The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Carey did what she could to help out her boyfriend. “There is no engagement,” she said. “There is no ring.”

  Before Jeter pursued a ring of a different kind—his second championship ring—he had gotten a taste of transcendent celebrity, and he despised it. Carey? She was a blossoming diva who thrived on the fuss.

  Steinbrenner was concerned his shortstop might take his eye off the ball while dating one of the few young performers in America who had a bigger and more passionate following than he did, and those fears were unfounded.

  Jeter had bought a place in Tampa to put in extra conditioning work at the team’s facilities, and he was known to have a commitment to excellence matched only by Steinbrenner’s. His cage work and tee work were supplemented by years of fielding drills with a small Rawlings training glove he loathed, a glove Yankee instructor and minor league manager Trey Hillman forced him to use.

  “He’d get all bent out of shape when I made him put it on,” Hillman said. “The whole point was to try to get him to flex at the knees a bit more because his frame is so tall. He never did flex as much as I wanted him to, but he made the adjustments he needed to make, anyway.”

  Jeter started the 1998 season on a mission to right the individual and team wrongs of 1997, and to silence the growing chorus of voices suggesting he was the overhyped product of his market, uniform, and looks. Popular opinion had Jeter behind Alex Rodriguez and Boston’s breakout star, Nomar Garciaparra, on any credible ranking of AL shortstops.

  The Yankees gave him a bigger 1998 salary than they had to, anyway. Like Mariano Rivera, a third-year player eligible for arbitration in year four, Jeter took the $750,000—a bump from his $550,000 salary in ’97—and went about his business.

  Jeter had already hoped to be working on a multiyear contract. According to Ray Negron, a longtime Steinbrenner aide, Jeter approached him the previous spring in Tampa with this request:

  “Can you talk to Mr. Steinbrenner about giving me a five-year contract?”

  Negron did just that. Steinbrenner laughed and told Negron to have Jeter see him after a luncheon the following day. The shortstop and owner took a short walk with Negron.

  “Derek, I could take advantage of you and sign you to a long-term contract,” Steinbrenner told Jeter. “But I’m not going to do that to you because you’re going to make a hell of a lot more money than you would in the contract I’d give you now. I’m not going to do that to you. You don’t realize how much is ahead and how much money you’re going to make.”

  “I understand. I understand,” Jeter responded.

  “Trust me,” the Boss said. “I’m going to do the right thing by you.”

  No, Steinbrenner was not the same owner who wondered if the rookie Jeter could start for his team. Despite his concerns over Mariah-mania and the disappointments of the previous season, the Boss realized Jeter was a franchise cornerstone, a Yankee out of central casting.

  So off went Jeter, Steinbrenner, and the rest of the New York Yankees on a journey unlike any in team history. Steinbrenner had signed a Cuban defector, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, to fortify his slightly suspect pitching staff, and he had in Knoblauch, Jeter, Paul O’Neill, Williams, Martinez, and Davis a top six in the order that would unnerve any opposing team’s ace.

  Yes, George Steinbrenner had given Joe Torre the horses. Lots and lots of horses.

  But when they got out of the gate 1-4 on the West Coast, Steinbrenner forgot all about his declaration that his manager would be safe for the year, regardless of his record. Before the season started, the owner jokingly asked Torre if any team had gone 162-0.

  Steinbrenner was not joking anymore. Naturally, the crushing Division Series defeat in Cleveland the previous fall had changed his relationship with Torre. So when the manager dropped the ’98 season opener in Anaheim, nobody was surprised when the Boss complained to Newsday’s Jon Heyman, “We’re behind the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in our division right now.”

  Three more losses over the next four games, compounded by Rivera’s groin injury and Davis’s ankle injury, locked the Yankees inside another crisis. Torre did not need Steinbrenner to announce he was in trouble; he had been fired enough to know the feeling. He did not need to see the walls closing in on him to know that they were.

  But then his Yankees scored six runs in their very next inning, beat the Mariners by a 13–7 count, and suddenly the team Steinbrenner thought should win 162 games started looking like one that would win 100.

  The Yanks ripped off eight straight, fourteen of fifteen, and twenty-five of twenty-eight. Jeter was batting .319, still seeing Mariah, and still impressing the older veterans with his ability to make a brutally difficult game look like so much fun.

  Jeter’s Yankees were majoring in fun. On May 17, before a Bronx crowd of 49,820, David Wells—a more imperfect man than Don Larsen could ever be—threw the second perfect game in franchise history, beating the Twins by a 4–0 count.

  Jorge Posada, who was supplanting Joe Girardi at catcher, solidified his presence behind the plate; the disagreeable Wells shook him off only twice. Chuck Knoblauch, who was raising concerns about his alleged Gold Glove defense with his erratic arm, made the most conspicuous history-preserving play when he knocked down Ron Coomer’s short-hop liner with a backhand in the eighth and made a sound throw to first.

  The 1998 Yankees had declared themselves: at every turn they would try to expand the boundaries of human achievement. Would the Yankees win more games in 162 attempts than the ’27 Yankees won in 154 (110)? Would they win more games than the 1906 Cubs, who held the record at 116-36?

  Only this much was certain at the halfway point, with the Yanks at an all-time best 61-20: they thought their B lineup was as good as their A lineup. Strawberry and Raines came off the bench, as did Homer Bush, who electrified the home crowd with his speed and his .380 batting average as Knoblauch’s backup.

  Among the new acquisition starters, Knoblauch was not what he had been in Minnesota, but he was good enough. Scott Brosius was a much stronger hitter in the Bronx than he had been in Oakland; he was a Clark Kent using the Yankee clubhouse as his phone booth. And the mystery man, El Duque, who claimed to have escaped Cuba on a leaky raft, combined with Wells, Cone, and Pettitte to give Torre four starters who would have been worthy aces on most staffs.

  “But Derek was the centerpiece of the entire team,” Cone said. “We took on his persona, which was to show up and win the game no matter what happened the day before. We never changed who we were, no matter how many games in a row we won, and a lot of that was Derek’s personality.

  “He was more of a leader than anyone knew. We had a relentless nature where nobody gave away an at-bat no matter what the score was, and that’s who Derek was.”

  Jeter missed a dozen games in June with a strained abdominal muscle and still was named an All-Star for the first time, an honor that hardened his standing as a team leader at the age of twenty-four.

  He was able to maintain a dignified presence while lightening the clubhouse load with his boyish energy. Jeter would tell Teammate A that Teammate B was ragging on him, almost always when Teammate B had done no such thing. Jeter freely traded playful insults with thirty-eight-year-old Raines, their routine open for all to hear, and veterans often credited the shortstop’s approach for relieving the pressure as the victories and expectations mounted.

  “Derek’s so much more colorful inside the locker room than he is out on the field,” said O’Neill, “and over the course of the year our team needed that.”

  O’Neill needed it as much as anyone. Beaten down by Lou Piniella in Cincinnati, tortured by his own expectations, the right fielder was forever slamming down helmets, throwing bats, and cursing the fates. O’Neill could not see a 4-for-5 day at the plate as anything other than a lost opportunity to go 5 for 5.

  Like Jeter, O’Neill was angered when removed from the lineup and given a day off. Unlike the shortstop, the right fielder often ripped his manager to a coach wh
en it happened.

  In the pre-Torre days, O’Neill would be standing next to Brian Butterfield in the outfield when Buck Showalter approached with the grim pregame news. “Here comes that stumpy little fuck to give me his bullshit on why I’m not playing,” O’Neill would tell Butterfield.

  Showalter forgave him; he knew O’Neill’s inner flame burned hotter than most. The right fielder remained the same brooding, tightly wound creature under Torre, but Torre had help his predecessor did not have, help in the soothing form of Derek Jeter.

  “I never played with anybody who was able to do a photo shoot in the morning and be locked in to play at seven o’clock like Derek could,” O’Neill said. “He amazed me.”

  Surely, subtly, Jeter grabbed his team by the throat. But the Yankees did not revolve only around Jeter; they revolved around his bond with Torre, who saw his shortstop the way John Wooden always saw his point guard—as a coach on the floor.

  “Jeet believed in Joe’s way,” said Mike Borzello, the Yankees’ bullpen catcher and Torre’s godson, “and everyone kind of felt, ‘If Jeet believes in it, we have to believe in it.’

  “Jeet and Joe were both positive thinkers, they didn’t overreact to anything, and they didn’t show their emotions until the very end. It was a perfect marriage.”

  If the Yankees needed a buffer between manager and clubhouse, Jeter assumed the role. It made sense. Jeter always saw himself as a unifier, as someone who could reach different people because of his biracial roots. Given that he always had white and black friends, and always had people believing he was Hispanic or Italian or Jewish or French, Jeter said, “I think I can relate to everyone.”

  He related to the manager better than any fellow Yankee. Mike Buddie, once a Class A pitcher with Jeter in Greensboro, finally made it to the Bronx in ’98 and saw veterans such as Raines, Martinez, and Knoblauch go to Jeter with matters they did not want to take straight to Torre.

  Buddie saw two undisputed leaders in the clubhouse—Cone for the pitchers, Jeter for the position players. “And Derek brings out a humanity in managers that makes everybody more comfortable with them,” Buddie said.

  “Derek can be goofing around with Joe Torre, and instead of gasping and saying, ‘Oh, my God, that’s Joe Torre,’ you’re thinking, ‘I can’t believe Jeter just taped his shoes together.’ Derek keeps everybody loose and honest.”

  Back in Greensboro, Buddie had been a college player out of Wake Forest four years older than Jeter, and he had been among the team leaders who made sure to include the teenager in almost everything they did.

  By ’98, Derek Jeter was famous enough to make the cover of GQ. His fan mail could practically fill the entire clubhouse if he let it go for a month. And yet with Buddie trying to keep his mouth shut and stay out of a juggernaut’s way, Jeter returned his bygone favor and—without patronizing the spare-part pitcher—made Buddie feel as welcome in the clubhouse and at nightspots as Pettitte or Cone.

  After the ’98 home opener, Buddie and his wife were celebrating his first appearance in Yankee Stadium and his first major league victory when Jeter’s parents approached. Charles and Dot told Buddie they were so proud of him and greeted his wife, Traci, by name.

  “They hadn’t seen us in years, their son’s become Derek Jeter, and they even remembered my wife’s name,” Buddie said. “That explains why Derek’s so likable, the way he was raised.”

  In August, Jeter became the first Yankee to collect 50 hits in a month since Joe DiMaggio’s 53 in July of 1941, the very month DiMaggio saw his 56-game hitting streak come to an end. On September 9, Jeter achieved something far more dear to his heart.

  He clinched another division title in a 7–5 victory over the Red Sox that improved the Yankees’ record to 102-41 and their divisional lead to twenty and a half games. Jeter blasted 2 homers off Boston knuckleballer Tim Wakefield in the victory, giving him 19 for the season, 3 more than the previous high for a Yankee shortstop (Roy Smalley in 1982).

  Amid the clubhouse celebration, with Heineken beer dripping from his divisional championship cap, Jeter was asked about his chances to win the American League MVP award. “It’s not really something that I think about,” he said.

  “You can make a case for any person on this team to be MVP. It’s been that type of year. Tino Martinez is having a great year, Paul O’Neill is, Bernie Williams, David Cone as well. There are twenty-five guys. You can make a case for all of them. We’re playing on an MVP team.”

  At a time when the country was swept away by superhuman individual feats, by the home-run derby staged by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa at the expense of Roger Maris’s single-season record, the Yankees were dominating the sport one base and one at-bat at a time. They were as perfect a team as Don Shula’s 1972 Dolphins.

  Williams had missed thirty-one games because of a knee injury suffered in June, and the Yankees kept winning with Chad Curtis in center. Chili Davis missed more than four months with his ankle injury and returned to find his chief replacement, Strawberry, leading the team with 22 homers.

  “We had a great team, great camaraderie, great everything,” O’Neill said. “If you go up and down our roster, nobody really had a bad year. We went into cities and it was like, ‘Are we going to sweep these guys or take two out of three?’ It got to the point where sweeping teams came naturally to us.”

  So did the all-for-one, one-for-all mentality that defined the Yankees—at least until the night of September 18, when David Wells acted like a horse’s rump for the sake of old times. In the middle of a 15–5 rout of the Orioles at Camden Yards, Baltimore’s Danny Clyburn hit a high pop between shortstop and left. When Jeter and Curtis and Ricky Ledee failed to run it down, Wells gestured in disgust, slapped his hands on his hips, and stared down his teammates.

  Jeter should have caught the ball; even Torre agreed with that. The shortstop quit running for it too soon and allowed it to fall. But Wells had no right to put on this childish show, and Jeter let him know it. “Don’t show me up in front of people,” he warned the pitcher in the dugout.

  Jeter dressed and left the clubhouse without speaking to the news media; Wells would tell reporters that his conduct was “totally unprofessional on my part.” The following day, acting on a tip that Jeter had engaged in a heated confrontation with Wells over his humiliating body language, Buster Olney of the New York Times asked the shortstop for a comment on his source’s account.

  Jeter turned angry and raised his voice. “Where did you get that bullshit?” he asked. Olney tried to calm the shortstop so his competition would not hear their exchange. “You’re just trying to start something,” Jeter barked.

  Just as Knoblauch drifted toward the conversation, Jeter sensed the living, breathing presence of an alibi.

  “Hey, Buster is trying to say shit happened between Boomer and me,” he said to Knoblauch, hoping his double-play partner would play along. Only the second baseman had never been mistaken for a nuclear physicist.

  “Yeah, it was wild, wasn’t it?” Knoblauch said.

  Olney wrote what he had to write and did not hold Jeter’s rare lie against him. For the shortstop, it wasn’t personal, just business. He did not believe the confirmation of in-house strife was good for the business of winning.

  Jeter was quite stubborn about his articles of game-day faith. He believed in being accessible to reporters, in being accountable for poor play. He was distant and guarded but was not one to be rude. Jeter did not allocate his time and attention based on the size of a newspaper’s circulation, or on the coverage area of a TV station, a game played by so many star ballplayers and coaches. Jeter gave the same say-nothing answers to the New York Times and the Poughkeepsie Journal.

  In a locker room culture where many multimillionaire athletes would just as soon meet a reporter’s question with repeated belching and flatulence, Jeter’s locker was a sanctuary of sorts. He was never going to embarrass anyone who approached his stall. He was available, benign, and cognizant of the fact that a
quote from his mouth—even if it amounted to a run-on cliché—carried weight in anyone’s report.

  But Jeter did not believe in making his private thoughts and emotions public. So with the playoffs fast approaching, he was not about to provide details on his summer breakup with the poster girl on his bedroom wall.

  Mariah Carey—and the attention she craved—wore him out, simple as that. “It was the wrong time,” Carey would say of their romance. “Our two worlds were just too much for that moment.”

  It had nothing to do with baseball, even if some whispered that Mariah-mania was behind Jeter’s early struggles at the plate. “I’m just a singer,” Carey would be quoted as saying, “not some magical genie who can make or break someone’s game.”

  Jeter said his mother and sister represented a tough screening committee for his prospective girlfriends, and his sister, Sharlee, would say Carey passed the test. “I found Mariah to be a good person,” she said, “and I trust Derek’s judgment. But he’s my brother, and I want to keep him away from women who only care about his fame.”

  Carey had enough fame for the both of them. Regardless, the breakup between the singer and the ballplayer was a predictable development to the veteran New Yorkers who had watched the graceful way Jeter carried himself around the city’s social landscape.

  “Derek needs to write a book for the rest of us on how to do it,” Cone said. “I don’t know where he’s hiding or what he’s doing, but he stays out of the clubs, stays out of where the paparazzi hangs, and goes to the movie theater a lot, goes to dinner. If he has a drink it might be a light beer. He never puts himself in a position to be taken advantage of, not even for a little bit.

  “If he’s gone to clubs here and there he’s gotten out early. He’s found ways to get into them by the back door and then left by midnight. You’d never catch him in a club at four in the morning. With Mariah, through my connections in clubs, she didn’t start her nights until after midnight, 1:00 a.m. No way Jeter was going for that.”