The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Steinbrenner actually showed a little humanity following the brutal eleven-inning loss, planting himself in a folding chair opposite a devastated Mattingly and whispering to the same first baseman who believed his owner had used the tabloids to run him out of town.

  When reporters made their way toward Mattingly’s locker, Steinbrenner got up, grabbed his captain around the neck with both hands, and squeezed. Mattingly was on the verge of tears—his one and only postseason appearance went down as a classic he could not win.

  “It felt like a war out there,” Mattingly said.

  Showalter had been sobbing in his office, knowing he had likely managed his last game as a Yankee, when the man who wanted to fire him was consoling players in the clubhouse.

  “We lost this series,” Steinbrenner told the team, “but you guys played hard. We’re ready to go. We’re ready to start winning.”

  Some Yankee veterans who knew the Boss to be a terrible sport were shocked at what they were hearing. “For Mr. Steinbrenner to say that, as much as he hated to lose,” Pat Kelly said, “that meant a lot to us.”

  The flight home felt like it was fifteen hours long, with the dead-silent coaches and front-office officials projecting a sense of doom and gloom in the front of the plane. David Cone, who valiantly threw 147 pitches in the Game 5 defeat, was feeling an intense pain in his right arm at thirty thousand feet. He could not even lift that arm, and he was thinking he would not have been able to make another postseason start had the Yankees advanced.

  But in the back of the plane, some Yankees were playing cards, listening to music, and exchanging banter as if they had just finished losing some garden-variety series to the Mariners in the middle of May.

  “It kind of surprised me,” Sussman said. “I felt like it was inappropriate to be doing that.”

  Dramatic changes were on deck, highlighted by the stormy departure of Showalter, who refused to sacrifice the coaches Steinbrenner wanted him to dump. A Steinbrenner aide, Arthur Richman, gave the Boss a list of possible replacements that included Sparky Anderson, Tony La Russa, Davey Johnson, and Joe Torre.

  Even before the Yankees were eliminated by Seattle, Showalter’s coaches knew this list and this day were coming. Only minutes after the Yankees clinched the wild card at the end of their strike-shortened season in Toronto, Steinbrenner barreled into the coaches’ office and declared, “If you don’t go to the World Series, you’re all fuckin’ gone.”

  “Yeah, like we didn’t already know that,” a fading voice responded from the back of the room.

  So Steinbrenner had his list of four, and it would be quickly whittled to one. Anderson chose retirement, La Russa chose the Cardinals, and Johnson chose the Orioles.

  That left the Boss to choose Torre, an agreeable fifty-five-year-old Brooklynite who arrived in the Bronx with a career record of 894-1,003 and this unwanted distinction: he had played and managed in more games without reaching the World Series than any big leaguer dead or alive. A former catcher, first baseman, and third baseman, Torre had been a nine-time All-Star and, in 1971, the National League’s MVP with the Cardinals.

  But he had never reached the postseason as a player and had never won a single playoff game as a manager. It was such a tough sell to the public—Showalter had won 54 percent of his games; Torre, 47 percent—that Steinbrenner did not attend the November 2, 1995, news conference to introduce his man.

  “Bob [Watson] and I are going to decide the baseball side of the situation,” Torre said that day. “Until I see otherwise, I have no reason to think otherwise.”

  Steinbrenner thought otherwise the next morning, when he rose to a New York Daily News back page that read “CLUELESS JOE.” The Boss called the aide who had recommended Torre, Arthur Richman, and screamed louder than that headline.

  “What the hell have you gotten me into?” the Boss barked. Within days, Jack Curry of the New York Times reported, Steinbrenner showed up at Showalter’s Pensacola, Florida, door and offered his not-so-dearly-departed manager a chance to replace Torre and bring back his entire coaching staff.

  “I had two different contracts offered to me,” Showalter would say, “one before they hired Torre and one after they hired Torre. They were going to make [Torre] president of the club.”

  Only Showalter would not be Steinbrenner’s new-age Billy Martin. He had a handshake agreement with Jerry Colangelo to manage a concept known as the Arizona Diamondbacks, and he did not think an immediate return to the Bronx would be fair to Torre. So Showalter settled in the desert and announced to one reporter that his 1994 Yankees would have won the World Series if not for the strike.

  Showalter had no such excuse for 1995. The experience of watching the Game 5 loss to the Mariners on videotape? “It’s like watching Brian’s Song with the lights off,” Showalter said.

  But now the burdens of managing George Steinbrenner’s Yankees belonged to Torre, and with the start of the ’96 season closing hard, the Boss and one of his most trusted advisers, Clyde King, were in Torre’s office asking if Derek Jeter should be benched.

  Actually, Steinbrenner was doing the asking, and King was doing the recommending. This was after the veteran Tony Fernandez had fractured his right elbow diving for a spring training ball in a game at the Yankees’ shiny new facility in Tampa, Legends Field. A four-time All-Star at short, Fernandez was set to start at second base to make room for Jeter, and he was not happy about it. In fact, he had requested a trade.

  That request had become moot. On the very day Fernandez got hurt, Jeter made two errors, including one on a throw to Fernandez two pitches before the second baseman got hurt. Jeter was struggling; he called his own spring training performance “terrible.”

  Sight unseen, acting on the organization’s desire, Torre had reluctantly anointed Jeter his starter at short over the winter, at least until the rookie amended the statement to say the manager was merely giving him an opportunity to earn the starting job. “He said it better than I did,” Torre conceded.

  In ’95, Jeter had hit .234 in thirteen starts for Showalter after Fernandez went down with the rib cage injury, and before Fernandez’s recovery broke Jeter’s heart—Derek was on the verge of playing his first hometown series in Detroit when he was sent back to Columbus.

  Jeter was recalled in September, and after going nearly a month without facing live major league pitching, he became an emergency starter for a huge game in Milwaukee (Bernie Williams had missed his flight back from Puerto Rico after visiting with his wife and newborn child, angering Showalter and creating a hole in the lineup).

  In the second inning, Jeter ripped Scott Karl’s first pitch for an RBI double, impressing one veteran observer who was not around for the shortstop’s first call-up in May.

  “Buck took out Derek after Bernie showed up,” said David Cone, who was traded from Toronto to the Yanks in July, “and I was thinking, ‘Leave him in the game. That’s OK, Bernie, you take the day off.’ . . . When I saw Jeter run and watched how the ball jumped off his bat, I was like, ‘Wow, this kid’s got some talent. This kid’s got it.’ You could tell he wasn’t intimidated and he wanted to play.”

  Showalter invited Jeter to sit in on the Seattle playoff series, an invitation that came with a warning. The manager told Derek he had better behave himself and take advantage of this chance to watch and learn how postseason baseball is played, or he would be sent home. Jeter would later confess that Showalter’s words practically left him afraid to leave his hotel room.

  As it turned out, the manager and Cone appreciated the way the kid carried himself, and the respect he showed for the game. Jeter did not speak unless he was spoken to. He studied every move Mattingly made.

  Jeter would have preferred to trade roles with Mariano Rivera, who was on the active roster and who could have potentially advanced the Yankees to the American League Championship Series had Showalter or anyone else fully grasped his ability.

  But Jeter did learn something valuable in observing this franchi
se-altering defeat. “It let Derek see that beyond the money and the contracts there was still a passion for the pureness of winning,” Showalter said. “He saw that it was OK for Don Mattingly to cry. He saw that losing that series made us all sick to our stomachs, and that pain helped Derek’s development. It taught him to do everything he possibly could to avoid that feeling.”

  Jeter carried those lessons into spring training, 1996, with Showalter long gone. Only now Joe Torre’s Yankees had a struggling novice at short, a utility man in Mariano Duncan at second, and the Greensboro Hornets’ former Glove of Stone, Andy Fox, backing up both.

  Jeter himself had been asking at least one team official, “Am I going to make the team? . . . Am I going to make the team?” So Steinbrenner and King joined Torre, his coaches, Watson, Watson’s assistant GM, Brian Cashman, the GM turned scout, Gene “Stick” Michael, and other team officials in the manager’s office to talk about a potential deal. The Boss gave the floor to King, a former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher whose opinion had long carried a lot of weight—too much weight, many Yankee officials felt—with Steinbrenner.

  King had served the Boss as a scout, pitching coach, manager, and general manager and as GM had been ordered by Steinbrenner to fire Yogi Berra sixteen games deep into the 1985 season, a decision that inspired Berra’s vow to never again step foot in Yankee Stadium. Eleven years later, King had been watching Jeter in camp, and he did not like what he saw. “I think you guys have got a problem,” King told the group.

  He was not alone in this assessment. Tim Raines, a Steinbrenner acquisition, had seen a lot of shortstops in his sixteen years in the bigs, and he did not think Jeter was ready, either.

  Raines was not in the room; King was, and he spoke his mind. He did not think the Yankees should open the ’96 season with Jeter at short. The best available alternative on the board amounted to a trade with Seattle, of all teams. The Mariners were willing to deal Felix Fermin, a journeyman shortstop who had hit all of .195 in ’95, for either Rivera or reliever Bob Wickman.

  King was emboldened by the Boss’s implicit backing, putting the Yankee coaches and officials on the defensive. “It was an intense meeting,” Cashman said, and the intensity was written in the creases of the sun-damaged faces in the room.

  Steinbrenner’s outsize presence left everyone on edge, especially the new coaches on staff, and the waiting news media members lined up in the hallway did nothing to lighten the load. “It was almost like waiting for the puff of smoke when the papal decision has been made,” Cashman said.

  Some in the meeting reported that King pushed for Jeter to be demoted to Columbus. “I didn’t say that,” King would contend. “And anybody who says otherwise, that’s an outright lie.”

  King swore he thought Jeter was ready physically, but that he just wanted to see the kid sit a couple or three games to get his legs underneath him. “I thought we were rushing him just a bit,” King said, “but I never, ever said we should send him to Columbus.”

  Either way, King made it clear he wanted Jeter benched, and he had a captive audience in Steinbrenner. Torre had already discovered that no, Yankee baseball decisions were not the exclusive property of the manager and GM.

  Torre and his coaches, especially Willie Randolph, the former Yankee captain and second baseman, spoke up for Jeter. When it was Cashman’s turn to talk, the assistant GM was not afraid to tell it straight. Stick Michael had taught him to convey his feelings with conviction and to fight for what he thought was right.

  In a meeting the previous fall, after the Yankees were eliminated, officials seated at a conference table were asked to identify their personal choice for the manager’s job. “I’d go back and get Buck if we can,” Cashman said. “I know Buck Showalter. I don’t know Joe Torre, so I can’t say yes, go get Joe Torre, and I can’t say no, don’t get Joe Torre.”

  This time around, Cashman voted for Jeter and against trading one of the pitchers for Fermin. He knew Michael had established a plan over the winter revolving around this article of faith: no matter what happened in the spring, Jeter would be the Yankees’ shortstop for at least half a season.

  Michael had even told Steinbrenner to avoid watching Jeter until the All-Star break, to stay away from games until the kid had a chance to make his mistakes and overcome them. So when he was called late into the summit in Torre’s office, and then briefed on what had been discussed, Michael turned to King.

  “You forget that I played the position,” Stick told him, “and this kid is better than I ever was.”

  Michael then turned to Steinbrenner.

  “We promised we wouldn’t do this,” he said. “Why are we even here? We were going to give Jeter a full shot, and we weren’t going to utter anything until the middle of June.”

  “I know, I know,” Steinbrenner responded. “I was supposed to stay home in Tampa and not say anything until July.”

  Everyone in the meeting laughed; for once in his life, the Boss had actually eased the tension in a room. Randolph said that Jeter would be fine, that the rookie had good hands and a better work ethic. Others chimed in with supporting thoughts.

  “We went from ‘We couldn’t win with Jeter’ to ‘We couldn’t win without him,’” Michael said.

  So Clyde King was not going to win this meeting, and Derek Jeter was not going to lose his job. Watson called Seattle to say thanks, but no thanks.

  The 1996 Yankees would try to win the franchise’s first World Series title since 1978 by playing a kid at short.

  “We’ll be patient with him,” Steinbrenner pledged. “Every year you look for Derek Jeter to stumble and he just doesn’t. He dominated rookie ball so we moved him to [Class] A and he dominated there. We force-fed him to Double A and he dominated there. At Columbus, it was the same thing.

  “I’m telling you, he could be one of those special ones.”

  The Yankees were snowed out on April Fools’ Day in Cleveland, and so Derek Jeter, their first rookie to start an Opening Day at short since Tom Tresh in 1962, had an extra twenty-four hours of anxious waiting to negotiate.

  Jeter was nervous even before he saw the highlights of the Mets’ own rookie, a Cuban defector named Rey Ordonez, putting on a defensive clinic in a 7–6 victory over the Cardinals, including an absurd throw to the plate from his knees that left the great Ozzie Smith offering the ultimate compliment.

  “I’d have to say this guy is the second coming of me,” the forty-one-year-old Wizard said.

  So with the city wondering if the new kids on the block would build a Phil Rizzuto–Pee Wee Reese type of rivalry, Jeter had a tough New York, New York act to follow when he showed up at Jacobs Field. The Yankees were only hoping he would be another Bucky Dent and hit close to .250, make the plays he needed to make, and occasionally deliver a timely single up the middle.

  Jeter had greater expectations for himself than that.

  His mother, Dot, was in the crowd of 42,289 for this delayed opener; his father and sister had returned to Kalamazoo, Charles to work and Sharlee to play softball. Yankees owner George Steinbrenner was off in California filming an episode of Seinfeld, but he had left behind another laugh-a-minute production of the Bronx Zoo.

  Kenny Rogers, his $20 million free agent acquisition, was told he would not even be in the rotation to open the season a day before Melido Perez lost his velocity and his temper and landed Rogers right back in the starting five, for the time being, anyway.

  David Cone, the $19.5 million Opening Day ace, had nearly slipped through Steinbrenner’s hands and signed with the Orioles, which would have been a disastrous twist of fate after the Yanks declined to offer salary arbitration to Jack McDowell.

  Mattingly, the retired icon, had been replaced by Seattle’s Tino Martinez. Mike Stanley, the popular catcher who was good for 18 homers and 83 RBI in ’95, had been replaced by Joe Girardi, who was good for 8 homers and 55 RBI. And Buck Showalter, the manager who ended the playoff drought and whose fist-pumping introduction before the Seattle ser
ies made Yankee Stadium shake, had been replaced by Joe Torre, a three-time loser, a nice guy expected to finish last.

  The pressure on Torre and his new Yankees was immense when they faced the Indians, the defending American League champs. The turmoil and turnover colored this opener in ominous shades, a truth hardened by the presence of the rookie at short.

  Jeter was wearing number 2, and for the second straight year the number almost came by accident. In ’95, Jeter wanted his father’s number at Fisk, 13, but it was already taken by Jim Leyritz.

  The assignment of a single-digit jersey was no small matter in Yankeedom. Billy Martin was number 1, Babe Ruth number 3, Lou Gehrig number 4, Joe DiMaggio number 5, Mickey Mantle number 7, Yogi Berra and Bill Dickey number 8, and Roger Maris number 9. All those numbers had been retired.

  “When you project a single digit at Yankee Stadium,” Showalter said, “you’d better be right.”

  Showalter and Michael agreed Jeter was worth the shot. Nick Priore, the longtime equipment manager, was not so sure. When Priore assigned number 51 to the promising center fielder, Bernie Williams, Showalter asked him, “Don’t you think Bernie will be a better player than that?”

  “If it’s fuckin’ good enough for Willie McGee,” Priore shot back, “it will be fuckin’ good enough for Bernie Williams.”

  But Priore gave in on Jeter. So did George Steinbrenner, who told Showalter, “You’d better be right about this,” words that did not shake the manager’s faith.

  “I knew by the time Derek proved he wasn’t worthy,” Showalter said, “I’d be long gone anyway.”

  In ’95, Jeter batted .250 without a home run or stolen base in fifteen big league games, and he had homered only twice in 123 games in Columbus the same year. Maybe Priore did not think Jeter was single-digit material. With Showalter gone and Michael in a reduced role, maybe Priore thought he should act on his gut instinct.