The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  As he walked toward the left-field corner, his teammates falling in behind him, Jeter extended his cap high toward the fans in the upper deck. The captain was reaching out over the barriers to touch the people.

  His final night inside Yankee Stadium was also his finest.

  Jason Riley checked his phone. It was Joe Girardi, calling out of the blue.

  This was before the 2008 season, and Riley was the director of performance of the Athletes Compound, a training facility at Tampa’s Saddlebrook Resort. He was the man who was going to make Derek Jeter reach all those ground balls Brian Cashman told the captain he needed to reach.

  Cashman kept Girardi away from that Upper East Side dinner with Jeter, kept him away from a potential confrontation with the most important Yankee in his clubhouse. But the new manager had to involve himself at some point, so he called the trainer Cashman and Jeter’s agent, Casey Close, agreed could do the job.

  “Joe asked about the program and how it would be geared toward Derek,” Riley said. “He only cared about Derek’s defense and his mechanics; he didn’t care about anything else. Joe wanted him to play defense better, and I told him I had the program to make that happen.”

  Cashman so wanted Jeter to go through the program, the Yankees told their shortstop they would pay for it. Riley did not come cheap, either.

  Jeter first showed up at the trainer’s facility the week before Christmas 2007 and asked, “What do you have for me? . . . How is this going to work?” Riley walked him through his program of speed and agility drills and worked out the shortstop from early January through spring training, conducting early-morning sessions before Jeter had to report to camp.

  The captain had brought along his longtime personal trainer and friend, Rafael Oquendo, for the first few weeks. “And then one week Rafy didn’t show up,” Riley said. “I said, ‘Where’s Rafy?’ and Derek said, ‘Rafy doesn’t need to come anymore.’”

  Jeter had replaced Oquendo with Riley. “Just making adjustments,” the shortstop said. As always, Jeter moved to downplay the significance of those adjustments.

  “I think any time you go through a season,” he said, “you’re going to have some issue that you have to address in the off-season. You have a leg problem one year, you do something to help out your leg. You have an arm problem, you do something to help out your arm.”

  Only Jeter did not have a leg problem or an arm problem as much as he had a position problem. He wanted to remain at shortstop for as long as he possibly could, and if his range continued to diminish as dramatically as it had, he would end up in left field before he knew it.

  Girardi had the requisite admiration for Jeter, his teammate on three championship teams. But Girardi did not have the same blind loyalty to Jeter that Torre had. If the new manager thought a different shortstop would better his chances of winning, earning some job security, and enjoying the kind of extended run Torre had enjoyed in the Bronx, a different shortstop would be in play.

  “What we discussed with Casey [Close] and Joe,” Riley said, “was the need to improve the length of Derek’s career. If he’s going to get injured and slow down, there won’t be many years ahead of him where he can play at the level he wants to play. Maybe he can be a DH, but not a shortstop.

  “We needed to improve Derek’s performance and length of career, and to accomplish that through injury prevention. We had to keep him on the field, and ultimately that could help him get a contract extension.”

  Jeter did play better defense in 2008, and did improve his sabermetric scores (his Plus/Minus went from minus 34 to minus 12, and his Ultimate Zone Rating went from minus 17.9 to minus 0.3). But his body needed time to adjust to the new routine, and a quad injury limited the improvement in his range.

  In the months leading up to the 2009 season, a healthier Jeter was throwing himself into the workouts as never before. Riley had worked with Ryan Howard, Ryan Zimmerman, and Joey Votto on the baseball side, and Maria Sharapova on the tennis side, but Jeter’s work ethic was off his charts.

  “I’ve been in the industry for fifteen years,” Riley said, “and I’ve never come across anyone like Derek.”

  At thirty-four, Jeter already knew he wanted to take his career into his forties. “Derek said it may not be eight to ten years at shortstop,” Riley said, “but that he wanted to play that long.”

  So Riley focused on Jeter’s agility and first-step quickness to the ball. The shortstop needed to become more flexible and explosive in his side-to-side movements, and toward that end he would show up before 7:00 a.m. to get in his extra work.

  Riley found what most Yankee coaches, players, fans, and beat writers already knew: Jeter had the most difficulty when moving toward second base. “That was something Girardi really stated,” Riley said. “Derek’s defensive mechanics to his left were something Girardi really wanted to improve.”

  Like many right-handed players, Jeter had much better mobility and flexibility in his right ankle and hip than he did in his left ankle and hip. Riley had Jeter perform a wide array of drills to loosen up his left side.

  The trainer wanted to reeducate Jeter’s brain to improve its communication with his nerves and muscles. Riley had his student do a series of resistance drills, running at full speed with a belt around his waist and covering five to seven yards with twenty to thirty steps, recoaching that first step over and over so Jeter could create more force in the direction he wanted to go.

  Riley had the shortstop doing shuffle drills from cone to cone, dropping him into a low defensive stance—as if he were guarding a point guard on the perimeter—and using resistance to build a more powerful lateral move.

  “I think he hated doing those drills at first,” Riley said, “because it’s almost like reeducating a little kid. An accomplished athlete is like, ‘I don’t want to do this because it makes me look stupid.’ And then suddenly, Derek was killing those drills.

  “One day we’re doing crossover movements for base-stealing mechanics, and at the end of the workout he was close to getting it right, but not quite. I told him to shut it down for the day, but he said, ‘No, I can tell you’re not happy about it.’ We ended up doing another ten or fifteen sprints before I had to stop him for fear he’d injure himself.”

  No, Jeter was not giving up his position, his identity, without a fight. But just in case a new trainer with a new fitness program produced the old 2007 results in 2009, Jeter had put his fallback plan in place.

  “Derek mentioned something to me about DH at the end of his career,” Riley said. “If he realizes he’s a detriment to the team playing at a certain level, he would take that role as DH. He’ll do it to help the team out.”

  Derek Jeter’s buddy R. D. Long posted a blog dated September 19, 2008, under the headline “A-Rod Represents the Collapse of an Empire.”

  Of course, back in 2004, Long was the man who told Jeter he would not win a title with Rodriguez as a teammate, and that he should try to find a way to get rid of him. In the 2008 blog Long stated that Rodriguez’s presence had sent the great Yankee franchise downhill.

  “If anyone thinks this amuses the Captain, Derek Jeter,” Long wrote, “you couldn’t be more wrong. Derek has the unenviable task of watching Alex chase the HR record by piling up meaningless HRs that tend to help only his stats, not the win column for New York. . . . These sentiments have been felt from the day Jeter presented him with that so unlucky #13 [at Rodriguez’s introductory news conference]. This has to represent one of the worst days of Jeter’s career.

  “It’s hard to imagine Derek Jeter finishing his career with a bunch of meaningless baseball games while he approaches the 4,000-hit mark.”

  It would grow harder to imagine Derek Jeter finishing his career with a megastar teammate who had confessed to being a chemically enhanced fraud.

  In February of 2009, Alex Rodriguez was outed as a steroid user by Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts, outed as a name on the list of 104 players who turned up positive in survey tes
ting. Rodriguez had no choice but to address the report. After a dreadful attempt to come clean in an interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, A-Rod agreed to take a mulligan in a February 17 press conference outside Tampa’s George M. Steinbrenner Field, formerly Legends Field.

  Rodriguez’s personal life had taken some turbulent turns in 2008. His marriage ended in divorce after he reportedly had a love affair with none other than Madonna (“It was more of an infatuation,” one Rodriguez friend maintained). Now A-Rod’s professional life was unraveling at the same breakneck speed.

  Fittingly, this circus was held under a tent, and it was attended by Joe Girardi and Brian Cashman, who sat with the man of dishonor, and by thirty of A-Rod’s teammates and coaches, who were gathered off to the right. Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and Jorge Posada sat in the front row of that group with the grim-faced captain. Dressed in jeans and a hooded shirt, Jeter slumped in his chair and rested his clasped hands in his lap.

  Rodriguez started by reading from a crumpled piece of paper, and he choked up and needed to pause for thirty-seven seconds when he reached the part of the script where he was to thank his teammates for their show of support.

  The year before, Andy Pettitte had confessed to using human growth hormone to expedite his recovery from injury. But even if Pettitte was not telling the whole truth, people wanted to believe him. He was a neighborly, low-maintenance Yankee and a four-time champ.

  Nobody wanted to believe A-Rod, and on that front the third baseman did not disappoint. Rodriguez’s story was impossible to believe.

  He said a cousin he would not identify injected him with a substance called “boli” that they obtained in the Dominican Republic. As Rodriguez was reported to have tested positive for the steroid Primobolan and testosterone, it was believed “boli” represented a street name for Primobolan.

  But A-Rod claimed he was not sure what he took, or if it had any positive impact on his play, in general, and on his home-run total, in particular. The man with 553 homers and three MVP awards said he took this mystery potion over three years as a Texas Ranger without knowing if his mystery cousin knew how to administer it.

  “It was really amateur hour,” Rodriguez said.

  A-Rod claimed the “boli” was always injected, never taken orally, and yet when Rodriguez admitted he realized he was doing something wrong, he used an oral visual (“I knew we weren’t taking Tic Tacs”) to make his point.

  The news conference was broken up after thirty-two minutes, before Rodriguez could further embarrass himself. The slugger worth $305 million, including his tainted $30 million homer bonus, left the tent a shattered man.

  “If this is Humpty Dumpty,” Cashman said, “we’ve got to put him back together again and get him back up on the wall.”

  The general manager acknowledged that the news conference did not end anything, that Rodriguez would have to deal with the fallout for the balance of his career. A-Rod was not alone.

  Jeter would have to deal with it, too, and he wanted to wait a day before addressing Rodriguez’s not-so-venial sins. For a while, anyway, A-Rod had to go this one alone. The captain was smart enough to wait the twenty-four hours.

  When he spoke with reporters on February 18, the captain also was smart enough to stay clear of the tent. Jeter was a baseball player, and a clean one. He would conduct his briefing in the dugout.

  Jeter did not come to George M. Steinbrenner Field on this day to throw a figurative arm around A-Rod. Separation—or a greater degree of separation—was on the captain’s agenda.

  “One thing that’s irritating and really upsets me a lot,” Jeter told the gathered reporters, “is when you hear people say it was the Steroid Era and that everybody is doing it, and that’s not true. Everybody wasn’t doing it.”

  Jeter had his theme for the day, and he wasn’t veering off message. The third baseman was a cheater (“I think he cheated himself,” Jeter said), and the shortstop was not.

  “I never took performance enhancers,” Jeter said, “and I never took steroids. . . . I understand a lot of big names are coming out. But that’s not everybody. . . . That’s the thing that’s most upsetting to me.”

  The captain said he was disappointed in Rodriguez, and in the parade of former teammates who showed up in the Mitchell Report. “It really has given the game a bad name,” he said.

  Only Jeter was not as disappointed in the steroid cheats as he was in the notion that all players were presumed guilty by association, a fact that raised a tough question for the captain to answer:

  Why didn’t you use your considerable clout and unmatched public platform to pressure the Players Association into accepting a tougher drug-testing plan?

  Jeter had long been the living symbol of the clean ballplayer, the one superstar who would have been voted by the fans and his peers as the least likely major leaguer to end up on the wrong side of a steroid bust. Whenever asked, the shortstop explained that his father was a drug and alcohol abuse counselor who taught his children to stay clear of illegal substances.

  “Me and my sister were always educated on that,” Jeter said, “pretty much all the time growing up.”

  Asked if he was ever tempted, even a little bit, to dabble in performance-enhancing drugs to keep up with the Joneses (and the McGwires and the Bondses), Jeter said, “No.”

  “Why?” came the follow-up.

  “It’s a little different when your dad is a drug and alcohol abuse counselor, you know what I’m saying?” he answered. “I’m not saying I’m any better than anybody else. I’ve just been educated on that, and there are side effects, too. Eventually, I think you’re making a deal with the devil.”

  So Jeter refused to make a Faustian deal for the sake of another ten to fifteen homers a year. He believed in working on his body and game the old-fashioned way, and besides, he was never obsessed with individual numbers. Jeter realized early in his career he would never be a big home-run hitter, so why risk destroying his good name and legacy to inflate a stat that would not define him anyway?

  But Jeter also remained silent when the union resisted drug testing at every performance-enhancing turn, in effect doing more to protect its dirty members than its clean ones.

  “You never know what somebody’s doing,” Jeter would argue. “You can’t sit here and speculate and guess, because I think it’s unfair to them. So it wasn’t like I sat down and said, ‘I think this guy’s doing this or that guy’s doing that.’ I’ve always given people the benefit of the doubt.”

  Only the Mitchell Report and the BALCO case made it painfully clear the Yankee clubhouse was a place where the benefit of the doubt went to die. Asked if it would have been hard for a Yankee to spend season after season in that clubhouse without suspecting steroid use among some teammates, Mike Mussina said, “I would have to say yes.”

  Given Jeter’s intelligence and awareness, he had to have strong suspicions teammates were not just doing their pushups and taking their Flintstone vitamins to remain at an elite competitive level. Jeter also had to know the entire sport was rotting at its core, its integrity compromised in murky underground labs.

  Baseball had long been reduced to a battle of pharmacology, with one simple rule of engagement: it’s your back-room chemist against mine. Confronted by this reality, Jeter declined to take a public stand even though his voice would have resonated like no other in the game.

  This was a four-time champion, an iconic Yankee, a Madison Avenue heavyweight, and an athlete with enough mass appeal to host Saturday Night Live. Yes, before the feds went after BALCO, before Congress started swinging its heavy lumber, and before the players flunked their survey testing, Jeter would have had a better chance of moving an immovable union than Bud Selig had.

  But the shortstop was not any more eager to go after the cheats than he was to tell Yankee fans to stop booing A-Rod. “Who am I to assume somebody’s doing something?” Jeter would maintain. “How would you know?

  “I mean, how am I supposed to know? Do yo
u think if somebody’s doing something they’re going to come tell me? I was never at a meeting, like a big group or a Players Association meeting. . . . I don’t ever make assumptions on what somebody’s doing or not doing.”

  Jeter no longer had to worry about assumption when it came to Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod admitted he had crossed over to the dark side, and it looked like the third baseman and shortstop were a million miles apart.

  Jeter had to be thinking his buddy R. D. Long had been right after all: he would never win a World Series title with Rodriguez as a teammate.

  Only Long had a little surprise for the captain in February of 2009, one Jeter welcomed. Long said he believed A-Rod’s steroids admission would deflate the slugger’s aura and allow Jeter’s to have a greater positive impact on the club.

  “So for the first time since A-Rod arrived,” Long said, “I changed the way I was looking at it.

  “I told Derek, ‘You’ve got another ring coming, buddy.’”

  As the 2009 season unfolded, the Yankees were defined by the new Stadium, the new recruits, the new Joe Girardi, the new Alex Rodriguez, and the old Derek Jeter.

  The Stadium was a $1.5 billion monstrosity, the Steinbrenners’ answer to the Mall of America. A cavernous clubhouse was only the gateway to a labyrinth of fitness rooms, rehab rooms, meal rooms, and other restricted hideaways to allow the players to flee the advancing New York news media.

  Tickets were wildly overpriced, running up to $2,500 a pop, giving the new place too much of a wine-and-cheese personality and not enough of the beer-and-pretzel intensity that made the old Stadium a forbidding house to the visiting side. Pop-ups kept riding some mystery jet stream over the outfield wall in right and right center, turning the new Stadium into a homer-happy Little League field and mocking the fact that its dimensions were identical to those of its predecessor.