by Ian O'Connor
Only Jeter did care. In his eighth year as a scorer, Karpin had never been approached by the shortstop to question one of his rulings. But Karpin went down to the clubhouse in case Jeter wanted to talk, and the captain did indeed call him over.
Karpin explained that after reviewing the play, he decided Jeter’s slight contact with the third baseman from behind caused the ball to drop. “Derek was cordial,” Karpin said, “but the ruling definitely seemed to bother him.”
Before he left for Fenway and five games his team would win, Jeter spotted Karpin in the Stadium hallway and approached a second time in an attempt to persuade him to hand the bill back to A-Rod.
“I think you may want to look at it again,” the shortstop said.
“I think you may want to look at it again,” Karpin responded. They went back and forth for a few minutes, neither party raising his voice, and then Jeter boarded the bus.
No, Jeter and A-Rod were not another Kobe and Shaq, superpowers who openly feuded and criticized each other in the press. They were too smart to engage in a shouting match or fight in front of teammates, who would undoubtedly leak word of any such confrontation.
But the tension between them was real enough for Cashman to approach Jeter several times about the need for the shortstop to build a bridge to third base. Jeter maintained he had spoken with A-Rod on more than one occasion and was trying to improve the relationship, and when Cashman asked Rodriguez if this was indeed the case, the third baseman confirmed the captain’s account.
Jeter never lied about team business. If he said he did something, he did it, and Cashman respected him for that.
Only there was a problem: those conversations between Jeter and Rodriguez did not thaw out the sheet of ice that separated their lockers, which, fittingly enough, were across the room from each other, Jeter’s on the left and A-Rod’s on the right.
One friend of Jeter’s who agreed with Cashman’s take tried to persuade the shortstop to make more of an effort to bring A-Rod in from the cold. “Now you’re sounding like everyone else,” Jeter told the friend. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? I try, and sometimes I’ve just got to walk away and come back and try again, but you know I’ve tried. And every time I try, he’ll do something that pushes me away.”
Don Mattingly, hitting coach and former captain, told Yankee officials he tried giving Jeter the same advice. Mattingly could not stand teammate Wade Boggs, once his chief rival in Boston.
“But I faked it with Boggs,” Mattingly said he had told Jeter. “And you have to fake it with Alex.”
It was a tough sell. One Yankee official said he was afraid to approach Jeter on the subject of his relationship with A-Rod “because it would’ve been the last conversation I ever had with Derek. I would’ve been dead to him. It would’ve been like approaching Joe DiMaggio to talk to him about Marilyn Monroe.”
Truth was, Jeter did not hate A-Rod. He just hated being A-Rod’s teammate.
More than five years later, Jeter was not hung up on the Esquire comments as much as he was hung up on Alex’s me-first antics. Jeter’s idea of the perfect teammate was Rivera, Pettitte, or Posada from the glory days, or Hideki Matsui from the current group.
Matsui was quiet, dignified, chiseled from stone, ready to play every day. If he had been raised in Iowa instead of Ishikawa, Matsui would have been Jack Armstrong, everyone’s all-American boy.
The Japanese slugger appreciated Jeter’s kindness when he first arrived in the States (“It was huge to me,” Matsui said), and Jeter appreciated the same toughness and selflessness in Matsui he saw in the dynasty keepers.
Matsui broke his wrist trying to make a catch in May and then apologized to his fellow Yankees for being unavailable to help them.
“I had never seen that before,” Jeter would say. “He’s been one of my favorite teammates I’ve ever played with.”
Rodriguez was the anti-Matsui, an insecure wreck who constantly craved positive reinforcement, and who cared much too much about what was written and said about him in the newspapers, on the air, in a media culture spawning a new invasive platform every hour, on the hour.
Jeter was hardly the only Yankee who noticed. One teammate of both who did not count himself as a member of Jeter’s camp or A-Rod’s camp—if A-Rod even had a camp—offered this agenda-free scouting report on Rodriguez’s standing in Yankeeland:
Alex isn’t a bad guy, but he’s just very phony.
I was taken aback by how insecure a person he is. He’s very cognizant of how other people were reacting to him. He would walk into the clubhouse, and he knew immediately who was where. You could tell he’d be asking himself, “Are they acknowledging me? Are they looking at me?” In batting practice he’d tell people, “Hey, I’m going to put on a show for you today,” and when he did, he’d say, “Did you see that? Did you see that?”
It amazed me how he’d walk from the parking lot to the clubhouse and see the same people every day and not give them the time of day. I made that walk with him, and I was disgusted by the time I got to the clubhouse. Alex gave those people nothing, walked right by them as if they weren’t even there, and I was embarrassed by it. You’ve got to try pretty hard to be that mean.
Derek Jeter was rarely, if ever, rude or dismissive to the minions in his midst, which raised a question about A-Rod: If the third baseman was so obsessed with the shortstop, why didn’t he do a better job of following his lead?
And yes, one team official said, Rodriguez was indeed obsessed with the captain. “Alex,” the official said, “would constantly ask, ‘Is Jeter doing this? . . . Is Jeter doing that? . . . Did you talk to Jeter last night? . . . Is Jeter involved in this charity thing?’ It never stopped.”
Rodriguez should have walked around wearing his own “WWJD” bracelet (“What Would Jeter Do?”). People told Rodriguez to stop comparing himself to the captain, if only because A-Rod had no chance of ever measuring up. Rodriguez was not born with Jeter’s spectacular talent for doing the right thing at the right time. All the time.
A-Rod would walk past kids in the dugout before a game, oblivious to the fact that they were there for a reason (often because they were battling a serious illness). Jeter did not need to be told. If he saw a kid in the dugout, near the bat rack, he almost always stopped to chat, tousled the kid’s hair, and made the kid’s month. “Do you have a girlfriend?” he would ask the boys. “Do you have a boyfriend?” he would ask the girls.
Jeter was once filing out of an event at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center in New Jersey when an official spotted a boy of about seven or eight walking in front of the shortstop, blissfully unaware of who was behind him. Jeter planted his hands on the boy’s shoulders and shook him playfully before starting a conversation with him.
“Most athletes in that situation,” the official said, “would’ve been telling themselves, ‘Oh, God, please let this kid walk another ten feet without turning around.’”
Rodriguez was one of those athletes.
A-Rod did not get it, off the field or on. While Jeter was a master of shrinking the biggest moments, Rodriguez often made them too big to handle, and the Division Series loss to the Angels the previous fall had offered ample evidence of that.
Jeter batted .333 with two home runs and five RBI in the series, and in the sudden-death fifth game, on the road, he had three hits, including a homer in the seventh inning and a single to lead off the ninth with the Yanks down 5–3.
Rodriguez finished the series with two hits in fifteen at-bats, finished hitless in Game 5, and all but killed the Yanks’ last chance by following Jeter’s ninth-inning single with a ground ball double play before, of course, likening himself to a dog.
A-Rod wanted badly to become a made man in a pinstriped suit, to win like the former three-peat champ at third, Scott Brosius, a World Series MVP whose talent could fit inside one of A-Rod’s shoes. If he could not win a title, Rodriguez would at least settle for the kind of signature October moment seized by his predeces
sor, Aaron Boone.
Jeter had reached out to the homer hero of 2003 after he tore up his knee, clearing the way for Rodriguez. “I think the way Derek put it to me, I wouldn’t repeat,” Boone said. “But it was appreciated by me. . . . I think he felt bad about the situation.”
Jeter was not a hard captain or teammate to please. He demanded hard work, accountability, and a willingness to place team ahead of self. Sometimes Jeter even embraced those whose commitment to the cause did not match his.
He buddied around with Jeff Weaver, a bust and a mope. Jeter came to like Giambi, who had lost a lot of respect in his clubhouse when he pulled himself out of Game 5 of the 2003 World Series. Jeter believed that Giambi partied too heavily, and that he did not take losing half as seriously as the first baseman he replaced, Tino Martinez, also Jeter’s friend.
But through his actions and words of support, Jeter gave the fun-loving Giambi his papal blessing. The defrocked slugger was liked by star teammates and low-level staffers alike, especially those staffers who benefited when Giambi demanded in a postseason shares meeting—against the wishes of established Yankee veterans—that they receive full shares instead of the reduced bonuses they had been getting.
Giambi showed leadership in that 2003 case, and there was no doubting his standing as the tattooed leader of the renegade Oakland A’s teams that challenged the Yanks. Only Giambi was not that dynamic force anymore. He was a fading player who had been exposed as a cheat, and so Jeter did not see him as a threat to his standing with the team and fan base.
Rodriguez? The magnitude of his talent, contract, stardom, and personality made him a natural threat. So Jeter was not beyond taking an occasional poke at him, as he did the time two female reporters who happened to be wearing pink shoes stopped at his locker.
Jeter mentioned the matching shoes, and when one of the reporters playfully asked him where his pink shoes were, Jeter said, “I don’t have any.” He then rolled his eyes toward A-Rod’s locker and joked, “He might.”
It was clear Jeter and Rodriguez needed a Kissinger-like mediator the way Reggie Jackson and Thurman Munson did. Back in the day, the simmering Jackson-Munson feud was settled—or tempered, anyway—when backup catcher Fran Healy and clubhouse attendant Ray Negron persuaded the two stars to meet inside a hotel restaurant in Detroit.
The gruff and grumpy Munson was an unmade bed; Jackson was a polished, self-celebrating star made for Hollywood. “When Reggie would put on a uniform,” Negron said, “he would say, ‘This is my cosmetic touch.’ Everything had to be right, including his socks, or he wasn’t ready to play the game. Thurman? He was just like, ‘Let’s go, motherfucker.’ He was a monster.”
On arrival in the Bronx, Jackson had his own Esquire moment—he was quoted (erroneously, he swears) in Sport magazine as saying, “I’m the straw that stirs the drink. Maybe I should say me and Munson, but he can only stir it bad.”
Munson was just as furious with Jackson’s remarks as Jeter would be with A-Rod’s nearly a quarter century later, but the two eventually got past it and won a couple of championships together before Munson died in a plane crash.
“Thurman is Jeter and Reggie is Alex, and I’ve told Jeter that,” said Negron, who became an adviser to George Steinbrenner. “Jeter is more to himself like Thurman was, and Alex is more outgoing like Reggie.”
Jackson was among those who tried to improve relations between Jeter and A-Rod. He spoke to Rodriguez and Jeter separately, telling A-Rod about his own isolation in Munson’s and Billy Martin’s clubhouse, and advising Jeter on his responsibilities as a team leader.
“I spoke to him as a captain, not as Derek Jeter,” Jackson said. “I told him what I thought was needed, and I think he took pieces of what I said that he agreed with and didn’t take the pieces he disagreed with.
“I certainly hope Derek and Alex can win together like I did with Thurman. Alex has a good heart, but sometimes he doesn’t express himself well, and he tries to express himself too much. If he would say less and let his bat do the talking, no one can talk like him with a bat. But when he tries to say the right things, it just doesn’t work.”
Joe Torre did not believe he needed to talk to the left side of his infield about forming a unified front, as he reasoned Jeter and Rodriguez knew each other before either had met Torre and would figure it out between themselves. But Torre was concerned enough about A-Rod’s tenuous place in the clubhouse to dispatch others to talk to him.
“Joe Torre asked me to talk to him all the time,” Gary Sheffield said. “In talking to [Rodriguez] it was more about giving of yourself, Alex, because if you want to win a championship you have to be in a team concept rather than as an individual.
“I didn’t go to him and say, ‘You’ve got to be about the team,’ and this and that. I just let him know that I was asked to come talk to him. This was nothing I thought was an issue; other people said it was an issue . . . I was just doing what my manager asked me to do.”
If nothing else, no Yankee was ever asked to talk to Rodriguez about his game-day preparation. A-Rod’s sweat-soaked routine was a blur of indoor batting practice, outdoor batting practice, infield practice, long toss, and medicine ball exercises. Only Roger Clemens’s pregame intensity matched A-Rod’s, and Rodriguez was not merely pitching one out of every five days.
His teammates were not blind to Rodriguez’s near-maniacal work ethic, which was one reason some believed Jeter should have done more to help him. As much as A-Rod could be his own worst enemy, he did bust his ass in his attempt to be the best ballplayer he could be, a truth those teammates felt should have counted for something with the captain.
But as far back as spring training 2005, Jeter had clearly established he would not be stepping in front of any freight trains heading Rodriguez’s way. One by one, the Red Sox were taking the lumber to A-Rod’s good name, or what was left of it, their venom inspired by an interview Rodriguez gave Bob Klapisch of the Record in New Jersey. In it A-Rod made this self-serving declaration about his commitment to fitness: “I know there are 650 or 700 other players who are sleeping this morning. Either that, or they’re taking their kids to school. But there’s no way they’re going to be running the stairs or doing what I’m doing.”
Trot Nixon took the first cuts of spring, saying of A-Rod, “Well, I’m not a deadbeat dad, you clown.” Nixon also said that when people asked him about the Yankees, “I tell them about Jeter and Bernie Williams and [Jorge] Posada. I don’t tell them about Rodriguez.”
On cue, Jeter was asked to respond to Nixon’s verbal assault on his teammate. “I’m not getting into a war of words with them,” the captain said. “That’s between Trot and Alex.”
Sensing an opening, realizing Jeter had not protected his third baseman when Nixon attacked, or when Schilling had attacked in the past, the Red Sox announced the opening of hunting season on A-Rod.
Everyone got a free shot. Bronson Arroyo, Jason Varitek, Keith Foulke, Kevin Millar, and former Yankee David Wells fired away without fear of retribution. They mocked A-Rod’s little Game 6 squibber, and his little slap at Arroyo’s glove. They mocked his ten bare fingers, too.
None of the Yankees who had supported a steroid user, Giambi, stepped up in Tampa to return fire on Boston’s Fort Myers base. Including Jeter.
Especially Jeter.
The Red Sox kept praising the Yankee captain at A-Rod’s expense, kept calling him a pure winner, a team player, as professional as anyone in the game. “Derek Jeter, he’s a Yankee, period,” Millar said. “Alex Rodriguez’s salary doesn’t dictate that he’s a Yankee. Just because he’s making $25 million doesn’t mean he’s a Yankee.”
Jeter did nothing about it.
“As long as I’ve been here,” he said, “we’ve never been a team that talks a lot. I don’t think it’s necessary. Really, I’m indifferent to it.”
When Wells, Boston’s latest recruit, threw his usual assortment of misplaced jabs the Yankees’ way, including one aimed at Rodriguez
for acting like he was part of the dynasty years, Jeter merely responded that he did not have any problems with Wells, and that his former teammate had even sent him a Christmas card.
Again, Rodriguez was on his own. He could choose to defend himself or simply let this Boston tee-off party go on forever. And if it were up to Steinbrenner, Rodriguez would have told the offending Red Sox where they could stick their championship rings.
The Boss had met with A-Rod weeks earlier and ordered him to stop trying to fit in, to stop deferring to Jeter and everyone else and assume a leadership role. It was virtually the same conversation Steinbrenner had with Clemens when the Rocket could not get comfortable in his pinstriped skin during his first season in the Bronx.
But Rodriguez played dead as the Red Sox piled on, his only sign of life coming in the form of a slight of Arroyo, whom he referred to as “Brandon.” Finally, Boston’s self-styled band of Idiots let it go, leaving A-Rod to answer the question that had more lives than a cat, Freddy Krueger, or the 2004 Red Sox:
How’s your relationship with Jeter?
“Very good,” Rodriguez said.
“As good as ever?” he was asked.
A-Rod laughed. “I don’t know. I think it’s good.”
Rodriguez was proven wrong as the season unfolded. And for every teammate who thought the captain was obliged to cover Rodriguez’s back, whether he wanted to or not, there was a teammate or two who felt A-Rod was the only Yankee required to bail out A-Rod.
“A lot of guys just felt, ‘Hey, if you don’t want to get booed, go out there and play better,’” one teammate said. “We never really looked at it as something Derek should’ve done. When you sign up to play for this team, you know if you don’t play well you’re going to get booed. And Alex was the one in control of that.”
This was a point hammered home to Rodriguez by his friend Mike Borzello, the bullpen catcher and Torre godson who was not afraid to get in A-Rod’s face. “You don’t need anybody,” Borzello told him. “Your bat should be bailing you out of whatever mess you’re in with the fans. They don’t boo you after you hit a home run. They boo you when you stink.”
