The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  With a prank.

  This was two days after a plague of Lake Erie midges descended on Jacobs Field in the eighth inning of Game 2, leaving the Yankees’ bullpen phenom, Joba Chamberlain, looking like a helpless grade-school camper who had walked into a beehive.

  Jeter and Alex Rodriguez and Doug Mientkiewicz were among the Yankees who were swatting at the bugs with their hands, gloves, and caps, but Chamberlain was the lead victim in this Hitchcock horror. The Yankee trainer, Gene Monahan, went out to spray him with repellent, but Monahan might as well have covered Joba in honey.

  The bugs attached themselves to Chamberlain’s eyes, face, and neck. Joba’s vision and focus were impaired long enough for the setup man to set up his team’s demise, unleashing his second wild pitch in ten pitches, allowing the tying run to score, and ultimately allowing the Indians a chance to win in the eleventh.

  Torre should have tried to stop the game; even Roger Clemens, his forty-five-year-old Game 3 starter, would say as much. But the Yankees managed all of three hits in that 2–1, eleven-inning loss, and Rodriguez went 0 for 4 with three strikeouts, extending his postseason hitless streak to eighteen at-bats and ending up 4 for his last 50 in the playoffs without a single RBI.

  So it was not just the midges. It only seemed that way.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Jeter said. “It was like someone let them go.”

  The next day, a workout day in the Bronx before Game 3, the day before the Yankees faced the possibility of a third straight first-round exit, Mientkiewicz found humor in his team’s desperation, referencing the captain’s personal brand of cologne.

  “The joke around the guys is that we all had Derek Jeter’s ‘Driven’ on,” Mientkiewicz said. “That’s why all the bugs were attacking us.”

  Jeter woke up to the quotes the following day, game day, and decided Mientkiewicz would regret that remark. Rome was burning, Steinbrenner was blustering, and Jeter was busy proving that no situation was too alarming to make him forget he was a man playing a boy’s game.

  In the clubhouse before Game 3, Jeter made a point of completely ignoring Mientkiewicz, who returned to his locker after batting practice to find a letter resting on his chair, a letter supposedly from Macy’s.

  The letter read something like this:

  Dear Mr. Mientkiewicz. Thanks to your comments to the media, we’ve had to pull 12.2 million bottles of Derek Jeter’s Driven off the shelves. You’ve cost my company and Mr. Jeter millions of dollars. I hope this turns out well for you.

  Mientkiewicz nearly passed out. He thought that he was done as a Yankee, and that he would be sued for everything he had.

  “I was crushed, and my stomach was in knots,” Mientkiewicz said. “Derek wouldn’t even look at me. And then right before he takes the field for the game, he runs by me and says, ‘That letter was bullshit. It was a joke.’ I’m bent over, hands on my knees, going, ‘You’re an asshole. I know this playoff thing is easy for you and it’s another game for you, but it’s not for me.’ And Derek’s over there giggling his ass off.”

  Laughing before an elimination game. This was the essence of the postseason Jeter, never sweating the stakes.

  Two years earlier, with the Yankees five minutes away from playing the Angels in the Division Series, Aaron Small had found himself sitting next to a completely relaxed Jeter in the dugout. “Don’t you ever get nervous?” Small asked.

  “Ah, man,” Jeter said. “We’re just playing a game.”

  Postseason, regular season, it did not matter: everyone called baseball a game of failure, but Jeter refused to let the failure get in the way of his fun.

  The shortstop loved exchanging banter with teammates, opponents, fans, even himself. “The only thing he’s negative about is himself once in a while,” Mientkiewicz said. “He tells himself he sucks, in a funny way that shows he’s human. Sometimes he’d have conversations with his front foot. He’d scream at himself, ‘Get the foot down,’ and some fan in the front row would yell, ‘Jeter, you suck.’ And he’d be like, ‘I know I suck. I’m trying my best.’”

  When Jeter was not engaging in a good-natured back-and-forth with the fans from the on-deck circle, he would playfully shout at his coaches from the batter’s box. Mientkiewicz said Don Mattingly was a favorite target, especially after Mattingly reported in a pregame meeting that an opposing pitcher topped out at 92 miles per hour, only for that pitcher to throw a fastball by Jeter at 94 miles per hour.

  “Jeter would look into the dugout,” Mientkiewicz said, “and he’d mouth, ‘Hey, Don-ehhh. You stink.’”

  It was all said and done with a wink. Jeter never disrespected umpires, coaches, or any authority figures, never mind a former Yankee captain who carried himself the way Jeter did, before Jeter did.

  The shortstop just never saw the need to make the game more serious than it had to be. At least until his team ended up on the wrong side of the final score. Jeter saw no fun in losing. He saw no redeeming qualities in seasons that did not end in a parade.

  “After we got eliminated in the playoffs,” one teammate said, “I didn’t sense him being disappointed or devastated. I sensed him being pissed off. That was usually his mood.”

  In that context, Jeter worked for the right man. Nobody in the history of American sports got more pissed off over losing than George Steinbrenner, who had won six World Series titles but had spent an ungodly amount of money in a vain pursuit of his seventh.

  At seventy-seven, Steinbrenner was not the Boss of old anymore, not with his health in a state of steady decline. He did not attend games, did not fire employees, did not call up writers to rip this bum or that one. Steinbrenner was speaking through statements released by his publicist, Howard Rubenstein, who swore to everyone who asked that the Boss remained a vigorous leader with an ample supply of fire in the belly.

  Rubenstein’s pitch did not jibe with the sad and pathetic portrait of an incoherent man in his midafternoon pajamas painted by Portfolio writer Franz Lidz, who arrived at Steinbrenner’s home unannounced and accompanied by the Boss’s longtime friend Tom McEwen of the Tampa Tribune.

  Had Steinbrenner suffered a stroke? Was he locked inside the dark prison of dementia? The Yankees’ owning family decided the answer was not for public consumption, but the word in early October was that Steinbrenner was having good days and bad days, with the good sometimes outnumbering the bad.

  The Boss was feeling strong enough to attend Game 3 of the Division Series and make his first Yankee Stadium appearance since Opening Day, and so a columnist from the Record of New Jersey called his Manhattan hotel room to see if Steinbrenner was having a good enough day to talk. Turned out he was.

  In what would be his final interview, his last blast from the past, Steinbrenner laced into umpire Bruce Froemming, the Game 2 crew chief, for not stopping the game on account of midges. “It was terrible,” the Boss barked. “It messed up the whole team, Jeter, all of them.”

  Steinbrenner claimed that his health was fine, that he still maintained full control over the team, and that he planned on re-signing Rodriguez. But as far as re-signing Torre, that was an entirely different matter.

  “His job is on the line,” Steinbrenner said of the manager making $7.5 million. “I think we’re paying him a lot of money. He’s the highest-paid manager in baseball, so I don’t think we’d take him back if we don’t win this series.”

  Torre and the front office were blind-sided by the quotes, and team officials were scrambling to find out how the columnist’s phone call made its way to the Boss. Meanwhile, the Yankees went out and played inspired baseball for a manager under siege, surviving a terrible performance by Clemens, who ended the last start of his career in the third inning, limping away with a strained hamstring. The Yanks recovered from a 3–0 deficit, ripping off eight unanswered runs, three on a homer from Johnny Damon. A-Rod actually got a couple of hits, and Torre lived to manage another day.

  “The Boss is the Boss,” Jeter would
say. “He’s going to say what he wants to say. This is just a regular day in New York.”

  The Yankees had momentum at home, but that momentum would die in the right hand of Chien-Ming Wang, the 19-game winner going on three days’ rest in Game 4. Though Wang had been hammered in Game 1, he had won 38 games over two seasons for Torre, who no longer believed in his fully rested alternative, Mike Mussina.

  As it turned out, Wang would give up four runs on five hits—including a leadoff homer to Grady Sizemore—while recording only three outs. The sinkerballer sank the Yanks, who were down 6–2 in the sixth inning when their big chance to get back in the game arrived in the form of their captain.

  Jeter had hits in his first two at-bats, including an RBI single in the second, and this time he had runners on the corners, one out, and lefty reliever Rafael Perez on the mound. As Jeter worked the count to 2-1, the sellout crowd stood and stomped and chanted for the shortstop to do something dramatic.

  Jeter grounded into a double play instead. Cleveland won, 6–4, to advance to the next round.

  “We’ve done it so many times,” the captain would say. “I thought we were going to do it again.”

  Rodriguez would homer in the seventh for his first postseason RBI since Game 4 of the 2004 ALCS, and he finished the series with back-to-back two-hit games. Finally, A-Rod had done just barely enough to funnel the toughest post-series questions toward another locker.

  Derek Jeter’s.

  The shortstop batted .176 over the four games and had no walks, four strikeouts, and one RBI. A lifetime .314 postseason hitter entering the series, Jeter grounded into three double plays in the last two games.

  He made no excuses when it was over, just said he did not get it done. But Jeter did not have to defend himself as much as he had to defend the only manager he had known as an everyday shortstop.

  “Everyone knows I love Mr. T.,” the captain said. “He’s the best, in my opinion. It seems like every season you’re asking if this is his best year, and this by far is his best year. It goes without saying I support him.”

  With Steinbrenner again in the house, the fans had supported Torre, too, chanting his name when he went out to the mound. It did not sound like a crowd trying to save the manager; it sounded like a crowd saying goodbye.

  “Whatever the hell happens from here on out,” said a choked-up Torre, “I’ll look back on these twelve years with great, great pleasure. The twelve years just felt like they were ten minutes long, to be honest with you.”

  In the end, the Yankees would make Torre a reduced-rate offer designed for him to refuse, and refuse it he did. The manager could have taken a one-year deal for $5 million in salary and $3 million in postseason incentives, but he knew the Steinbrenners and team president Randy Levine did not truly want him back, and he felt Brian Cashman’s support—once unconditional—had waned.

  Torre walked away, A-Rod was thinking of doing the same, and Steinbrenner was finally relinquishing control of the team to his sons. The franchise was being rocked by seismic change, and Cashman was trying his damnedest to hold it together.

  But as the general manager considered candidates to replace Torre, considered the amount of money required to keep A-Rod, and considered how strange it would be answering to Hank and Hal Steinbrenner instead of the Boss, Cashman also pondered a move that would be among the more difficult of his front-office career.

  Cashman had to tell one veteran employee his job performance needed to improve. After seven years of postseason losing, after three years of failing to reach the second round, Cashman had to inform this lifer that the status quo was not good enough.

  So here was the question the GM kept asking when he was all alone with his thoughts:

  How do you tell the great Derek Jeter he needs to pick it up?

  Even by New York Yankee standards, it would be a turbulent off-season. Joe Torre left in a huff and ended up with the Los Angeles Dodgers, forcing Brian Cashman to choose between an iconic Yankee, Don Mattingly, and a decidedly noniconic Yankee, Joe Girardi, whose approach would stand in greater contrast to Torre’s.

  Cashman picked Girardi.

  On muscle memory, Alex Rodriguez played the fool when his agent, Scott Boras, announced in the middle of Game 4 of the Boston-Colorado World Series that his client was opting out of his contract. Officials all over baseball roasted Boras and Rodriguez for trying to upstage their signature event, and the Boss’s more volatile and impetuous son, Hank Steinbrenner, declared there was “no chance” he would bring back A-Rod after warning him against opting out (a move that would cost the Yanks the $21.3 million subsidy from Texas on Rodriguez’s existing ten-year deal).

  But after A-Rod begged and pleaded and apologized, and after the slugger put Boras on the bench, Hank would take him back for $275 million over ten years, plus another $30 million in the event Rodriguez broke baseball’s career home-run record.

  Hours after A-Rod spoke about his new deal and conceded the timing of the opt-out was “inappropriate,” former Senate majority leader George Mitchell concluded his investigation into steroid use in baseball by releasing a report that identified eighty-six players, including twenty-two current or former Yankees. The undisputed star and ace of the Mitchell Report was Roger Clemens, who was alleged to have used steroids and human growth hormone provided by Brian McNamee, the pitcher’s former trainer and the former Yankee strength and conditioning coach.

  Rodriguez was not on the list, a fact that stunned the juicer turned accusatory author Jose Canseco, but suddenly the Yankee brand was in the same company as Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire—linked forevermore to what would go down as the sport’s Steroid Era.

  Only before this would prove to be an issue that would haunt the Yankees over the long haul, Cashman had a more pressing on-field problem with a player who was not among George Mitchell’s traveling all-stars: Derek Jeter. His defense was hurting the Yankees, and Cashman decided to do something about it.

  Jeter had made his eighth All-Star team, had won his second straight Silver Slugger award, and had become the first major league shortstop ever to collect six 200-hit seasons. But the sabermetric police had hauled in Jeter again, charging him with a number of fielding felonies.

  John Dewan of The Fielding Bible slapped Jeter with another minus 34 in 2007 (he made 34 fewer plays than the average shortstop), and the captain’s score from 2005 through 2007 added up to a league-worst minus 90 (Houston’s Adam Everett led baseball over the same period at plus 92). Jeter’s 2007 Ultimate Zone Rating, according to FanGraphs.com, checked in at minus 17.9, meaning his defense cost the Yanks 17.9 runs the average shortstop would have saved.

  Not that Cashman discovered Jeter’s defensive deficiencies in any statistical chart; his eyes told him the shortstop hadn’t lost one step, but two. So he invited Jeter to dinner and met him in an Upper East Side restaurant. The captain had no idea he was scheduled to be the main course.

  In Jeter, Cashman knew he had the near-perfect player. Near-perfect in the way he carried himself, in the way he competed, in the way he won, in the way he respected his elders and embraced his role-model responsibilities to the kids.

  The kids. Jeter was always great with the kids, regardless of the circumstances. One day after he had retired from baseball, Chad Curtis, the old Jeter antagonist, showed up at Comerica Park in Detroit with twenty-five students from NorthPointe Christian High School, where the former Yankee outfielder worked.

  Wearing shorts and a backpack and looking like he was ready to climb Mount Everest, Curtis made his way to the field and over to Jeter while the shortstop was doing his pregame stretching. Five minutes later, Jeter was near the stands and shaking hands with every single one of Curtis’s twenty-five students.

  “If you had a daughter, you’d want her to marry Derek Jeter,” Cashman said. “He’s a great person.”

  Great, not perfect.

  Jeter could be overly sensitive to criticism, and Cashman had that figured out going into this dinner. S
ome who knew the shortstop suspected this weakness was rooted in the racism he faced in his youth, and to the fact that his African-American father and Irish-American mother shielded their son and daughter from the ignorance of others by wrapping them in a warm blanket of nurturing and love.

  Others felt Jeter was overly sensitive to criticism for the simple reason he was so damn good at everything he did, he wasn’t used to receiving it.

  And those who did criticize the shortstop could feel the sting of Jeter’s River Avenue freeze-out. “One of Derek’s standards,” said longtime New York Post baseball columnist Joel Sherman, referring to club personnel and not journalists, “is if you burn me once you’ll live outside my igloo forever, and if you freeze to death that’s your problem.”

  One teammate who was friendly with Jeter recalled mocking the shortstop—in a joking way—in front of a small group of Yankees. Jeter glared at the teammate, turned away, and ignored him for two weeks.

  “I didn’t understand it, because we’d kidded each other all the time,” the teammate said. “But then I realized: that was the first time I did it in front of teammates, and as the captain he didn’t appreciate having that done in front of others.”

  Nor did Jeter appreciate less than glowing critiques from any corner of his athletic past. Told one of his former youth summer basketball coaches recalled he had likely been dunked on more than anyone in the state of Michigan—if only because Jeter hustled so much to get back on opposing fast breaks—the shortstop said, “I don’t know about getting dunked on. Power lay-ups, maybe.”

  Jeter had a long memory, too. In 2001, teammate David Justice was talking with Newsday baseball columnist Ken Davidoff when the writer mentioned he was the sports editor of the University of Michigan school paper who had assigned a piece on Jeter to another writer when the shortstop enrolled there in the fall of ’92.