and aura, those are dancers in a nightclub.”
Mystique and aura were appearing nightly, read the classic Game 5 sign in the Bronx, and when the Yankees boarded their plane for the Arizona desert, they were safe bets to bring another title to a city in dire need of something to celebrate. Jeter was going to separate himself from Nomar Garciaparra, the two-time batting champ, and from Alex Rodriguez, who had smashed 52 homers in the first year of his record $252 million deal.
The ring-free A-Rod and the ring-free Nomar could gorge themselves on individual stats. Jeter? He was about to win his one for the thumb.
Somehow the Yankees had the ninth-inning lead in Game 7. Somehow they had handed Mariano Rivera the ball with three outs to go and the bottom of Arizona’s lineup on deck.
It all started going wrong before Game 6, before Andy Pettitte tipped his pitches and the Diamondbacks teed off on him in a 15–2 victory, leaving the Bank One Ballpark operators to play Sinatra’s “New York, New York” in jest. Bernie Williams had shown up late for pregame warm-ups, very late, and as the Yankees were stretching, Jeter turned to a teammate and said, “Where the hell is he?”
Jeter was furious by the time Williams finally arrived, asking him, “Where the hell have you been?” The center fielder offered a dog-ate-my-homework answer, and Jeter jumped all over him. “What do you think you’re doing here?” the shortstop shouted at Williams. “We’re trying to win a championship, and this is unacceptable. . . . There’s no more important place for you to be than right here with your team for this game.”
This wasn’t the only time Jeter had to rouse Williams out of his oblivious state. “It was Bernie being Bernie,” one team official said, “and I think Derek got sick of it.”
Jeter was not one to chastise teammates in front of others, or even to speak up much in team meetings. Only this time he ripped a page out of the book George Steinbrenner once gave him, a book titled Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare and inscribed this way: “To Derek. Read and study. He was a great leader as you are and will be a great leader. Hopefully of the men in pinstripes.”
Jeter was not the team captain, even if the conversation about his candidacy had been carried on for a couple of years. But as the Yankees’ de facto captain, Jeter felt the need to go after Williams behind closed clubhouse doors, even if some were looking on.
No news media members were present, and Jeter did not mean for it to become public knowledge. “I don’t think it’s necessary for people to know about things publicly,” the shortstop would say when asked about his confrontation with Williams. “That’s just the way I’ve always handled it.”
Once Jeter was done rebuking Williams a second time near the clubhouse bathroom, all that mystique and aura were flushed down the drain. The Yankees came undone in Game 6 and were losing by a 15–0 count in the fifth inning when Torre applied his own mercy rule and removed Jeter, Tino Martinez, and Jorge Posada from the game.
Jeter ended up in the trainer’s room when he overheard reliever Jay Witasick say, “Well, at least I had fun.” Witasick made this remark after allowing Arizona nine runs, eight earned, while recording all of four outs, inspiring Jeter to give him the Bernie treatment times two. The shortstop had never been angrier.
“Fun? I can’t relate to it,” Jeter would tell Sports Illustrated’s Tom Verducci. “I really can’t relate to it. I’ll never forget that. At least you had fun? I’ll never understand it. I don’t want to understand it.”
Their nerves frayed, their faith no longer as blind as it had been in the Bronx, Jeter’s Yankees were left to face the 22-game winner, Schilling, in Game 7.
It was a
tense struggle between Schilling and Roger Clemens, the 20-game winner who had ten years earlier showered his opponent with tough love, warning Schilling he needed to work harder and stop wasting his outsized skill. The Yankees were trailing the Diamondbacks by a 1–0 count before Jeter singled and scored in the seventh, and before Soriano homered in the soft desert rain to lead off the eighth.
The bullpen doors ultimately opened for Rivera and Randy Johnson, the Game 6 winner who had so memorably emerged from the Seattle pen in ’95 to eliminate Buck Showalter’s Yanks. Rivera survived the eighth and was a prohibitive favorite to survive the ninth.
Arizona’s Mark Grace opened with a single before David Dellucci pinch-ran for him, then Damian Miller dropped down a bunt that headed the closer’s way. Rivera fielded the ball and fired to Jeter at second, but his throw tailed in left to right, two-seamer form, and the shortstop tried in vain to stretch his sore, stiff body for the ball while keeping his foot on the bag.
Dellucci crashed his spikes into Jeter’s left ankle as the throw skipped off the shortstop’s glove and into center field, allowing the Bank One Ballpark crowd to dream this impossible dream: Rivera losing his streak of twenty-three consecutive postseason saves in a winner-take-all game.
A wincing Jeter pulled himself to his feet, limped to the mound for Torre’s conference with Rivera, and hobbled back to his position. Only three innings earlier, Jeter had made another breathless defensive play, leaping high to catch Williams’s relay throw on Danny Bautista’s RBI double, and cutting down Bautista’s attempt to make it an RBI triple with a release that was Dan Marino quick.
Jeter was no longer physically capable of making such a dramatic play. His body was shutting down, and there were still three outs to go.
Rivera got one of them on Jay Bell’s sacrifice bunt, throwing to third to get Dellucci. Even that sequence hurt the Yankees’ cause; Brosius had a shot at a double play but did not throw to first.
Tony Womack followed with the game-tying double into right field, breaking his bat the way Grace had broken his on the leadoff single. Rivera was sawing wood with his cutter, just as he always did, and it did not matter. By the time the closer hit Craig Counsell to load the bases, the Diamondbacks were looking like the Yankees, and the Yankees were looking like the ’98 Padres, the ’99 Braves, and the 2000 Mets.
Luis Gonzalez had blasted 57 homers in the regular season, yet he came to the plate as if he were a slap-hitting middle infielder, choking up for the first time all year. Rivera had struck him out in the eighth, and this time Gonzalez just wanted to get a piece of the ball.
Rivera’s second pitch was a cutter that broke Gonzalez’s bat; of course it did. The ball normally would have taken a benign path into Jeter’s glove, but there was nothing normal about this night. The infield was playing in, so millions of viewers took in a most stunning scene:
Derek Jeter lifting his glove for the hell of it, lifting it the way he would a white flag.
The Diamondbacks mobbed Gonzalez between first and second, and Jeter looped around them and onto the outfield grass to avoid crashing their party on his way to the dugout. Head down, Rivera trudged in the same direction as “We Are the Champions” blared on the speakers. The Yankees did a zombielike stagger off the field while Torre watched from the rail.
Jeter slumped on the dugout bench as the Diamondbacks celebrated November the way he had always celebrated October. Over his first six seasons, Jeter had played in sixteen out of a possible eighteen postseason series, and this was only his second series defeat.
“You expect it to be over when Mo comes in,” Jeter said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s over.”
Rivera was blaming himself for the loss, blaming himself for the throw that got past Jeter, as the shortstop sat in the corner of a clubhouse as still as a confessional booth at midnight. Torre had already addressed his players, told them they should be very proud of their efforts. The manager noticed that Jeter looked more pissed off than anyone in the room.
Mayor Giuliani hugged George Steinbrenner and told him, “Everyone in New York appreciates what you guys did for us.” Hopelessly burdened by his superstitions, Steinbrenner had been enraged late in the game when the Fox TV crew entered the Yankee clubhouse to set up for a celebration that would never come.
The Boss composed himself and promised his team would bounce back stronger than ever, even if that team would not include O’Neill, Brosius, Martinez, and Knoblauch.
The shortstop would return; Steinbrenner knew that much. And as he limped into the trainer’s room, a World Series loser for the first time, Derek Jeter had no idea he was beginning the second phase of his Yankee career, one that would not be half as charmed as his first.
Photo Insert
An eighteen-year-old Jeter, a few months removed from his high school graduation, appears on the Yankee Stadium field, in Yankee colors, for the first time and receives tips from Jim Leyritz and Mike Gallego.
Richard Harbus/AP Photo
Baseball America’s 1994 minor league Player of the Year holds his first trophy in the Bronx.
Mark Lennihan/AP Photo
The rookie shortstop throws his arms toward the sky as Charlie Hayes records the final out of the 1996 World Series, the first of seven trips to the Fall Classic (five of them victorious) for the iconic number 2.
Kathy Willens/AP Photo
Derek Jeter was the one employee who could get away with pouring champagne over George Steinbrenner’s head, as the shortstop did here to celebrate the 1999 ALCS victory over Boston.
Matt York/Reuters/Corbis
Derek Jeter deflates the Mets on the very first pitch from Bobby Jones in Game 4 of the 2000 World Series, homering on his way to winning the Series MVP award.
Peter Morgan/Reuters/Corbis
Perhaps the most memorable play ever made by a big-league infielder, Jeter completes his epic flip to Jorge Posada to get a standing Jeremy Giambi at the plate during Game 3 of the 2001 Division Series.
Eric Risberg/AP Photo
Mr. November wins Game 4 of the 2001 World Series with his tenth-inning homer off Arizona’s Byung-Hyun Kim.
Shaun Best/Reuters/Corbis
No pain, no gain. On opening night, 2003, Jeter’s devastating collision at third base with Toronto catcher Ken Huckaby left the shortstop with a dislocated shoulder.
Mike Cassese/Reuters/Corbis
Joe Torre applies his fatherly touch to his favorite player on the day Jeter was named captain of the Yankees.
Al Behrman/AP Photo
Derek Jeter was not quite as thrilled as Joe Torre to welcome Alex Rodriguez to the Bronx in 2004.
Jason Szenes/epa/Corbis
A bruised and bloodied Jeter is helped out of the stands after his catch and face-first dive against Boston in 2004.
Mike Segar/Reuters/Corbis
The shortstop’s signature play — the jump throw from the hole — from start to finish.
John Angelillo/UPI
A dropped pop-up in a blowout loss in 2006 and the captain’s staredown of A-Rod elevated their feud to Defcon 1.
Ray Stubblebine/Reuters/Corbis
Derek Jeter and teammates wave their caps to the crowd after Jeter delivered his postgame speech on Yankee Stadium’s final night.
John Angelillo/UPI
The captain salutes the fans after breaking Lou Gehrig’s franchise record for hits.
John Angelillo/UPI
Many longtime Jeter observers expected actress Minka Kelly to end up as the last woman standing.
Jason Szenes/epa/Corbis
Alex Rodriguez celebrates his first trip to the Fall Classic by giving his captain a champagne bath.
Anthony Causi/Icon SMI/Corbis
A World Series champion at last, Alex Rodriguez embraces Derek Jeter as if he plans on never letting go.
Justin Lane/epa/Corbis
The captain on his 2009 parade float with his mother Dot, his girlfriend Minka, his sister Sharlee, and his father Charles.
Anthony Causi/Icon SMI/Corbis
9. New Guys
In the wake of his crushing World Series defeat, Derek Jeter wore his torment well. Talking in front of people “always scared me to death,” Jeter said, yet he agreed to host Saturday Night Live and even to dress up in one skit as Alfonso Soriano’s wife.
It was a clutch at-bat that notarized Jeter’s standing as a performer who did not fear the consequences of failure, no matter the forum. The shortstop always fell back on his preparation and forever remained ready to keep his head in the event everyone around him lost theirs.
In many ways, Jeter was still the same consistent, low-maintenance Yankee he had been for years. He was still the son who lived in mortal fear of hurting or disappointing his mother and father. He was still the star player who never asked for special clubhouse privileges, who never so much as asked if his parents could tour the Yankees’ inner sanctum.
He was still the New Yorker who gave his time to the children of 9/11 victims, including Kate Mascali, the young daughter of a lost firefighter Jeter invited onto the field during stretching exercises while her mother, Lori, wept over the scene.
He was still the guy buying his daily cappuccino at Starbucks. He was still the Yankee using his black Louisville Slugger P72 bat, still swinging 34 inches and 32 ounces at the plate, still using his Rawlings glove, and still wearing his uniform to a certain fit—not baggy or tight, but just right.