by Ian O'Connor
One more time the Yankees were borrowing from their neighbor’s turbulent past, adding another prominent face from a period best defined by the titles the Mets did not win, rather than the one they did. Off his banishment for cocaine use, Strawberry had started working on Jeter’s impressionable mind after the shortstop was called up in September of ’95.
“He wasn’t playing and I wasn’t playing,” Strawberry said, “and I’d be talking to him in the dugout or in the clubhouse, just telling him, ‘Don’t worry about it, your day is coming, bro. This town is going to eat you up. They’re going to love you, trust me. You don’t have star potential; you’ve got megastar potential.’
“Derek just looked at me wide-eyed like, ‘Really?’ You could tell he wasn’t sure, but he was a great-looking kid who had it just like I had it. I told him, ‘I had all this and screwed it up by making bad choices. Don’t do what I did.’”
As Strawberry assumed the role of watchdog for Jeter (even if the son of a drug and alcohol abuse counselor did not need one), David Cone enjoyed a more playful relationship with the rookie. Cone and other veterans kept waiting to find something to ride Jeter about—his clothes, his shoes, his something, his anything—but the rookie never gave them an opening, not a single one.
Cone would tease Jeter about all those squealing voices in the Yankee Stadium crowd. “Be nice to those teenyboppers,” he told Jeter, “because one of them will be your wife someday.”
Derek laughed. Cone would watch Jeter peer into the stands and survey all the silly girls and women jockeying for his attention. “It’s not bad to be you, huh?” the pitcher told the shortstop.
Cone would try his damnedest to pry information out of Derek about whom he was dating. “Just throw me some crumbs,” Cone pleaded, but the rookie never would.
Jeter could spend hours listening to Strawberry, Gooden, and Cone tell him stories about the wild and crazy Mets of the eighties, a team that often treated a season as a six-month toga party.
Jeter wanted to know every last detail of every last anecdote. So Cone emptied his own considerable bag of salacious tales, starting with the time he was a single man in New Orleans trying to pick up a blond in a bar.
“I was cuddling up to her,” Cone said, “and then I realized she had a big Adam’s apple out to here. It took me an hour to figure it out . . . and I started to question my own sexuality. At the end of the night, the joke was on me.
“Jeter loved that story.”
Jeter loved this team, this clubhouse, this camaraderie, this boyhood dream come true. Before every game Jeter would walk up to Torre’s sixty-five-year-old, Popeye-ish bench coach, Don Zimmer, and either rub his belly or the peach fuzz on his head. Or both.
The kid did not want his good luck to run out. He was the twenty-two-year-old starting shortstop of a New York Yankees team that had a good chance to return to the playoffs and, who knows, possibly win it all for the first time since 1978.
Jeter was not getting distracted by the media blitz, either. He was available and professional when approached by reporters at his locker, but he never threw open any windows on his soul. He spit out so many clichés, some wondered if he had learned them on a bus ride with the Crash Davis character in Bull Durham.
“Mattingly taught him that,” Cone said. “Donnie told him, ‘If you want to stay out of trouble with the media and you don’t want them at your locker every day, just bore them to death.’ Donnie was kind of joking, but Derek might’ve taken it literally.”
Jeter found himself involved in one dustup he could not avoid. On September 12, with the Yankees’ twelve-game divisional lead suddenly down to a frightening two and a half games, they found themselves facing a 95-loss Detroit team before all of 9,009 Tiger Stadium fans, half of them sounding like they came in from Kalamazoo.
Charlie Hayes and Andy Fox hit back-to-back homers off Jose Lima in the ninth inning to make it 8–3 in the Yankees’ favor before Jeter came to bat. Lima proceeded to plant a fastball in the rookie’s upper back, right below his neck, and Jeter responded by glaring at the pitcher.
Torre and a couple of players shouted at Lima; everyone inside the visiting dugout assumed the pitch was laced with bad intentions. Jeter took his base, and the next batter, Williams, got even in the purest possible way: he hit a grand slam that left him with eight RBI on the night.
Only the long ball that made it 12–3 was not enough. Under baseball’s unwritten code of frontier justice, the Yanks would have been expected to avenge and protect Jeter, who had been hit by a pitch for the ninth time, and to send a message to future foes that they could not be intimidated.
Jeff Nelson was willing to settle the score in the bottom of the ninth. Twice he brushed back Detroit batters before Torre’s pitching coach, Mel Stottlemyre, trotted out to the mound to remind the reliever he could not intentionally hit a Tiger, not when a suspension could have cost the reeling Yanks dearly in the playoff race.
Nelson backed off. The Yankees secured the victory without further incident, at least until they walked through the clubhouse doors and realized that Mariano Duncan, another of Jeter’s many mentors, was in no mood to celebrate. Duncan confronted catcher Joe Girardi and profanely demanded an explanation for why no Detroit batter was hit. Girardi’s biggest backer, Zimmer, stepped between them and had his own heated exchange with Duncan.
Asked if he thought about retaliating on his own—i.e., charging the mound and fighting Lima—Jeter said, “What can I do? I’m not a pitcher.” If it sounded like the shortstop was upset that a Detroit hitter was not plunked, one teammate confirmed that suspicion.
“Derek felt kind of betrayed because we didn’t protect him,” Jim Leyritz said.
These were tense times for the Yankees, even if their most maddeningly self-absorbed member, Sierra, had been dealt to Detroit for Fielder, the powerful righty bat the team had lacked. Steinbrenner had already quit on the team, “because that’s what George Steinbrenner always did when things got tough,” one of his top officials said.
Steinbrenner assumed Peter Angelos, an owner he loathed, would steal the division. He assumed his Yankees would go down among the sport’s all-time chokers, just like the 1978 Boston team managed by the Boss’s current bench coach, Zimmer, and he was setting up Watson, baseball’s first African-American general manager, to take the fall.
Watson had made a deal for a fifth starter, David Weathers, who was awful. He had traded Gerald Williams and Bob Wickman to Milwaukee for reliever Graeme Lloyd and outfielder Pat Listach, both of whom turned up in the Bronx with preexisting injuries.
Steinbrenner would call Watson four or five times a day, and there would be two or three shouting matches in those four or five calls. The GM put in a new door to Torre’s Yankee Stadium office from the back hallway, he said, “to keep George out of the clubhouse. I kept him out of the clubhouse 95 percent of the time, because he brings an uneasiness with his presence.”
That uneasiness swept over the Yankees like a thick and ominous fog. Doc Gooden was coming undone on the mound, the Yanks could not hit left-handed pitching, and their Cooperstown-bound third baseman, Wade Boggs, was furious that the team had traded for Hayes.
Andy Pettitte, the Yanks’ best pitcher, had pain in his elbow, and Ruben Rivera, their most gifted outfield prospect, had been handed an important late-season role despite an alarming immaturity that embarrassed his cousin, Mariano.
Paul O’Neill started a brawl in Seattle after his old friend Lou Piniella had yet another one of his pitchers brush him back, and even then the Yankees were not inspired to play with the purpose and passion that had built their twelve-game lead. They were not even sufficiently roused by the remarkable return of Cone on Labor Day, when he made his first start in four months and threw seven no-hit innings at Oakland; the Yanks lost three of their next five.
But the Detroit series that saw Jeter get hit and his clubhouse nearly get flipped onto its ear by a heated argument over retaliation, or lack thereof, finally r
ighted the Yanks. Torre used his greatest strength—his ability to meet chaos with calm—to turn around his team. He called a team meeting in that series, and in a tone one would use to speak to a small book club in a library, the manager told his players the following:
“We’re not going to lose this division. We’re going to the playoffs, and we’re going to do well there. Just relax, go out and play, and don’t try to put everything on your shoulders.”
On cue, Jeter went 6 for 13 with 3 RBI and 7 runs scored in the three-game sweep, lifting his batting average to .313 and making for another significant homecoming.
It was in a Detroit hotel room where Jeter met his father and, over a box of pizza, told Charles he wanted to be a role model, wanted to give back, wanted to start a foundation like his idol Dave Winfield had.
Charles was surprised his son was ready to make the commitment. “It was his idea, he wanted to do it, and he was serious about it,” Charles said. “I was very, very proud of that moment.”
This was the first seed of what would grow into the Turn 2 Foundation, a program with a mission statement of keeping young students away from alcohol and drugs. Jeter was honoring his father’s work, but he was not taking his eye off the ball.
He would rip through September with a 17-game hitting streak, the longest for a Yankee rookie since Joe DiMaggio’s 18-gamer in 1936. The Yankees would win eight of nine, starting with that sweep of the Tigers and finishing with a stabilizing series victory over Baltimore.
Suddenly Steinbrenner was not berating Watson with the same intensity or frequency. Pettitte had been the rock of the rotation despite the elbow pain. Ruben Rivera had a huge hit against Baltimore, after a huge catch in Detroit, flashing some of the otherworldly talent that encouraged comparisons to a young Mickey Mantle and a hope—however thin—that he would someday grow up.
So on September 25, with the surgically repaired Cone on the Bronx mound for the first game of a double-header, the Yankees clinched their first division title in fifteen years by hammering Milwaukee, 19–2. Jeter contributed a two-run double to the ten-run second inning and joined his emotional teammates in a group hug near second base after Williams gathered the final out.
Torre cried in the dugout as cops surrounded the field and confetti and streamers fell from the sky. The Yankees waited until they won the second game of the double-header before they cut loose the champagne in their clubhouse.
“This could be the start of my greatest experience in baseball,” Torre would say. The manager understood who was most responsible for the career-changing possibilities before him.
“Jeter and Mariano Rivera were our biggest X factors who came through,” he said.
At that hour the kid shortstop had hit .375 over his previous sixty-four games, doing as much as any Yankee to hold off the Orioles. Jeter said he felt badly he reached the playoffs in his first full season after Mattingly made his first and last trip on the brink of retirement (“It seems kind of unfair, really,” Jeter said), but he was not shy about his October objectives.
“We want to win it all,” he said. “That’s what we want to do, and that’s what we play for.”
Someone asked Jeter if he was prepared to deal with playoff pressure. “We’ll find out Tuesday,” he said, referencing the start of the Division Series with the Texas Rangers.
The previous Saturday, in a wild and crucial 12–11 victory over the Red Sox, Jeter had ended the game with his third hit and third RBI—a two-out single to center that scored Boggs in the tenth. “When the games mean more,” the rookie said, “it’s a lot easier to play.”
Veteran Yankee observers realized none of this would have been possible with any of the Opening Day shortstops who had preceded Jeter in the past five years—Tony Fernandez, Mike Gallego, Spike Owen, Randy Velarde, and Alvaro Espinoza. Jeter would finish the year with a batting average of .314, with 10 homers and 78 RBI, showing more power than he showed as a minor leaguer and posting numbers that the Hall of Fame Yankee shortstop, Phil Rizzuto, never approached.
“Could he be the best Yankee shortstop ever? Absolutely,” Rizzuto said of Jeter. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a young kid play with so much confidence. Mickey Mantle had the ability as a rookie, but not the poise. Jeter has both.”
Jeter also had an unquenchable desire to compete every day. He played in 157 of the Yankees’ 162 games and complained about the 5 in which he did not appear.
“When I rested him a few months ago,” Torre said, “Derek told me, ‘How am I going to catch Cal Ripken?’”
Catch Cal Ripken? Derek Jeter did not know it at the time, but during his first October as the New York Yankees’ starting shortstop, he would not only have a chance to catch Ripken.
He would have a chance to pass him.
5. Champion
Derek Jeter was playing defense in his Yankee Stadium clubhouse, where inquiring minds wanted to know if the rookie had just choked. The Yankees had lost Game 1 of the Division Series to the Texas Rangers, and the shortstop was among the more conspicuous reasons why.
He had popped up with the bases loaded and had left six men on base in the 6–2 defeat. David Cone had been outpitched by John Burkett, but nobody questioned the accomplished veteran’s stomach for the big-game fight.
Jeter was a different story. No matter how composed he appeared during the darkest hours of the divisional race, when the Yankees threatened to give away a twelve-game lead, this was October.
Nothing in August and September can simulate true October angst.
“All I can do is forget about it,” Jeter said at his locker. “You can’t sit here and dwell on it. . . . You’ve got to let it go.”
Only Jeter wasn’t one to let criticism go easily. “People have always doubted me,” he said on the eve of the playoffs. “First, it was I couldn’t stay at shortstop. Then I was from a small town. In the minor leagues, people said I couldn’t hit, I couldn’t field, then I couldn’t hit at the major league level. There are probably still some who doubt me.”
Jeter swore he approached his first playoff game just as he had approached the 157 regular-season games that preceded it, and reporters had a hard time believing it. Asked if he was concerned his shortstop would struggle to keep his cool in the heat of the postseason, Joe Torre had his answer before he left Yankee Stadium for the night.
On his way to the players’ parking lot, done facing tough questions from the press, Jeter poked his head into Torre’s office.
“Make sure you get your sleep tonight,” he told his manager. “Tomorrow is the most important game of your life.”
Torre shook his head and laughed. The kid was going to be all right.
Before Game 2, Torre acknowledged he preferred to lean on his veterans when his seasons were on the brink. “To me, Jeter is different,” he would say. “I’ve been around a lot of young kids and a lot of rookies. He’s done a lot of growing up this year. He doesn’t see the postseason as something different.”
So Jeter honored his manager’s faith and delivered three hits in Game 2, including the decisive one in the twelfth inning. The Rangers held a 4–2 lead in the seventh and had the Yankees in a death grip—Torre’s team could not possibly go to the Ballpark in Arlington, Texas, down 0-2, not after losing five of six regular-season games there while getting outscored by a 44–15 count.
But a Jeter single helped cut the deficit in half, and ultimately a Cecil Fielder RBI single sent the game into extra innings. After the Rangers failed to score with the bases loaded in the top of the twelfth, Jeter led off with another hit, moved to second on Tim Raines’s walk, and then raced for third when Charlie Hayes put down a sacrifice bunt.
Dean Palmer, the Texas third baseman, fielded the ball and fired to first, but his rushed throw bounced in the dirt and skipped past the second baseman who was covering, Mark McLemore.
Jeter headed for home, scored the run that kept the Yankees in the series, and assured reporters once again he did not approach Game 2 any diff
erently than he had Game 1, or Game 98 of the regular season in July.
“If I don’t get a hit, you guys say I’m pressing,” Jeter said. “And if I do get a hit, you guys say I’m not pressing. I felt the same way tonight as I did yesterday, but yesterday I didn’t get any hits and today I did.”
Jeter was back in his element, but that did not mean the Yankees were at ease as they traveled to a place a couple of headline writers described as Arlington Cemetery. The Ballpark threatened to be for the Yankees what Chicago Stadium and the United Center were for the Knicks—a place where New York seasons go to die.
Over a ten-year period, the Yankees were 13-42 in Arlington Stadium and the Ballpark. Billy Martin had one of his many bar fights in Arlington. Bobby Meacham once committed an error in Arlington that so enraged George Steinbrenner, the Boss sent him to Class AA because Class AAA did not represent enough of a demotion.
Years later, Torre decided to inject some confidence into his Texas-bound players by elevating the youngest among them. The manager had so much faith in Jeter entering Game 3, he moved him from the number-nine spot in the order to the leadoff position, where the shortstop had batted thirty-nine times during the regular season. A rookie whose tenth-inning error in a loss to the White Sox only seven weeks earlier had inspired the New York Post headline “shortslop” was now charged to lead the Yanks into their not-so-little house of horrors.
Once again, Jeter responded to the manager he had come to see as a second father. He did make a rookie mistake in the field, failing to cover second base on a fifth-inning steal that led to the Rangers’ go-ahead run. But with Texas holding a 2–1 lead in the ninth, Jeter led off with a single to left against Darren Oliver.
Following a single from Raines and a deep fly to right from Bernie Williams, Jeter was home with the tying run. Mariano Duncan drove in what would be the winning run, and the Yankees would play Game 4 with a shot to advance to the American League Championship Series.