The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  These words would move the Yankees the way an Atlanta sportswriter named Tom McCollister had moved a forty-six-year-old Jack Nicklaus to win the Masters ten years earlier by writing that the Golden Bear was washed up, “gone, done.”

  Torre knew the status quo would not prove the columnists wrong, so he benched Wade Boggs, Tino Martinez, and Paul O’Neill for Game 3 in favor of Charlie Hayes, Cecil Fielder, and Darryl Strawberry. Martinez, who had no RBI in forty-four postseason at-bats, was furious nonetheless, slamming Torre’s office door after receiving the news.

  The manager did not blink. Torre also put a sore Jeter in the two-hole in the lineup, behind Raines, a move that paid off in the first inning when the shortstop dropped down a bunt that moved Raines to second, setting up Bernie Williams’s RBI single. The Yankees had an honest-to-God lead on the Braves when they handed the ball to Cone, going on eleven days’ rest.

  “To pitch in the World Series after having an aneurysm,” the starter said, “I wouldn’t trade places with anybody.”

  Cone had not won a postseason game in ’96, he had missed four months of the regular season after signing his $19.5 million deal, and his failure to beat Seattle in Game 5 of the ’95 Division Series still haunted him.

  Cone needed to beat the Braves. He was not the pitcher he used to be, not even close, but his competitive spirit was the closest thing to an indomitable force the Yankees had. So nobody on the visiting side was surprised when Cone imposed his will on Atlanta for six innings, barely surviving a bases-loaded jam and Torre’s visit to the mound by getting Javy Lopez to pop up on his ninety-seventh and final pitch.

  It was 2–1 Yankees when Cone walked off, leaving it to Jeter and Williams to take care of the rest. The shortstop and the center fielder had worn out the Rangers and Orioles in the first two rounds of the playoffs, carrying an offense that offered little else, but they were a combined 1 for 12 in the two home losses to the Braves.

  Matched against reliever Greg McMichael in the eighth, Jeter reached on an infield single in the hole, and Williams followed with a homer to deep right. If nothing else, their 5–2 victory guaranteed the Yankees would lose to the Braves with honor. Backup catcher Jim Leyritz would report that at least six or seven Yanks were reassuring one another with these words: “Hey, at least we didn’t get swept.”

  After all, Kenny Rogers, the Yankees’ Game 4 starter, amounted to a human white flag. Rogers was easily shaken and afraid to succeed. Few men had ever been so ill equipped to deal with the pressures tethered to a high-salaried ballplayer in New York.

  Rogers surrendered five runs while recording only six outs, and this was the near-unanimous thinking in Fulton County Stadium: the Braves were back to playing against history. But with the home team holding a 6–0 lead, Jeter had the nerve to interrupt a Torre visit to the mound to tell his manager, “Don’t worry. We’re going to win this game.”

  When Jeter came to bat in the sixth, this was the narrative thread connecting the Yankees’ postseason rallies: the rookie shortstop started almost all of them.

  Jeter would put another right-field umpire in an unwelcome position, and it was not by coincidence. Among his many talents, Jeter consistently kept his hands inside the baseball and used the opposite field, the very reason why Dick Maier had told his son Jeffrey to be ready in the right-field stands during Game 1 of the ALCS.

  Jeter did not send a ball to the wall this time; he lifted a Denny Neagle pitch foul near the right-field line. Atlanta’s Jermaine Dye appeared to be preparing to catch it until umpire Tim Welke accidentally got in the right fielder’s way. The ball fell to the grass as Dye went down in a heap.

  The Braves were upset with Welke, but at the time they had no idea where this unfortunate twist of fate would lead. Jeter received a free do-over at the plate, and he made good on it by blooping a single—to right field, of course.

  The Yankees scored three times that inning, reminding themselves how and why they had already set a postseason record by winning six straight on the road. In the eighth, the Yanks caught two major breaks—a swinging bunt from Charlie Hayes somehow stayed fair inside the third-base line, and shortstop Rafael Belliard bobbled Mariano Duncan’s double-play ball and got one out instead of two.

  But Atlanta still had faith in its flame-throwing closer, Mark Wohlers, who would face Leyritz with one out. Leyritz had beaten Seattle in Game 2 of the ’95 Division Series with a fifteenth-inning homer in the rain, a development that did nothing to tame the backup catcher’s oversized opinion of his own skill. Leyritz’s extreme belief in himself helped him in pressure situations like this one.

  He had never faced Wohlers, so in the dugout he called out to Don Zimmer, “Hey, what does he got?”

  “Throws 100,” Zimmer replied.

  One hundred miles per hour. And with the World Series hanging in the balance, Leyritz had the nerve to face Wohlers with someone else’s bat. The catcher’s supply was running low—he had only a couple of his own left with him in Atlanta—and he was scheduled to start Game 5 as Andy Pettitte’s preferred catcher. Leyritz wanted to save his bats for John Smoltz, so he asked Strawberry for a rental to carry into the biggest moment of his baseball life.

  Strawberry gave him one of his brand-new bats, and off Leyritz went with a bulky pad on his left elbow to protect against that 100-mile-per-hour heat. Wohlers started him off with a 98-mile-per-hour fastball, and Leyritz fouled it straight back. The closer took that as a sign the hitter was right on his pitch and made a stunning concession, throwing two consecutive sliders for balls.

  The Fox TV broadcaster, Tim McCarver, warned that Wohlers needed to get back to throwing heat. “If you get beat,” said McCarver, a former All-Star catcher, “you want to get beat on your best pitch.”

  Leyritz fouled back another fastball, this one clocked at 99 miles per hour, before Wohlers decided another concession was in order. It didn’t matter that Leyritz hadn’t proved he could catch up to his best pitch. The closer unleashed another slider, one Leyritz fouled off, before making his fateful choice with pitch number six.

  Another slider, designed to dive down and away from the hitter. Only this pitch looped high and out over the plate, looking more like a floating beach ball than an exploding blur of cowhide. Leyritz, wearing his lucky number 13, sent it high toward the left-field corner, high enough to clear the wall and the Atlanta phenom, Andruw Jones, who had scaled it.

  The Yankees would win their seventh consecutive postseason road game, the question a matter of how, not if.

  In the tenth, with Steve Avery on the mound, Jeter singled into the hole to put the go-ahead run at second. Williams was intentionally walked to load the bases, and to allow the left-handed Avery to go at the left-handed pinch hitter, Boggs, who had gone 3 for 27 in the first two playoff rounds and who had been benched after two games in the World Series.

  Boggs rediscovered his greatest weapon—a set of eyes with Ted Williams vision at the plate—and drew a walk on a full-count pitch. Suddenly the Braves were suffering a severe crisis of faith. They took four hours and seventeen minutes to lose the longest World Series game ever, and to become the second World Series team in forty years to blow a lead of at least six runs.

  They lost Game 4 and then lost an epic Game 5 pitching duel between Pettitte and Smoltz, punctuated by a seven-fastball battle between closer (John Wetteland) and pinch hitter (Luis Polonia). The Braves lost by a 1–0 count when Paul O’Neill—playing on a bad hamstring—ran down Polonia’s potential game-winning shot to right center for the final out. The Yankee coach, Jose Cardenal, had moved O’Neill eight feet to his right before Polonia quit fouling off Wette- land’s fastballs and finally ripped one fair.

  Torre was proven a prophet; he had told George Steinbrenner and his players that Atlanta was his town, that the Yanks would win all three games to return the World Series to New York. In his office, Torre lit another one of his Red Auerbach cigars.

  Everything was going right. Graeme Lloyd, a train wreck of a pi
ckup, turned into a sure-thing reliever who recorded the most tense October outs. Strawberry was back to punishing the ball the way he did before he betrayed his otherworldly talent with drugs. Williams had blossomed into the kind of one-man Murderers’ Row his employer, Steinbrenner, never fathomed when he ordered Gene Michael to trade him at all costs.

  Torre had won in Atlanta by benching Boggs, Martinez, and O’Neill, men who were destined to retire with more than 7,000 regular-season hits combined. Torre had won in Atlanta by relying on Rivera, who could have been traded in spring training, and by relying on Jeter, who could have been demoted on the same day of that trade that was never made.

  Just as the Orioles could not get past Jeter’s Jeffrey Maier homer, the Braves could not get past Jeter’s sixth-inning single in Game 4, right after Dye failed to catch the shortstop’s foul pop.

  Braves manager Bobby Cox was dragging down his team by constantly rattling on about an out that should have been made when his team had a six-run lead. “Dye couldn’t get around the umpire to catch the goddamn ball,” Cox grumped. “That was a big play. It was the first out of the inning. If you look at the replay, it’s an easy out.”

  It always came back to Jeter. Before Game 6, the shortstop was asked about the wrist that required a steady application of ice wraps.

  “Everybody’s making too big a deal about it,” he said. “It’s not a problem.”

  Yes, it was a problem—a problem Jeter chose to ignore. Only a few knew it at the time, but despite a build that suggested he would have been better off in the non-contact arenas of tennis and golf, Jeter had a threshold for pain that would have made Vince Lombardi proud.

  It was one of his greatest assets when he showed up at Yankee Stadium on October 26, 1996, wearing headphones and listening to Mariah Carey on the first day of the rest of his baseball life. Jeter was already assured of winning the American League Rookie of the Year award, but he craved only one trophy.

  If the Yankees did not win the World Series, Jeter would view his first full season as a complete failure.

  The Braves were giving the ball to their ace, Maddux, who made for a most appropriate fall guy. After Michael gave him a tour of suburban Jersey and took him to a showing of Miss Saigon following the ’92 season, Maddux had rejected the Yankees’ free-agent bid of $34 million to sign with the Braves for $6 million less.

  In the third inning of Game 6, the city Maddux rejected was falling on top of him. O’Neill doubled. Girardi smashed a triple over Marquis Grissom’s head. Jeter singled home Girardi, leaving Maddux cursing himself on the mound, and then stole second without Javy Lopez even making a throw. Bernie singled home Jeter for a 3–0 lead, and in the next inning, when Terry Pendleton hit a 3-1, bases-loaded pitch to Jeter to start a lethal double play, the Braves were done.

  Thoroughly out-managed, smoke billowing from his ears, Cox got himself ejected by Welke before his team got ejected by the Yanks; it was baseball’s answer to North Carolina’s Dean Smith getting tossed from a lost cause at the 1991 Final Four. Those Atlanta newspaper columns that had pronounced Joe Torre’s team dead on arrival could have been filed alongside the old New York newspaper column that welcomed Torre as Clueless Joe.

  Torre’s gravely ill brother, Frank, had received his heart transplant the day before, and Frank was strong enough to watch the game on his Columbia-Presbyterian TV. Torre’s starting pitcher for Game 6, Jimmy Key, had proposed to his girlfriend before arriving at the park.

  The Braves stood no chance against this unfolding fairy tale. So at 10:56 p.m., before 56,375 standing, screaming witnesses, Derek Jeter stopped in the dirt past the third-base line and threw his arms toward the night sky a split second before Mark Lemke’s pop foul settled into Hayes’s glove for the final World Series out.

  The Yankees piled onto each other on the mound. They did a victory lap around the Stadium, the delirious fans sang along to Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” and Boggs ended up on a cop’s horse. Finally Torre was the nice guy who didn’t finish last, and for this simple reason:

  The Braves had the better players, but the Yankees had the better team.

  “It’s just magic, magic,” Jeter said as he paraded around the winning clubhouse. “Everybody wrote us off. We read in the papers that it was over [after Game 2]. We picked up the Atlanta papers and they said the Braves were going to dominate us.”

  Jeter was a world champion, playing the most important position on baseball’s most important team. He was in a place the five prospects drafted ahead of him in 1992 could not fathom.

  Phil Nevin, Houston’s pick at number 1, had already been traded and had spent most of ’96 in Class AA before playing 38 games for the 53-109 Detroit Tigers. Paul Shuey, Cleveland’s pick at number 2, was 5-2 for the Indians before pitching poorly in the Division Series loss to Baltimore. B. J. Wallace, Montreal’s pick at number 3, was 15-15 over three minor league seasons and, after rotator cuff surgery, had already thrown his last professional pitch.

  Jeffrey Hammonds, Baltimore’s pick at number 4, had batted .226 in seventy-one games with the ’96 Orioles and did not make the postseason cut. Chad Mottola, Cincinnati’s pick at number 5, batted .215 in thirty-five games with the Reds before settling into life as a career minor leaguer.

  Jeter? He was partying with the beautiful people at the China Club, ignoring his early wake-up call for a ticker-tape parade in the Canyon of Heroes later that morning.

  Until this night, the Monday night after the World Series triumph, Jeter had conducted himself as a perfect gentleman in every public setting he graced. But in the China Club with a number of his teammates, Jeter let his hair down for the first time.

  He got carried away the way any kid who had secured rock-star fame overnight would get carried away. In all his years to come as a Yankee, this was the one and only time friends were concerned about the amount Jeter had to drink.

  “Derek was on such a euphoric high that night,” said someone in the bar, “you couldn’t shut him down. Nothing bad happened, but he was a little out of control.”

  Leyritz was among the Yankees with Jeter that night, and after precious little sleep they decided to drive together to Battery Park. A building security guard told them they were crazy to try, so they jumped on a packed train and began the slow crawl south.

  The fans went mad when they recognized the two new passengers on their subway car, and Leyritz and Jeter were not sure if they would make it to the parade. But make it they did, along with three and a half million of their closest friends.

  The ’86 Mets represented the last New York baseball team to earn a parade, and that one drew a crowd of two to two and a half million. Of the Yankees’ staggering turnout ten years later, Strawberry, a member of both title teams, would say, “The extra million was for Jeter. All young girls.”

  George Steinbrenner did his best to try to ruin this grand New York moment, ordering the same players’ wives he had banned from team flights to be banned from the players’ parade floats. A couple of Yankees felt empowered enough to defy the Boss and insist their wives ride with them, “and George went fucking ballistic,” one team official said. Steinbrenner directed much of his rage at Debbie Tymon, a marketing executive.

  “I was looking at George,” the official continued, “and saying to myself, ‘Man, you can’t even enjoy this. It doesn’t matter that you’re king of the hill in New York and in the country right now, and millions of people are here to pay homage to you. You’re going crazy because the players got their way on something so silly.’

  “But that’s him. If something’s not the way he wants it, big or small, it will set him off. And you don’t want to be on the receiving end of it when George goes off.”

  Only Steinbrenner could not rain on this parade. Governor George Pataki was riding with Joe DiMaggio, and Mayor Giuliani’s son, Andrew, was riding with his hero, Jeter.

  The shortstop was wearing shades to cover his bloodshot eyes, but through them he saw an unimagined sea of
humanity. “You can’t explain this right here,” Jeter said.

  His manager gave it a shot. “I tried to count how many wedding proposals Derek Jeter had,” Joe Torre said. “Everyone wanted to marry him up and down the street.”

  Jeter was bigger than DiMaggio that day, bigger than any ballplayer or politician on a float. He was as big as Lindbergh, MacArthur, John Glenn, and every other American lion who traveled up the Canyon of Heroes and into a blizzard of confetti, appreciation, and love.

  A champion at twenty-two, the Kalamazoo kid had Broadway at his feet in every literal and figurative way.

  6. Perfection

  Derek Jeter was sitting next to his good friend Alex Rodriguez at the 1998 NBA All-Star Game, watching Michael Jordan put on a show worthy of the Madison Square Garden stage.

  Jeter loomed as large as Jordan on this night, if only because he held the home court advantage. This was his town and his time.

  Jordan was turning thirty-five and in the middle of his final season with the Chicago Bulls; Jeter was twenty-three, he had been chosen as one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People,” and he had appeared on Seinfeld.

  Oh, and he was also dating the poster girl on his bedroom wall, Mariah Carey, just as he had predicted years earlier to everyone back home. Jeter and Carey had met at a Fresh Air Fund gala near the end of 1996 and ultimately started a romance when her marriage to music executive Tommy Mottola came undone.

  Jeter had it all. When he left his All-Star Game seat at halftime, Jeter parted a sea of awestruck fans on his way to the men’s room before one of them dared to penetrate his personal space. A hand emerged from the crowd.

  The shortstop was willing to give the stranger a quick handshake on the run until he heard the young man’s voice. “Derek, I’m Peyton Manning. You’re having some career.”

  Jeter stopped to congratulate the University of Tennessee quarterback who was two months away from becoming the first pick in the NFL draft, and Manning looked as pleased as any Little Leaguer would have been to earn ten seconds of Jeter’s time.