The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Soon enough the ticket prices were reduced, the home-run rates were tempered, and the public’s focus was returned to the Yankees’ improved product on the field. Brian Cashman had spent $423.5 million of the Steinbrenners’ money on three free agents—CC Sabathia, A. J. Burnett, and Mark Teixeira—and traded for free-spirited right fielder Nick Swisher, moves the GM made to ensure the Yanks never again missed the postseason under his watch.

  As a legitimate ace, Sabathia was the key to the off-season plan. He had concerns about the Yankees that extended beyond the fact that they played 3,000 miles away from his California home.

  “CC’s main concern was our clubhouse, and how people got along,” Cashman said. “We had a reputation for not being together. We had a reputation of fighting each other, and that was a big concern there.

  “I told him the truth. ‘Yeah, we are broken. One reason we’re committing [$161 million] to you is you’re a team builder. We need somebody to bring us all together.’”

  Sabathia knew all about the Jeter–A-Rod divide, so Cashman had to throw more than money at the extra-large lefty with the gregarious personality and easy smile. He took a top-secret flight to Sabathia’s home and told him he could be the grand marshal of the Thanksgiving Day parade, told him about the eclectic nature of the tristate area, told him he could own the town in a New York minute.

  “I had to be John Calipari,” Cashman said. He had to get this blue-chip recruit to sign the Yankees’ letter of intent.

  “CC’s like Santa Claus,” the GM said. “He lights up an entire room.”

  Cashman thought his broken team needed that positive life force. And as much as Sabathia’s generosity of spirit, and Swisher’s nonstop goofiness, and Burnett’s pie-in-the-face celebrations altered the dynamics of the clubhouse, the dramatic changes made by the incumbent manager and third baseman were no less important.

  Girardi was pressed by Cashman and the PR man, Jason Zillo, to lighten up. The GM handed Girardi a magazine profile on Giants coach Tom Coughlin, who had softened the jagged edges of his personality on the way to his epic Super Bowl upset over Bill Belichick’s unbeaten Patriots. “You need to read this,” said Cashman, a former roommate of Coughlin’s son.

  Girardi read it, thought about it, then thought about it some more. On the eve of training camp, he invited Zillo into his office, closed the door, and showed the PR man a yellow legal pad full of notes to himself, notes on how he wanted to change. They spoke for ninety minutes before the meeting broke up and Zillo called Cashman.

  “There’s been a breakthrough,” the PR man reported.

  Girardi canceled a spring training practice for a billiards tournament, just as Coughlin had canceled a training camp practice for a bowling outing. The manager eased the disconnect with his players and was not as quick to deceive the press. His bosses believed his user-friendly style was showing up in the box score.

  They felt the same way about Alex Rodriguez’s decision to reinvent himself one more time. A-Rod was not just humiliated by his own steroid confessions; he was a physical wreck going into his March surgery to repair a torn labrum in his right hip. He feared his career might be over, or at least permanently impaired.

  “I’d hit rock bottom,” A-Rod would say.

  Around the same time Details magazine published a piece on Rodriguez that included a photo showing A-Rod in a muscle shirt, kissing his own reflection in the mirror. So after Rodriguez rehabbed from surgery, and before he rejoined the team in early May, A-Rod would be dragged to a Tampa diner, Mom’s Place, by two people close to him—Zillo and longtime friend Gui Socarras.

  Rodriguez had surrounded himself with an ever-growing circle of advisers and crisis counselors, including Madonna’s manager, Guy Oseary, John McCain’s strategist, Ben Porritt, PR man Richard Rubenstein, and, of course, Scott Boras. But none of these suits had the nerve to piece together an intervention quite like this: Zillo and Socarras shouted down A-Rod over ninety minutes, ordering him to shed his self-serving skin for keeps.

  “I’m glad I had two friends that were very honest with me,” Rodriguez said of the ambush.

  Two days after this breakfast meeting, A-Rod hit the first postsurgical pitch he saw for a three-run homer in Baltimore. Of greater consequence, he maintained a relatively humble demeanor over the course of the season and, in his words, “divorced myself from any personal achievements.”

  Rodriguez would say he had spent more time with his teammates off the field—at dinners and backyard barbecues—than he had in his first five Yankee years combined. Although A-Rod did not say so publicly, it was obvious Derek Jeter had embraced him as never before.

  For one, Jeter had given up trying to understand why A-Rod could not be more like him. For two, Jeter realized an emasculated A-Rod was someone worth giving another shot.

  The captain saw A-Rod was making a legitimate attempt to curb his high-maintenance ways. More often than in the past, Jeter was seen engaging Rodriguez in small talk in the clubhouse, in the dugout, around the batting cage. They acted less like business partners with competing agendas and more like teammates with a common goal.

  “Alex really believes that for us to win a championship, he needs to have a good working relationship with Derek, and vice versa,” one team official said. “I think they have it now. I think they’ve found enough common ground where Derek can laugh off some of the stuff about Alex in the newspapers.

  “I think it took Derek a long time to get that point, where it would frustrate him so much for so long. Derek used to be like, ‘Why can’t you just get this shit right? It’s easy. Don’t say anything. Say what I say, which is nothing.’ Now Derek’s able to slough it off rather than re-create Alex into somebody who’s always going to say and do the right things.”

  Yes, it was a monumental struggle for Jeter to understand Rodriguez, the attention-starved boy abandoned by his dad. At thirty-five, Jeter was still very much his parents’ son. He still sought their approval on a daily basis. He remained, in effect, afraid of his mother and father, or at least afraid of hurting them, which was one of many reasons he did not turn to steroids.

  Just as they’d never imposed on their son’s youth baseball and basketball coaches, Charles and Dot Jeter never so much as asked for permission to enter the Yankee clubhouse after a big victory. When the Yankees opened the 2004 season in Japan, New York Post beat writer George King stumbled upon Jeter’s parents in a Tokyo convenience store searching for medicine for Charles’s killer of a head cold.

  “Why don’t you just have the Yankees get you something?” King asked.

  “We’ve never asked the Yankees for anything,” Dot said, “and we never will.”

  Derek maintained the same approach. Clubhouse guys who were kept busy washing players’ cars or filling their gas tanks or fetching their forgotten keys never received such requests from Jeter. “Derek’s responsible enough to know when the needle’s near empty, he’s going to pull into a gas station,” said Lou Cucuzza Jr., a visiting clubhouse manager who could not keep up with the requests from the David Ortizes and Zack Greinkes for autographed Jeter jerseys, requests the captain always granted.

  “Alex is a great guy; he invites us to his house sometimes for family barbecues. . . . But he’s different. He wants you to be more hands-on with him. He needs people to care for him a lot more than Derek.”

  Jeter was a giver, not a taker, and for much of his career A-Rod lived on the other end of the spectrum, lusting after perks, requesting his own cabana boy in the clubhouse.

  Only this was the new Rodriguez, playing for the new Girardi, attending family parties with the new recruits, and winning games in the new Stadium. The Yankees were 13-15 when A-Rod sent that first pitch over the Camden Yards wall; they were 91-50 and up nine games in the division before everything new about the franchise cycled back to everything that was old.

  Not an old Jeter, but the Jeter of old.

  The NFL season was under way, and a pencil-necked shortstop was p
roving he was still the toughest athlete in New York. Jeter was in the midst of a stunning renaissance, looking as young and supple in his first year in the new Stadium as he had looked in the old place in ’96.

  Jeter was still Jeter, still the impeccably dressed Yankee who quietly sat in the back of the team plane wearing his headphones, watching his movies, largely ignoring the card games played by others. Still the responsible captain who was never seen in a hotel lobby looking disheveled, unshaven, or even remotely drunk or buzzed. Still the earnest ambassador who served as Captain America for Team USA in the World Baseball Classic.

  But Jeter was playing the game with a new body, a new plan of attack. Jason Riley’s training program had worked. Jeter had turned his glaring weakness—grounders to his left—into an actual strength, and he was enjoying one of the finest seasons of his career.

  He was also giving Yankee Stadium crowds a fresh reason to celebrate him. Jeter was running down Lou Gehrig’s franchise hits record of 2,721, the chase inspiring a love fest bigger than the feat itself. In fact, many sports fans were shocked to learn the Yankees of Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle never had a player who collected 3,000 career hits.

  But this was the world’s most famous ball team, Gehrig was bigger in death than he was in life, and Jeter was a dignified figure at a time when they came in short supply. The captain was perceived as so relentlessly team-oriented, so compatible with a franchise that did not put player names on the backs of their jerseys, Yankee fans were eager to seize upon any chance to salute him as an individual.

  So they did just that on September 9, when Jeter ended an 0-for-12 stretch by dropping down a first-inning bunt for a base hit against Tampa Bay, by hitting a ground rule double in the fifth, and by ripping a hard grounder past a diving Chris Richards at first to tie Gehrig’s record.

  The home crowd exploded, and with the Rays holding a 2–0 lead, Jeter did not know whether to acknowledge the applause. He did not want to disrespect the visitors and defending American League champs, but the Rays took him off the hook, walking up to the dugout rail to clap along with the fans.

  “[Jeter] carries himself in a manner that’s worthy of passing Gehrig,” Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon said.

  Twice Jeter doffed his helmet to the adoring masses. Truth was, he felt a greater connection with Gehrig than with the other Yankee titans of the past. Quiet and dignified, the Iron Horse was the anti-Ruth, just as he would have been the anti–A-Rod.

  “One of the classiest people to ever play the game,” Jeter called Gehrig.

  Two nights later, a rainy September Friday, the Yankees staged a pregame ceremony to mark the eighth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that changed the world. The crowd of 46,771 honored the fallen, waited through an eighty-seven-minute rain delay, and then listened as Jeter walked to the plate with the elegant sound of Bob Sheppard booming over the public address system in his voice-of-God way.

  At ninety-nine, Sheppard was no longer strong enough to work the Yankee games he had been working since 1951, but Jeter was not about to take a cut in the Bronx without that voice introducing him to the crowd. He asked Sheppard to record his voice so it could be played for the balance of the captain’s career, and the P.A. announcer called that request one of the greatest compliments he had ever received.

  So Sheppard shepherded him to the plate one more time. Now batting for the Yankees, Numbah 2, Derek Jeter, Numbah 2. The fans were standing and the camera lights were flashing until the mighty Casey struck out.

  The captain went down on a curve ball from Baltimore’s Chris Tillman before he ended the newspaper countdowns in the third inning, with puddles forming on the warning track and fans huddled under their wet ponchos. Jeter cut loose his classic inside-out swing on Tillman’s 2-0 fastball and laced it past first base, past a diving Luke Scott, and into a deep corner of Yankee lore. The hit was nearly a carbon copy of the one that had tied Gehrig’s record two nights earlier, nearly a carbon copy of a thousand other singles (or so it seemed) in Jeter’s career.

  The shortstop rounded first base, extended his arms wide, and clapped his hands together. It was 9:23 p.m., and Derek Sanderson Jeter stood as the most prolific Yankee hitter of them all.

  Jeter approached the first-base coach, Mick Kelleher, and rested an arm on top of his head. The Yanks came pouring out of the dugout, led by Alex Rodriguez, and one by one they hugged their captain as the crowd roared its approval. Jeter raised his helmet high, waved it to all corners of the Stadium, and pointed and pumped his left fist toward his family’s suite above the on-deck circle, where his parents, sister, and his serious girlfriend, actress Minka Kelly, had lifted their arms to the sky.

  Wearing a military cap with the interlocking “NY,” Kelly grabbed the pendant around her neck and looked up adoringly at the woman some close to Jeter expected to be her mother-in-law. Nick Swisher, up next, dug into the batter’s box, but the fans kept chanting Jeter’s name, forcing him to wave that helmet one more time.

  Once again, Charles and Dot had ordered their son to enjoy this moment. “It’s still hard to believe,” Derek would say. “Being a Yankee fan, this is something I never imagined. Your dream is always to play for the team, and once you get there, you just want to stay and try to be consistent. This wasn’t a part of it. This whole experience has been overwhelming.”

  Jeter was surprised by the sight of his teammates coming over the dugout railing, and he was touched by the number of fans who had waited out the rain. “They’re just as much a part of this as I am,” the captain said.

  George Steinbrenner would call his shortstop during a second rain delay, and the failing Boss would release a statement through his publicist that began like this: “For those who say today’s game can’t produce legendary players, I have two words: Derek Jeter.”

  In a joint news conference called as the game was about to resume with a horde of second-stringers, A-Rod, Andy Pettitte, and Jorge Posada delivered an appreciation of Jeter past and present. Pettitte and Posada talked about the frail and terrified teenager they saw in Greensboro, North Carolina, and how that wisp of a kid grew into a man.

  Rodriguez recalled his first meeting with the shortstop at that Michigan-Miami baseball game in ’92 and thinking Jeter “just had this special feeling, that special look in his eye.”

  All these years later, A-Rod said, that special feeling and look could not be explained by any box score. “Fifty years from now,” he said, “people are going to look at the back of [Jeter’s] baseball card and see some crazy number of hits, maybe in the mid-3,000s or maybe even 4,000. But it’s not going to capture half the story.

  “For me, playing next to him I’ve learned so much. He’s motivated me and inspired me. . . . Derek is the ultimate grinder. He’s the ultimate winner. . . . I don’t think he’s ever played any better than he’s playing right now. . . . He’s like a machine. He’s like a robot.”

  Only Jeter was human enough to understand that his historic baseball achievement, at least on this night in this town, cried out for proper perspective. He spoke of his team’s role as goodwill ambassadors and as entertainers providing a necessary sanctuary for a devastated city after the 9/11 attacks.

  On the eighth anniversary, he spoke of giving New Yorkers another temporary reprieve. “This is a day everyone will continue to remember forever in our country,” Jeter said, “and I’m sure people’s thoughts were elsewhere. But at least for a little while, they had a chance to cheer today.”

  Jeter gave them that gift, a gift that promised to keep on giving. At thirty-five, the captain was ahead of the pace set by Pete Rose, who retired at forty-five as the all-time career hits leader with 4,256. Jeter scoffed at the notion that he could break that record (“Come on, man, you’re talking about another 1,500 hits”) or that he ever sat around thinking about it.

  But one Jeter friend said the shortstop had brought up Rose in conversation and had asked about where the Hit King stood at Jeter’s age. The captain did acknowle
dge he wanted to play into his forties, and as he was piecing together his fourth 200-hit season in his last five years, and as he was on track to play in at least 148 games for the thirteenth time in fourteen seasons, it appeared he could go on forever dumping singles into right field.

  It also appeared he could make that jump throw from the hole and reach hard grounders up the middle for who knew how long. Jason Riley’s regimen was largely responsible for Jeter’s defensive rebirth, and Kelleher’s film work did not hurt, either.

  The former big league infielder spent his off-season studying every 2008 grounder that went Jeter’s way and found the captain was playing too shallow and setting his feet too late. Jeter realized he could reach more balls by playing deeper, and by moving into a ready position earlier in a pitcher’s delivery.

  But this adjustment was not only about positioning. “Derek needed somebody in his corner,” Kelleher said. “He needed somebody to say, ‘Hey, you can be better.’”

  As a result, Jeter’s sabermetric scores finally lined up with his standing among Yankee fans. For the first time, Jeter scored a positive number in John Dewan’s Plus/Minus system, checking in at a plus 5 two years after his ghastly minus 34. The shortstop also nailed a positive Ultimate Zone Rating; according to FanGraphs.com, he scored a plus 6.4 two years after a minus 17.9.

  “Jeter is Benjamin Button,” said Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane, a sabermetric scholar whose charts had been most unkind to the shortstop in previous years. But late in the 2009 season, Beane looked down at those same charts and saw Jeter ranked as the third-best defensive shortstop in all of baseball.

  “My God, it’s amazing,” Beane said. “My whole front-office career I’ve been waiting for Jeter to slow down, and this year he’s as good as ever. His grace and elegance in everything he does, and his ability to be the same exact guy today that he was the day he stepped into the big leagues, is just incredible.

  “It’s hard to have a negative thought about the guy even as you are competing against him. . . . If you’re in Fenway and [David] Ortiz hits a home run, as a GM you’re going, ‘Fuckin’ Ortiz,’ even though Ortiz isn’t a guy you dislike. You would never say that word in front of Jeter’s name. You can’t deface it. You have the term ‘Damn Yankees,’ but there’s never a ‘Damn Jeter.’”