Core Four: The Heart and Soul of the Yankees Dynasty

by Phil Pepe

  Showing that the perfect son, the perfect friend, the perfect teammate, the perfect opponent, the perfect Yankee, the perfect representative of his trade is not perfect, Jeter’s slip showed in 2011. (Isn’t everyone, even a perfect one, entitled to one slip-up?)

  Voted by the fans—his fans—onto the All-Star team for the 12th time and as the American League’s starting shortstop for the eighth time, Jeter, citing “emotional and physical exhaustion” from his pursuit of 3,000 hits and having recently come off the disabled list because of a calf injury, chose to bypass baseball’s annual midsummer showcase event to be held in Phoenix just a few days after Jeter bagged his 3,000th hit. It was a decision uncharacteristic of Jeter, and because it was uncharacteristic it brought about an avalanche of reaction, both in defense of Jeter’s decision and opposed to it. It’s likely no other player would have received such a mixed reaction.

  According to an anonymous official, Major League Baseball had planned to celebrate Jeter’s achievement of reaching the 3,000-hit plateau and was unhappy with his decision not to attend the event.

  “Derek Jeter has done everything right during his whole career,” the official said. “He was wrong on this one.”

  According to the official, baseball would have been fine with Jeter going to Phoenix, appearing on the field during player introductions to take a bow, tipping his cap, and then leaving the stadium and heading back to New York or wherever he was planning to spend the few days off.

  “This could have been a celebration of his 3,000th hit,” said the baseball official. “He didn’t have to play.”

  Yankees president Randy Levine, as expected, defended Jeter’s decision and took issue with the unnamed baseball official.

  “This was Derek Jeter’s decision,” Levine said. “He was hurt for three weeks. He felt he needed the time off. We respect that. There weren’t any Major League [Baseball] officials criticizing him. If someone was criticizing him they should have the guts to not do it anonymously.”

  Bill Giles, Philadelphia Phillies chairman and honorary president of the National League, had the guts not to speak anonymously on the subject.

  “I think it’s too bad that Jeter in particular is not here because of what he accomplished over the weekend,” Giles said. “I think it’s a bit of a problem and baseball should study it.”

  Said Yankees catcher Russell Martin: “He’s just coming off the DL. He played a bunch of games in a row. I’m sure the fans wanted to see him here. He just got his 3,000th hit, and the way he did it was incredible. But he’s got to take care of himself and make sure that he’s healthy. You have to respect that.”

  “I don’t think it’s my place to speak for others,” said Cardinals outfielder Lance Berkman, who would be Jeter’s teammate with the Yankees for part of the 2010 season, “but to me personally, if you get selected to be here, you have an obligation. You gotta be here. If you can go, you gotta go.”

  Paul Konerko, Chicago White Sox first baseman: “I think it’s one thing where everyone should give him a slide, give him a break. This guy has been doing it for a long time in All-Star games, World Baseball Classic, representing the game in an awesome way, period. Maybe one time everyone should just give him a pass instead of him doing everything for everybody all the time.”

  Carlos Beltran: “I do believe, as a ballplayer, if you have no injuries, you should be here. The fans are the ones that vote for you and want to see you here.”

  Colorado Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki: “Everybody would want a piece of him here [if Jeter did attend] and sometimes you need a little mental break. I’m not going to say anything bad about him because I’m probably his biggest fan.”

  It was left to Commissioner Bud Selig to have the final word on the subject. “Let’s put the Derek Jeter question to bed,” he said. “There isn’t a player that I’m more proud of in the last 15 years than Derek Jeter. He has played the game like it should be played. He’s even been a better human being off the field as great as he is on the field. So any concerns that I keep hearing about Derek Jeter, I know why Derek Jeter isn’t here. I respect that. And I must tell you I think I would have made the same decision that Derek Jeter did.

  “Derek Jeter has brought to this sport great pride. He’s become a role model. Earned it. Still earning it. And so any suggestion that I, or anybody else, is unhappy with him about not being here is false.”

  It’s because he has always done the right thing that this incident became such a tempest. Players have skipped the All-Star Game in the past with hardly a whimper of criticism. Jeter does it one time and it’s a major story. Why? Because he’s Derek Jeter, the perfect son, the perfect friend, the perfect teammate, the perfect opponent, the perfect Yankee, the perfect representative of his trade.

  He is loyal (among his closest friends are Jorge Posada, who goes back with Jeter to 1992 and the Greensboro Hornets, and Gerald Williams, who was there when Jeter was called up to the Yankees during the 1995 season), and respectful (when the great longtime Yankees public address announcer, Bob Sheppard—the “voice of God,” according to Reggie Jackson—retired, Jeter requested that the Yankees make a tape of Sheppard’s introduction of Jeter coming to bat (“Now batting, number two, Derek Jeetah, number two…”) and that it be played as long as Jeter remains a Yankee. He is mindful of the Yankees’ legacy and of his own role in that legacy (at the old Yankee Stadium as he headed to the dugout he never failed to touch the sign in the tunnel between the clubhouse and the dugout with Joe DiMaggio’s famous quote: “I want to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee”), and affable (he can often be seen chatting with fans as he waits in the on-deck circle, greeting the opponent’s catcher playfully with a gentle tap of his bat as he steps in the batter’s box, or chatting with opposing base runners who arrive at second base).

  “I had a lot of animosity toward Derek Jeter early on in my career,” said Chipper Jones of the Atlanta Braves, a future Hall of Famer. “He beat me in two World Series [1996 and 1999] and I didn’t know him. I sat across the field from him so many times, saw all the accolades he was getting and was a little green with envy. Then I got a chance to play with him [at the 2006 World Baseball Classic]. In the clubhouse, in the dugout, off the field at dinner, this is the best dude I have ever met. This guy deserves everything.”

  With the media, Jeter often is evasive, noncommittal, and difficult to pin down but rarely is he aloof, assuring that he can never be accused of being uncooperative. As team captain, he understands his responsibility to be the representative of the team and to make himself available to the media, but only on a limited basis and mostly on his terms. He cooperates, but reveals little of himself, and never anything of a personal nature. He will confine his comments to matters that occur on the playing field. As sportscaster Joe Buck once said, “Derek Jeter has mastered the art of talking to the press and saying absolutely nothing.”

  He has limited formal education, but impeccable instincts and what is commonly known as street smarts. However you want to categorize those smarts, he’s smart enough to know when to speak and what to say and when not to speak and what not to say. When, in his role as team captain, leader, and on-field representative of the Yankees, he has been called upon for public orations as he was on the final day of the old Yankee Stadium, he has demonstrated a gift for public speaking.

  What They Say About Derek Jeter

  Joe Torre: “Derek Jeter is the best player I’ve ever managed. I don’t think there’s any question. It’s more than just his ability. It’s his dedication to the city of New York, the New York Yankees. It’s just admirable. It never stops being special to him.

  “I don’t think I can compare him to anybody when you consider that he may not have the most ability. I grew up in a time when

  Willie Mays was special in this town and, of course, I played with Hank Aaron for eight years. But when you see what Derek has done in this town star
ting as a 21-year-old and still has been able to live up to himself and live up to the tradition of the Yankees, I may be biased, but he’s as good as any player I’ve ever been around.”

  Robin Ventura: “I think he’s the greatest Yankee of all-time. That’s because of the position he plays and the era he plays in. Every play he has ever made is on tape. The players before him, nobody ever saw them fail. All we saw of them was them doing good. Every one of Derek’s games has been on television. He has been criticized more than any other player in Yankee history, too; at least among the ones that were good.

  “As a manager I don’t like for him to come up with guys on base. I don’t want him to come up when it’s tied, when they need somebody on base, and I don’t want him coming up late in the game to win it. He is still that kind of player.”

  Jesse Orosco: “You can throw him inside as much as you want, and he can still fist the ball off. You can throw the ball low and away, and he can hit with power the other way. We have pitchers’ meetings and he’s one of the guys where you just stay on the subject for a while. What do you do?”

  Paul O’Neill: “He’s the best player I’ve ever played with, and I think a lot of people in this clubhouse are going to say that before he’s done. What sets him apart is the number of ways he can affect a game.”

  Reggie Jackson: “In big games, the action slows down for him where it speeds up for others. I’ve told him, ‘I’ll trade my past for your future.’”

  Billy Beane: “Everything he does has such a grace about it. Maybe because of Jeter the Yankees know how to win. It’s not an act. It’s similar to what DiMaggio was in his era.”

  [Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, recalled seeing Jeter, in the prime of his career, run out a routine ground ball to shortstop in the late innings of a routine game in which the A’s were beating the Yankees. Jeter made it from home to first in 4.1 seconds. It made such an impression on Beane he had his staff show videos of the play to all the players in the A’s system.]

  “Here you have one of the best players in the game who already had made his money and had his four championships by then and he’s down three runs in the seventh inning running like that. It was a way of showing our guys, ‘You think you’re running hard until you see a champion and a Hall of Famer run.’ It wasn’t that our guys were dogging it, but this is different. If Derek Jeter can run all out all the time, everybody else better personally ask themselves why they can’t.”

  Curt Schilling: “Derek Jeter has always been above the fray. As someone who’s wallowed in it, ‘foot-in-mouthed it’ hundreds of times, said dumb things and backed up dumber ones, Jeter is refreshing. He’s shown up, played, and turned in a first-ballot Hall of Fame career in the hardest environment in sports to do any/all of the above. I know competing against that guy for the decade or so we matched up was what made the major leagues the major leagues for someone like me.”

  Chipper Jones: “When I look at him, I see a guy who’s got his act together, a guy who is a winner, who does everything the right way and deserves everything he gets.”

  Don Zimmer: “He might go down, when it’s all over, as the all-time Yankee.”

  Mike Trout (named to the American League All-Star team as a rookie in 2012, on being a teammate of Jeter, if only for a couple of days): “It’s an honor. It’s one of those things you dream about as a kid. It’s pretty amazing. I’m going to try to soak in every minute and talk to him as much as I can.”

  Jorge Posada: “Nothing surprises me when it comes to Derek Jeter.”

  Andy Pettitte: “We were so young and started this run off at a young age [when the Core Four first played together as teammates with the Columbus Clippers]. Again, you knew that he was special.”

  Alex Rodriguez: “Fifty years from now, 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. He’s like a machine. He’s like a robot.”

  26 The Kid, the Flip, the Dive

  Over a two-decade career, Derek Jeter has been the Captain, Mr. Clutch, and Mr. November, architect and caretaker of a career filled with an endless list of SportsCenter highlights. Three such highlights stand out. Known simply as the Kid, the Flip, and the Dive, they represent the magic, the instincts, and the opportunism that define Derek Jeter.

  The Kid

  Derek Jeter was just a rookie in 1996, a very special rookie to be sure, one who batted .314, hit 10 home runs, and drove in 78 runs during the regular season and was unanimously voted winner of the American League Rookie of the Year Award, but a rookie nonetheless.

  He would bat .412 in the Division Series as the Yankees erased the Texas Rangers in four games, and now, in Yankee Stadium on the night of October 9, he was coming to bat in the bottom of the eighth inning in Game 1 of the best-of-seven American League Championship Series against the Baltimore Orioles with the Yankees trailing 4–3.

  On the mound for the Orioles was Armando Benitez, a 6'4", 200-plus-pound 23-year-old right-handed fireballer from the Dominican Republic who had been known, on occasion, to reach triple digits with his fastball. He had entered the game in the bottom of the seventh with the bases loaded and walked in a run before blowing away Mariano Duncan with fastballs to end the seventh inning.

  In the bottom of the eighth, Baltimore manager Davey Johnson, opting for defense to protect his one-run lead, replaced right fielder Bobby Bonilla with Tony Tarasco. Benitez started the inning by striking out Jim Leyritz. That brought up Jeter, who already had two hits, both of them infield singles.

  On the first pitch of the at-bat, Jeter, with what would become his signature “inside-out” swing, lifted a drive to right field, headed for Yankee Stadium’s well-known “short porch” with Tarasco drifting back to the wall in pursuit. Here is the call of Bob Costas on NBC television:

  “In right field, Tarasco going back to the track, to the wall…and what happens here? [What happens is Tarasco makes a futile plea to the umpire in right field.] He contends that a fan reaches up and touches it! But Richie Garcia says no. It’s a home run! Here comes Davey Johnson, out to argue as Jeter comes across to tie the game.”

  Television replays and newspaper photographs show clearly that while Tarasco is reaching up to catch the ball, a young fan, who would later be identified as Jeffrey Maier, a 12-year-old Yankees fan from New Jersey who had the good sense and premonition to bring his fielder’s glove to the game, is reaching over the right-field wall and, with his glove in the playing area, managed to catch Jeter’s drive.

  “It was like a magic trick,” said Tarasco. “I was getting ready to catch it and suddenly a glove appeared and the ball disappeared. When the kid reached over the wall, the kid’s glove was very close to mine. We almost touched gloves. I was camped underneath the ball. If the ball was going out, I would’ve at least tried to jump. It was magic. Merlin must be in the house. Abracadabra.”

  After looking at replays, umpire Rich Garcia admitted he blew the call. “I don’t think the ball would have gone over the fence,” he said. “But I don’t think he [Tarasco] would have caught it, either.”

  Said young Jeffrey Maier: “I didn’t mean to do anything bad. I’m just a 12-year-old kid trying to catch a ball.”

  As would become his wont, Jeter had nothing to say on the subject, but his home run made a statement that would follow him throughout his long and spectacular career. He had come through in the clutch and tied the game. The Yankees would win it in the 11th inning on a home run by Bernie Williams and then go on to beat the Orioles, four games to one, and the Atlanta Braves, four games to two, to win their first World Series in 18 years and the first of five World Series championships in the era of the Core Four.


  The Flip

  It was the play that would come to define Derek Jeter, the play that would prompt Bernie Williams to say of his teammate, “When you see that, you appreciate how great a player he is,” and Ron Washington to comment, “That’s why Derek Jeter is Derek Jeter.”

  It came on Saturday, October 13, 2001, in Oakland, and it was so unexpected, so startling, so inspired, that it not only defied belief, it became a part of the Jeter legacy and the Jeter mystique. It was a play that we came to believe, because of his uncanny instincts and his knack for being in the right place at the right time, only Derek Jeter could have made.

  The Yankees had dominated the American League East, winning 95 games and losing 65 and finishing 13½ games ahead of the Boston Red Sox. But the Oakland Athletics, although finishing 14 games behind the Seattle Mariners in the American League East, had won 102 games and would be a formidable foe for the Yankees in the Division Series.

  Things looked bleak for the Yankees when Mark Mulder beat Roger Clemens in Game 1 and Tim Hudson out-pitched Andy Pettitte in Game 2, both games in Yankee Stadium. No team had ever lost the first two games at home and come back to win a five-game playoff series.

  Game 3 was another pitcher’s duel of 17-game winners, Mike Mussina for the Yankees, Barry Zito for the Athletics. As they went to the bottom of the seventh inning, both pitchers had allowed just two hits, but because one of the Yankees’ two hits was a fifth-inning home run by Jorge Posada, Mussina and the Yankees had the upper hand and a 1–0 lead.