by Ian O'Connor
Or maybe Rodriguez would do exactly what he did: produce a sorry-looking roller down the first-base line.
Arroyo fielded the ball, tucked it away, and moved toward the chugging Rodriguez. Cornered and acting on a survivor’s instinct, A-Rod raised his left hand and slapped at the pitcher’s glove. The ball kicked free, and all hell broke loose in the Bronx.
While the Red Sox chased the fumble, Jeter ran all the way around to score and Rodriguez headed off to second base. Most in the crowd were too delirious to notice or care that Boston manager Terry Francona had scrambled onto the field to protest A-Rod’s slap. The Yankees had cut the Red Sox lead to 4–3 and Gary Sheffield was about to bat with one out, all because Rodriguez had made the kind of resourceful postseason play patented by Jeter.
But Francona persuaded the umpires to huddle. Randy Marsh, the first-base umpire, acknowledged he did not get a good look at the play before Joe West, the plate umpire, said he had it all the way. West ruled that Rodriguez should be called out for interference, for using his arms to commit an unsportsmanlike act.
Informed he was out as he stood on second base, A-Rod slapped his hands on top of his helmet and shouted, “What?” Torre came out to argue in vain, and enraged fans threw bottles and debris and let loose with a profane chant, forcing police in riot gear to prepare to line the field.
“I don’t know what the ruling was, or what the rule was,” Jeter said. “I saw the umpires talking about it, and I don’t think I was going to change anyone’s mind.”
The run came off the board, A-Rod was sent back to the dugout, and Jeter was sent back to first. “If Alex doesn’t do that,” Arroyo would say, “Derek’s standing on second base and it’s a different mindset for me with Sheffield up and a runner in scoring position.”
When order was restored, Sheffield popped out and left every last witness in Yankee Stadium believing the unbelievable: the Red Sox were now in strong position to advance to the World Series.
Boston closer Keith Foulke walked Matsui in the ninth with two outs, then recovered to strike out Tony Clark on a full-count pitch to stamp the Red Sox as baseball’s first team to force a Game 7 after losing the first three. In the wake of a third consecutive defeat, Torre had to explain why he did not bunt on the badly injured Schilling, and A-Rod had to explain what he was thinking when he tried to karate-chop his way onto base.
“Looking back,” Rodriguez said, “maybe I should’ve run him over.”
Schilling decided to run over A-Rod instead, this while helping Jeter to his feet. Before Game 7, the winning Game 6 pitcher went on ESPN Radio and said this of A-Rod’s decision to slap at Arroyo’s glove:
“That was freakin’ junior high baseball at its best. Let me ask you something: Does Derek Jeter do that? . . . You know for a fact he doesn’t because Derek Jeter is a class act and a professional, that’s why.”
All of New England had ridiculed Rodriguez over the Varitek fight in July, over the photo from that tussle that showed A-Rod’s contorted face buried in Varitek’s fingers and mitt. But as far as material went, the Slap trumped it by a country mile.
Rodriguez, who had called his failed off-season talks with the Red Sox “a huge blessing in disguise,” found himself in the wrong dugout at the wrong time. The Red Sox were about to deliver the most devastating blow a Yankees team had ever taken, and A-Rod was the face of this disaster, the star of his own Shakespearean tragedy.
Never mind that the Yanks could not overcome the losses of Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and David Wells, that Mike Mussina was their only reliable starter, that the staff was built around older right-handers who could not get the Red Sox out.
A-Rod was the one with the $252 million contract, the one who nearly landed in Boston, the one who was supposed to help Jeter find his way to a fifth parade. Rodriguez needed an ace to save him, a Schilling, but Torre did not have one available.
It was Kevin Brown or Javier Vazquez—a choice between the electric chair and lethal injection—and Torre picked Brown.
Before Game 7, Jeter saw general manager Brian Cashman addressing reporters in the dugout. “You going to make any acquisitions before tonight’s game?” the shortstop yelled.
“Don’t need any, babe,” Cashman answered.
The GM had never been so wrong.
The Yankees had brought in Yogi Berra for the occasion, and not simply because Yogi had approached Bernie Williams before the ’99 ALCS victory over the Red Sox to tell him, “We’ve been playing these guys for eighty years; they can’t beat us.”
Yogi was the official mascot, and people would have been surprised if he was not there. But the Yankees embarrassed themselves by asking Bucky Dent to throw out the ceremonial first pitch, a decision that only threw a brighter spotlight on their desperation. As it turned out, Dent’s strike to Yogi Berra looked better than anything Brown would throw to the plate.
The fans chanted “1918,” and one took the time to dress up as Babe Ruth’s ghost. Nothing worked. Jeter tried to single-handedly stop the tidal wave of momentum raging in Boston’s favor in the first inning, taking a relay throw and nailing Damon at the plate. “The dugout went from a complete high to a complete low,” Boston’s Doug Mientkiewicz said. “We were like, ‘Dammit, that might’ve changed everything,’ because you always worry about one play or one pitch changing the momentum.”
On the very next pitch, Brown eased all Red Sox fears by surrendering a two-run homer to David Ortiz.
The Yanks were dead men walking. Brown was booed off the mound—booed as loudly as any Yankee had ever been—after loading the bases in the second inning, leaving Vazquez to try to prove he should have been the man Torre selected for this apocalyptic start.
Damon stepped to the plate; he had dragged a .103 series batting average into the night. “I knew the curse was still living,” he said.
The Curse of the Bambino.
Damon had decided he had looked at too many pitches in Oakland, where he had been taught by Billy Beane to play the on-base-percentage game. Damon wanted to become a more aggressive hitter in 2004, and after grounding into a critical double play in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, he wanted to make sure he put something from Vazquez in the air.
So Damon put the first pitch from Torre’s starter turned reliever in the air, over the right-field wall, into a forever corner of Red Sox lore. The grand slam did not officially end the series like Aaron Boone’s homer ended it the year before, but it ended this ALCS in every other way.
The most profound scene of Yankee anger and dismay came in the third inning, after Jeter singled home Miguel Cairo to make it a 6–1 game. As Rodriguez left the on-deck circle, the captain screamed at him from first base.
Jeter was not encouraging A-Rod as much as he was scolding him. Rodriguez answered that scolding with a predictable squibber back to the pitcher, Derek Lowe, and after his final two at-bats—a groundout and a strikeout—the fans gave him the Kevin Brown treatment.
A-Rod finished the series 0 for 7 with runners in scoring position. Rodriguez was 2 for 17 overall in the four losses, and fans could not let go of his defining ALCS at-bat, a one-out strikeout in the eighth inning of Game 5 after Jeter had bunted Cairo over to third with the Yanks holding a 4–2 lead.
But the entirety of this defeat could not be stuffed inside Rodriguez’s locker. A-Rod’s was a broken team, a team with a $120 million slugger (Jason Giambi) who could not even make the postseason roster.
The Yanks were beaten by Lowe, going on two days’ rest. They were beaten by four home runs, three on the first pitch, including a second from Damon off Vazquez punctuated by an upper-deck landing that would have made Ruth proud.
More than anything they were beaten by a better team. When it was over, when Ruben Sierra grounded out to second and the 10–3 final was frozen in history’s lights, frozen at 12:01 a.m., the 2004 Boston Red Sox had joined the 1975 New York Islanders and the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs as the only North American professional teams to recover from a 3–0
series deficit.
The winners mobbed each other under the surreal sounds of Sinatra. They would end up celebrating on the Yankee Stadium field, spraying champagne on the Boston fans who had gathered around the visitors’ dugout, fans who were filling the Bronx night with chants of “Let’s go, Red Sox.”
Epstein, Boston’s young and dynamic architect, held a cold Budweiser in his clubhouse and dedicated the victory to all Red Sox players and coaches who had fallen to the Yanks in the past. On the other side of the Stadium, Epstein’s counterpart, Cashman, shook his head over this remarkable event. “All year long,” the losing GM said, “Boston was kind of like Jason from [Friday the 13th] or Freddy Krueger.”
A-Rod said he was embarrassed. At Jeter’s locker, the captain’s face was an unruly brew of anger and pain. He called the defeat “shocking”—Jeter never, ever used words like shocking—and conceded the pain was greater because Boston made history at his expense—Jeter never, ever made those kinds of concessions.
A week later, the unwashed and unworthy Red Sox finished off a sweep of the Cardinals and won their first World Series title since 1918. Edgar Renteria made the final St. Louis out, and he was wearing Ruth’s number, 3, when he did.
Back in New York, the Yankees’ number 2 remained livid that the curse had been reversed on his watch. “I’m not going to forget it,” Jeter promised on the night he was eliminated.
The shortstop made something else crystal clear to the reporters in his midst, to those wondering what had become of the Yankees’ endless run of magical October nights. “It’s not the same team,” Jeter reminded them. “I’ve said it time after time, it’s not the same team.”
As Jeter’s buddy R. D. Long had predicted, A-Rod’s karma was taking hold of the Yankees, a truth that could mean only one thing for the captain:
There was a lot more postseason pain and suffering around the bend.
11. The Great Divide
A simple August pop-up in the middle of a blowout loss to the Baltimore Orioles announced that the Yankees’ shortstop and third baseman were participants in a chemistry experiment gone wrong.
Baltimore designated hitter Jay Gibbons sent a Mike Myers pitch high into the afternoon sky, a ball Alex Rodriguez figured was his. But infield protocol said the shortstop took control whenever he deemed it necessary, and this was one of those occasions when the captain deemed it necessary.
Derek Jeter was calling for the ball as he drifted to his right and into A-Rod’s territory, the two superstars looking up and tracking this routine sixth-inning pop. A-Rod, the $252 million third baseman, planned to catch it. Jeter, the $189 million shortstop, planned to do the same.
Only the ball glanced off Rodriguez’s glove as Jeter bumped him, and then it landed behind the shortstop. Miguel Tejada would score to give Baltimore a 10–2 lead, and Jeter? Jeter did not even bother to retrieve the ball.
He was too busy shooting A-Rod the kind of stare armed troops often gave each other from opposite sides of the 38th parallel.
The fans had been shredding Rodriguez; the 2005 American League MVP was having a rough 2006 at the plate and in the field. The fans had been chanting “MVP” for Jeter, who was enjoying one of his best seasons—enjoying it, at least, when reporters were not asking him why he never gave those fans a captain’s order to back off and cut A-Rod a break, the same captain’s order he had given the year before on behalf of Jason Giambi, admitted steroid cheat.
After the San Francisco Chronicle reported Giambi had told a federal grand jury he used steroids and human growth hormone, and after Giambi delivered a bizarre public apology, expressing contrition for a sin he would not identify for fear of jeopardizing his contract, the fans lost their patience with the slugger’s problems at the plate. Giambi was no longer a $120 million bust as a first baseman and designated hitter; he was also a $120 million pharmacological hoax.
But when the fans turned ugly in the Bronx, Jeter told them to knock it off. “If you’re a Yankee fan and you want us to win,” he said, “we need Jason to do well. They should be cheering him.”
Only a year later, the shortstop was not campaigning for any such clemency for A-Rod. Rodriguez was drowning and the captain refused to pull him in. The fans were taking out their past postseason frustrations on A-Rod. He was the face of the disastrous 2004 loss to Boston and the slugger who delivered 48 homers and 130 RBI in the 2005 regular season before batting .133 with no homers and no RBI in another Division Series loss to the Angels, a performance that compelled A-Rod to admit he had “played like a dog.”
Rodriguez was the enduring symbol of a $203 million payroll ousted in the first round. “We can win three World Series,” A-Rod said, “and with me it’s never going to be over.”
Yankee fans were just hoping for one World Series title from A-Rod, and when he struggled in 2006, the Stadium crowds were no more forgiving of him than they were of Giambi. Only Giambi had an influential teammate in his corner.
Alex Rodriguez did not.
“I can’t tell the fans what to do,” Derek Jeter said.
He told them what to do in Giambi’s case. In fact, when the Stadium crowd had cheered for struggling second baseman Chuck Knoblauch years earlier, Jeter remarked that “it’s about time the fans got behind him.”
Rodriguez was on his own, and Brian Cashman was fed up with it. So after the August 17 pop-up fell to the ground in the 12–2 loss to Baltimore, after Jeter gave A-Rod a look that could maim, if not kill, and after A-Rod was roasted by the fans for popping out in his final at-bat, the general manager decided to take the issue head-on.
But first Joe Torre would address Jeter and Rodriguez in the clubhouse. If Torre, an accomplished former player, was not crazy about singling out Yankees in front of the team, he did it when he had to.
He had first shown a willingness to criticize a Yankee before a full and captive clubhouse audience in 1996, when he ripped Paul O’Neill for not hustling after a fly ball. “You’re better than that,” Torre barked, “and I expect more out of you. I don’t want to see that again.” O’Neill did not say a word in response.
Ten years later, Jeter and A-Rod were bigger stars than O’Neill, bigger than their combined salaries of $45 million. Torre had no choice but to confront them anyway, with the rest of the team looking on.
The clubhouse doors were shut to the media, and the manager stood before the hushed Yankees, fixing his glare on the two heavyweights among them. “I don’t know what happened out there,” Torre told the left side of his infield, “but that fuckin’ ball’s got to be caught. I don’t care who catches it, but somebody had better catch it.”
Now that Torre had confronted Jeter and Rodriguez, Cashman decided it was time to confront Torre. The manager was partial to Jeter, the team-centric winner who made Torre a four-time champion. Jeter never would have been pictured in the New York Post sunbathing shirtless in Central Park before a game the way A-Rod had been the previous month (before going hitless and committing three errors in a game for the first time in his career).
Rodriguez had not won for Torre, and he brought to the clubhouse a level of narcissism not seen in the Bronx since the days of Reggie Jackson. A-Rod was worth two diva dramas a week, at least, and so naturally Torre did not connect with him the way he did with his shortstop.
But Cashman saw in Rodriguez a nine-figure corporate asset that had to be protected. For that reason, the GM wanted Jeter to appeal to the fans to support A-Rod just as he had appealed to them to support Giambi.
To date Jeter had declined. The botched pop-up upped the ante, inspiring Cashman to make his move. He asked his manager to order Jeter to end his cold war with A-Rod for the betterment of the team.
Torre did not believe it was necessary. “I’m not going to bring that up with them,” he replied. “If you want something done on that, you handle it.”
So Cashman handled it, face-to-face with a captain who hated criticism almost as much as he hated losing.
“Listen, this
has to stop,” the GM told Jeter. “Everybody in the press box, every team official, everyone watching, they saw you look at the ball on the ground and look at him with disgust like you were saying, ‘That’s your mess, you clean it up.’”
Jeter responded by summoning the Cuba Gooding Jr. character in Jerry Maguire.
“Show me the video,” he told Cashman. “Show me the video.”
The GM told Jeter to look for himself and reiterated that the captain’s body language had screamed to the world he had no use for A-Rod. Jeter maintained again that Cashman and the rest of creation had it wrong.
“If that’s not what you meant, fine,” the GM said. “But perception is reality, and that’s what people perceive it to be. . . . You’ve got to do a better job with Alex as far as embracing him.”
Cashman asked Jeter to do a “self-test” on the Rodriguez issue, to go home and question himself about whether he was doing enough as a captain and teammate for A-Rod, and the conversation ended. Meanwhile, the Yankees were heading off to play five games over four days in Fenway Park while holding only a one-and-a-half-game divisional lead, and all the news media wanted to talk about was a Little League mistake made by two men who had combined to win the last four American League Gold Glove awards at short.
“When it was hit, I was calling it,” Jeter explained. “I guess he didn’t hear me.”
“Just a goofy play, that’s all,” Rodriguez said. “He called it. I called it. We didn’t hear each other.”
The official scorer, Howie Karpin, originally assigned the error to Rodriguez, which would have given the third baseman—plagued earlier by throwing problems—a league-leading 22. On further review, Karpin decided the shortstop had impeded Rodriguez’s ability to catch the ball and reassigned the error to Jeter, whose total increased to 10.
Told he had been stuck with the bill on the pop-up, Jeter said, “That wasn’t my error, buddy.” Assured he had been assessed the error, the captain said, “I was? Really? I didn’t touch it. Wow. . . . I don’t care.”
