The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  “I’d tell Derek, ‘You’ve got to get to guys who you think are driven to win and pull with those guys and see if you can corral the other guys and get them to come with you.’ But the playoffs would come, and all of a sudden guys you relied on had fake injuries, or all of a sudden they had injuries and they couldn’t play.”

  Martinez was not naming names; it wasn’t the Yankee way. But Jeter clearly was enraged when Martinez’s successor, Giambi, begged out of the lineup before Game 5 of the 2003 World Series.

  “I think they lost that feel of guys wanting to be really out there when the pressure’s on and failing and dealing with the media,” Martinez said. “I think after we left certain guys came in with more of a let’s-have-fun-off-the-field mentality. If we win or lose today it’s no big deal because we’ll have fun tonight wherever we go.

  “It’s that type of mentality that drove [Jeter] crazy. Guys were laughing after losses. It’s not that we were a morgue in there when we lose a game in June or July, but you don’t want guys laughing or joking around like it’s no big deal.”

  Jeter’s scouting report alone did not inspire these conclusions. Martinez saw it for himself when he returned to the Yanks in 2005, after spending two seasons with St. Louis and one in Tampa Bay.

  “Everybody was on different pages, guys were out, and it was a mess,” Martinez said. “I knew I had a year to come back, maybe two, and I wanted to win the World Series again, get that whole experience, get another parade. But it just wasn’t the same feeling.”

  Mike Stanton reached the same verdict when he also returned to the Yanks in 2005. The reliever had a great appreciation for Jeter, especially after he thought he had nearly ended the shortstop’s career years earlier.

  Stanton was part of a Nike commercial shoot before a Subway Series against the Mets, an ad pitting the Yanks against the Mets in a stickball game. With Jeter on first, Stanton swung his broomstick and ripped a pitch from John Franco right into the shortstop’s lower stomach, inches north of his groin. As Jeter doubled over, gasping for air, Stanton thought to himself, “Oh, my gosh, there goes my Yankee career.”

  Jeter survived. Stanton remained gainfully employed and ended up as a vital part of three championship teams under Torre. On his second go-around in the Bronx, Stanton believed the 2005 Yanks had title-worthy talent.

  “You had an All-Star from another team at every position, not the homegrown guys,” he said, “but it was completely different.

  “We had a great team on the field, but we just didn’t have the cohesiveness as we did in the past. I think we had the same commitment to winning, but not the same commitment to being a team. You had guys going in different directions, and when we were winning championships everybody put the team in front of ourselves. In 2005 it was more about playing for the three-run homer and making sure you got your ERA down or your batting average up.”

  The 2006 season offered more of the same, and the most conspicuous source of tension in Yankeeland—the awkward public dance between Jeter and Rodriguez—was still a hurdle the entire franchise could not clear.

  Their extreme differences went far beyond A-Rod’s habit of watching as much televised baseball as he could, and Jeter’s refusal to watch any game in which he was not playing. Rodriguez finally decided to do something about his relationship with the shortstop. Emasculated by Torre in the Detroit series, burdened by the probability that 2007 would be his final year as a Yankee, A-Rod chose to put Jeter on his heels.

  As tired as Jeter was of all that October losing, Rodriguez was just as tired of seeking the captain’s approval in vain. The third baseman was tired of tiptoeing around Jeter, tired of swearing their friendship was intact, tired of carrying all that baggage to the plate.

  So he dumped it right in Jeter’s lap. Rodriguez reported to spring training, took a seat in a Legends Field dugout, and while Jeter was taking his physical, A-Rod became the first known major league player to announce a divorce from a teammate.

  “Let’s make a contract,” Rodriguez said to reporters. “You don’t ask me about Derek anymore, and I promise I’ll stop lying to all you guys.”

  As much as they loved this story A-Rod was telling, the gathered reporters were not ready to make that trade.

  “The reality is there’s been a change in the relationship over fourteen years and hopefully we can just put it behind us,” A-Rod continued. “You go from sleeping over at somebody’s house five days a week, and now you don’t sleep over. It’s just not that big of a deal.”

  Oh, this was as big a deal as the opt-out in A-Rod’s contract, the clause he could exercise at season’s end to become a free agent. Rodriguez was done speaking from the scripts he had run past focus groups.

  This cathartic exchange explained why Rodriguez walked into camp as if he were arriving for a weigh-in before a middleweight bout. He had shed about fifteen pounds, reduced his body fat from 18 percent to 10 percent, and lowered a two-ton issue from his shoulders.

  “People start assuming that things are a lot worse than what they are, which they’re not,” Rodriguez said. “But they’re obviously not as great as they used to be. We were like blood brothers. . . . I think it’s important to cut the bull.”

  A-Rod was as free as a bird. Yes, he lied about Torre, saying he blamed only himself for the embarrassment of batting eighth against Detroit. One Rodriguez friend maintained there was a better chance of Jeter forgiving A-Rod for his sins than there was of Rodriguez forgiving Torre for his.

  But Rodriguez liberated himself on the more critical front, the Jeter front, and when the shortstop heard about A-Rod’s little stunt he did not do a handstand. “Why does he keep running his mouth off?” Jeter asked a team official. “Why doesn’t he just shut up?”

  The day after Rodriguez’s confession, Jeter sat in the same dugout and, per the captain’s policy, refused to feed the media beast.

  “I don’t have a rift with Alex; let’s get that straight,” Jeter told reporters. “Like Alex said yesterday, when we’re on the field we support each other, we’re pulling for each other, and that’s all that matters. What we do away from the field really has no bearing on us playing baseball.”

  Jeter was asked to characterize his relationship with Rodriguez. “How would I characterize it?” he said. “I would characterize it as it doesn’t make a difference.”

  The captain revealed he’d had a conversation with Rodriguez about his perceived lack of support, and that A-Rod did not believe what reporters and columnists were writing—that Jeter needed to do more to make his former best friend feel at home in the Bronx.

  “From day one, I’ve said I support Alex,” the shortstop said. “The only thing I’m not going to do is tell the fans what to do.”

  Even if he told them what to do when they were jeering Jason Giambi.

  Jeter said that he and A-Rod laughed about the dropped pop-up against Baltimore, that media members were analyzing their relationship without knowing all the closed-door facts. Rodriguez swore his only desire was to win a championship with Jeter at his side, and to be there in 2009 for the opening of the new stadium across the street.

  But with Rodriguez a potential free agent, with Torre in the last year of his contract, and with Jeter desperate to win after six years of postseason losing, something would have to give in 2007. The Yankees were not going to crash and burn in another Division Series and make it to 2008 with their core figures intact.

  The conflict within the organization was not limited to the left side of the infield. Steinbrenner had almost fired Torre after the loss in Detroit, and ownership and management no longer viewed him as the manager with the Midas touch. One constant issue was Torre’s use, or overuse, of certain members of the bullpen, the most recent and obvious case represented by the dangling right arm belonging to Scott Proctor, who had pitched 1021/3 innings over 83 games in 2006.

  Over the winter, Brian Cashman consulted with members of Torre’s coaching staff and arranged for an intervention. C
ashman called in bench coach Don Mattingly, third-base coach Larry Bowa, first-base coach Tony Pena, and bullpen coach Joe Kerrigan. Most, if not all, shared the general manager’s opinion that Torre needed to adjust the way he used relief pitchers and do a better job of protecting valuable arms. Cashman did not bother inviting Ron Guidry, the pitching coach, because the GM saw Guidry as a blind follower of Torre’s who would never cut against the manager’s grain.

  Once the meeting started and Torre figured out its agenda, he got so defensive that the coaches turned stone-cold silent, hanging Cashman out to dry. Suddenly a group intervention became a face-off between the GM and Torre.

  It did not go well, and after the meeting ended, Kerrigan, Bowa, and Mattingly apologized to Cashman for, in effect, chickening out. But if Torre needed another reason to believe he could not lose in the first round of the playoffs for the third straight year, he had gotten one.

  Torre would have to make do without Bernie Williams, who was not brought back, and again without Carl Pavano, who answered teammate criticism of his lack of commitment and availability (Mike Mussina put an on-the-record face and voice to that criticism) by making two starts, including one on Opening Day, before going down for the season with a ligament tear in his elbow that required Tommy John surgery.

  A far more reliable Yankee, Andy Pettitte, was back on Torre’s side after three years in Houston, making the manager feel a bit more secure about his staff. That was the good news surrounding Pettitte’s return. The bad news?

  Pettitte found that balls his Houston shortstop, Adam Everett, used to reach were getting by Derek Jeter for base hits. Pettitte would never consciously show up his friend and captain; the first and last time Pettitte did big-time Jeter, the two were minor leaguers in Greensboro and the left-hander was watching the teenage shortstop botch a series of ground balls.

  But veteran Yankee observers noticed that Pettitte’s body language occasionally screamed, “How did that get through?” when grounders—especially those to Jeter’s left—were bouncing into the outfield. If Pettitte was silently asking that question, others were asking it out loud.

  The sabermetric crowd was ganging up on Jeter, the three-time Gold Glove winner who was number 1 in the hearts of Yankee fans, number 2 in their game programs, and number 30 or so in the sabermetric rankings of everyday shortstops.

  Bill James, one of the godfathers of the movement, a widely respected author and statistician hired by the Red Sox as a senior adviser after the 2002 season, wrote a piece for The Fielding Bible comparing Jeter to Everett based on data provided him by John Dewan and his fellow sabermetricians at Baseball Info Solutions.

  “One of their conclusions,” James wrote, “was that Derek Jeter was probably the least effective defensive player in the major leagues, at any position.”

  James watched video of the best twenty plays and worst twenty plays made by Jeter and Everett in 2005, film that showed the Yankee shortstop playing shallow and rarely setting his feet, and the Astro shortstop playing deep and almost always setting his feet. James also studied charts and summaries of every 2005 play Jeter and Everett did and did not make.

  He concluded that Everett failed to make 41 plays that “given the vector, velocity and type of play, the expectation that the shortstop would make the play was greater than or equal to 50%,” while Jeter failed to make 93 such plays. James also concluded Everett did make 59 plays one would not expect a shortstop to make (expectation of less than 50 percent), while Jeter made only 19 such plays.

  James allowed that Jeter was a superior offensive player to Everett, and one who was responsible for creating 105 runs in 2005 against Everett’s 61. But the author of the annual Baseball Abstract books argued in The Fielding Bible, “It makes intuitive sense that Derek Jeter is the worst defensive shortstop of all time. . . . The worst defensive shortstop in baseball history would have to be someone like Jeter who is unusually good at other aspects of the game.”

  Mathematical equations and statistical analyses had long been suggesting Jeter was a below-average fielder despite his soft hands and his unmatched ability to come in on slow grounders and to run down pop flies over his head. In 2003, a Monmouth University mathematics professor named Michael Hoban wrote a book, Fielder’s Choice: Baseball’s Best Shortstops, that ranked Jeter as the worst in the game at his position because of the dramatic decline in his range. In 1997, Hoban wrote, Jeter’s range was 39 points above the league average; by 2002, his range “had fallen to a disastrous 75 points below the league average.”

  Dewan’s plus-minus rating, based on a computerized study of every chance and designed to identify the number of plays a fielder made above or below the average defender, left Jeter with a wretched minus 34 in 2005.

  Shane Jensen, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, led a group of researchers who studied every ball put in play from 2002 through 2005. Jensen concluded that Jeter was costing the Yankees 13.81 runs per season, and that Alex Rodriguez was saving the Rangers 10.40 runs per season before leaving for New York. Jensen would say his statistics suggest “the Yankees have one of the best defensive shortstops playing out of position in deference to one of the worst defensive shortstops.”

  Of course, the sabermetricians could not account for the fact that Jeter played hurt as often as any other position player in the game. Despite the flip play against Oakland, despite the relay throw to get Timo Perez at the plate in the Subway Series, despite those Jordan-esque jumps from deep in the hole, their exhaustive studies showed what they showed—Jeter helped the Yankees with his bat, but not with his glove.

  “Jeter gets more outrageous and patently false praise than any other player,” James would say.

  But the sabermetricians rarely, if ever, argued that Jeter was not a good to great player. Asked if he would want Jeter on his team, knowing what he knew about the shortstop’s abilities, good and bad, James did not let his printouts or his Red Sox paychecks get in the way of his response.

  “Oh, absolutely,” he would say. “Jeter is a tremendous player, for reasons that I shouldn’t have to explain.”

  Jeter did not feel the need to explain them, either, not when confronted with sabermetric data suggesting he was a liability on one side of the ball. The captain took great pride in his defense. He wrapped his entire baseball identity around the only position he ever wanted to play.

  Jeter also spent entire winters protecting his claim to that position. He worked out with his trainer, Rafael Oquendo, and logged more hours at the Yankees’ minor league facility in Tampa than any veteran player.

  So at his locker, Jeter offered no warm welcomes to reporters who wanted to ask about a possible position change in the future. On a day A-Rod was getting rested, goes a story Mattingly told, the coach once asked Jeter—half-jokingly—if he would consider playing third base.

  “Ain’t happening,” Jeter answered.

  He came in as a shortstop, and he wanted to go out as a shortstop, even if he knew that was not a realistic proposition. Cal Ripken Jr. had to move to third base full-time in 1997, at thirty-six, and Jeter was approaching his thirty-third birthday.

  One day during spring training, Jeter had baseball mortality on his mind when he came across Gene Michael, the Yankees’ longtime executive and scout.

  “How much longer do you think I can play shortstop?” Jeter asked Michael.

  “One year,” Michael joked.

  “One year? Nah, I’m serious. What do you think?”

  “How long do you want to keep doing this?”

  “I want to play another ten years.”

  “Ten years? Not at shortstop.”

  “I can DH later. . . . Or I’ll just move over to first base. I’ll have a good on-base percentage and I can hit with a little power there.”

  “Well, don’t you have anything else you like to do besides play baseball?”

  “No, I don’t. That’s what I love to do.”

  Jeter added that he wanted to ow
n a team someday but made it clear he planned on extending his playing career into his forties. The captain was not vacating his shortstop position one day before he absolutely had to, and he was not allowing his sabermetric critics to convince him that day should come sooner rather than later.

  “You can’t mathematically figure out how everybody plays defense, otherwise you’re just playing Nintendo,” Jeter would say. “You’re playing on a computer. You can’t mathematically figure that out. That’s impossible to do, so I don’t care.”

  Jeter said he did not pay attention to sabermetric rankings, and he was incredulous when asked why.

  “A computer?” he said. “I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t learned about it, and I really don’t care to learn about it. . . . I think it’s literally impossible to do that, because everybody doesn’t play in the same position and doesn’t have the same pitcher. The ball’s not hit to the same spot, and you don’t have the same runner. . . . One day he’s got a leg problem, the next day he doesn’t.

  “You just can’t do it. There are too many factors that go into it.”

  Only it was not just the computer. Even the most ardent Jeter fans were seeing a slower and less supple version of the shortstop’s former self in the field.

  One was his former teammate and coach Joe Girardi, National League Manager of the Year in Florida who was fired by Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria in a clash of stubborn personalities. Girardi had become an analyst for the YES Network, and he thought as much of Jeter’s tangible and intangible skills as any teammate the captain ever had.

  Girardi saw Jeter as a baseball player who could beat you eight days a week. But as he watched his old teammate cheat to his left to compensate for lost range up the middle, watched him get to fewer ground balls than he used to, Girardi told a couple of friends something he took no delight in saying.