The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  “You could see the pressure on the Boss’s face,” Cucuzza said. “That was the World Series he had to have.”

  Near the end of Game 4 a pipe burst in the clubhouse and Steinbrenner actually helped the maintenance workers and firemen bail out the water. The Boss suspected the Mets of foul play, of intentionally opening a valve to soak the Yankees’ imported sofas and chairs.

  No, Steinbrenner was not about to accept the explanation that a trash container fire caused the problem. On the way out of Shea, as he proudly pointed out the wet spots on his slacks, Steinbrenner said of the Mets, “I’d rather be where we are than where they are.”

  The following night, Jeter belted another homer, this one off Al Leiter, to make it a 2–2 game in the sixth, and soon enough Mike Piazza was driving a deep fly to center off Mariano Rivera with two outs and a man on in the ninth, Yanks up by a 4–2 count. It looked like a tie ball game, until it didn’t. Williams made the catch at the stroke of midnight, Jeter jumped into Luis Sojo’s arms, and the Yankees were living out a Mets fan’s worst nightmare, celebrating their twenty-sixth championship on the home field of a New York team that had won only two.

  “Jeter’s one of the most classic winners ever to play the game,” Mets GM Steve Phillips said. “Every time we said, ‘OK, now we’ve got it going,’ Jeter did something to change the game. He hits that home run on the first pitch of Game 4 and it’s like, ‘Oh Jesus, here we go again.’”

  Jeter became the first player to win MVP of the World Series and All-Star Game in the same season. He batted .409 against the Mets and extended his World Series hitting streak to fourteen games.

  On the Shea field, Jeter was wearing a champagne-soaked World Series championship T-shirt and a championship cap turned backward as he hugged his sister, Sharlee. In a chair waiting to do an ESPN interview, Jeter was wearing an Air Jordan wristband when he held up four fingers, Michael Jordan–style.

  Amid the clubhouse celebration, when he was not spraying champagne, Jeter was singing a silly frat boy version of “Who Let the Dogs Out?”

  At the top of his lungs, on top of the world. Derek Jeter, four-time champ, was the undisputed lord of the rings.

  He had no idea how much suffering he would endure in pursuit of his one for the thumb.

  8. The Flip

  Alex Rodriguez had made a complete fool out of Texas Rangers owner Tom Hicks, siphoning $252 million out of his pocket, and suddenly A-Rod was moved to make a fool out of himself. Rodriguez had just signed a staggering ten-year contract, and for some reason he marked the occasion by turning his friendship with Derek Jeter into a contact sport.

  In December of 2000, appearing on Dan Patrick’s ESPN Radio show, Rodriguez was asked to identify the star he felt could break his record for fattest all-time contract. A-Rod mentioned Andruw Jones and Pedro Martinez but maintained “my talent at such a young age” would make his record hard to top.

  At the time Brian Cashman was in serious long-term talks with Derek Jeter’s agent, Casey Close. The ring-free Rodriguez figured he needed to protect the only title he could win.

  “Even a guy like Derek,” he said, “it’s going to be hard for him to break that [$252 million barrier] because he just doesn’t do the power numbers. And defensively, he doesn’t do all those things. So he might not break the 252. He might get 180. I don’t know what he’s going to get. One-fifty? I’m not sure.”

  In one juicy on-air paragraph, A-Rod had taken his heavy lumber to Jeter’s offensive ability, his defensive ability, and his leverage with George Steinbrenner. For weeks Jeter declined to respond in public. So a columnist assigned to the New York Giants–Baltimore Ravens Super Bowl in Tampa, next door to the Yankees’ minor league facility, checked in to see if Jeter finally wanted to call an all-out blitz on A-Rod.

  Behind the facility, where the shortstop spent the winters honing his swing, Jeter stopped to conduct an interview he did not want to do. He had already dispatched Rob Thomson, the team’s director of player development, to inform the columnist he did not have any time to give, but when Jeter emerged from the complex and saw a familiar face, he agreed to stop and talk.

  That was the essence of Derek Jeter—never wanting to expose his vulnerable side to the public, but never wanting to offend, either.

  Small talk about the Giants and Ravens represented the appetizer before the dreaded entrée was served. Jeter was asked about A-Rod’s claim that he wasn’t a $200 million shortstop, never mind a $252 million shortstop.

  “I’m not trying to beat Alex’s record anyway,” Jeter said. “The only record I’m concerned with is Yogi’s record, and that’s the [ten] championships.”

  In two on-the-record sentences, Jeter had taken his own heavy lumber to A-Rod’s obsession with winning in free agency what he could not win on the field.

  “I didn’t pay much attention to it because that’s not my goal,” Jeter continued. “I haven’t been sitting around saying, ‘Alex got this so let’s see if I can break his record.’ It’s not important. I mean, I think we’ve been doing something right around here the last few years.”

  The Yankees had won four championships in Jeter’s first five years, or four more than Rodriguez had won in his first six.

  “You want people to remember you as a winner,” Jeter said.

  And not as a human hedge fund.

  Jeter had returned fire on Rodriguez in a passive-aggressive way, and the shots were much deserved. A-Rod had violated an unwritten law of the big league land. Ballplayers rarely attack and marginalize each other in the middle of high-stakes contract negotiations, especially when those ballplayers are supposed to be dear friends.

  Jeter did reveal that he had asked Rodriguez for an explanation, and that he had been convinced A-Rod meant little or no harm. “I don’t think he had bad intentions,” Jeter said. “It was probably more playful than anything else.”

  But in reality, the Yankee shortstop was wounded by A-Rod’s jealous jabs, which picked and picked at one of his human weaknesses: his inability to forgive or forget. As Jeter drove off that day in his silver Mercedes convertible—he was finally looking to sell the old Mitsubishi with 80,000 miles on it—he was carrying a grudge in the trunk.

  He had no idea A-Rod had another nuclear warhead aimed at Tampa.

  Before Rodriguez escalated hostilities, Jeter had to sign his contract with the Yankees. Cashman and team president Randy Levine had started working the numbers with Close before the holidays. The Yanks wanted to avoid another arbitration showdown with Jeter, who was asking for $18.5 million to play the 2001 season, or $4 million more than the Yanks were offering.

  A-Rod’s ten-year, $252 million deal with Texas was signed in December (Hicks had paid $250 million for the entire franchise in 1998), just before Manny Ramirez completed his eight-year, $160 million deal with the Red Sox. Neither contract helped the Yankees’ cause, nor did Steinbrenner’s disposition. The previous winter, the Boss nearly signed Jeter to a seven-year, $118.5 million contract before backing out because he did not want to be the one to establish a new salary standard in the game.

  This time around Steinbrenner wanted to keep Jeter’s annual wage below $19 million, and so Cashman and Levine came to a tentative settlement with Close on a ten-year, $189 million commitment. The Boss let that agreement marinate for a while as he stewed over the size of the payout.

  The Yankees had already given free agent pitcher Mike Mussina $88.5 million, and counting the $10 million Jeter earned in 2000, Steinbrenner was about to pay his shortstop $80.5 million more than the figure guaranteed in the seven-year deal he could have and should have signed after the ’99 season.

  The Boss did not care to extend lavish contract offers to players before they reached free agency; he had cost himself a lot of money by waiting until the eleventh hour to sign Bernie Williams for $87.5 million.

  Jeter was one year away from free agency, but even Steinbrenner realized the waiting game was a losing proposition with his movie star at short.
In his first five full seasons Jeter had four rings, the same as Joe DiMaggio. Jeter had 996 hits from 1996 through 2000, or 26 more hits than DiMaggio had from 1936 through 1940. The twenty-first century’s answer to the Yankee Clipper was only getting more expensive by the game.

  Finally, after one last conversation with Jeter designed to remind him who was the Boss, Steinbrenner made it official. “Derek Jeter embodies everything the Yankees are about,” the owner said in a statement.

  “Being the highest-paid player is not something I covet,” Jeter said. “If that was the case, I would’ve waited another year and maximized my earning potential, so to speak. What is important is where you are and what makes you happy. . . . I never intended to look elsewhere. I couldn’t picture it.”

  Jeter made his comments from Tampa on a late Friday afternoon conference call, and no seasoned Yankee observer with any news media savvy had to ask why. The Yankees were in the habit of throwing big news conference bashes for all of their big-ticket acquisitions, but they intentionally put the face of their franchise through a faceless exercise in the hope it would diminish the impact of the news.

  Steinbrenner still believed in the power of the printed word and still saw New York as the ultimate newspaper town. Just as he had done in the seventies, the Boss knew how to run his own guerrilla campaign in the last great tabloid war in America, pitting the Daily News against the Post and vice versa.

  Steinbrenner did not just understand how to deliver messages to his managers, players, and fans through the back pages. He understood everything about newspapers, including the fact that Saturday’s editions reached the fewest sets of eyes.

  So with commuters getting the early jump on their weekends, and with the next morning’s paper scheduled to be pancake-thin, Steinbrenner decreed Jeter’s latest victory at the bargaining table would come without a photo op.

  “If there’s any team or organization that can find a way to mess it up, it’s the Yankees,” said a livid Close. “They have done it. A Friday afternoon press conference? If you can sweep a $189 million contract under the rug, that’s when you would do it.

  “You’ve got the most celebrated athlete in New York. People love him. . . . It’s a shame toward Derek. If anyone deserves a day of recognition, it’s him.”

  Richer beyond his wildest imagination, Jeter was willing to move on, willing to continue calling his manager “Mr. Torre,” and willing to continue chasing Yogi Berra’s record of ten championship rings.

  “This is the only organization I’ve played for, and the only one I want to play for,” Jeter said. “Hopefully I’ll be with the Yankees for my entire career, and this is a giant step toward that.”

  Jeter accepted a contract worth $63 million less than A-Rod’s, and he was fine with it. Cashman? Not so much. The general manager had great respect for Jeter and found Close to be a good, tough, and smart advocate for his client.

  But on this day, Cashman decided to change the way he did business with the young Yankees of the future. In his mind, Jeter and Close had pledged to reward the Yanks if they agreed to pay the shortstop more than they were required to during his second and third seasons, when the team had the power of contract renewal on its side.

  Cashman felt that the Yankees were generous with Jeter, only to receive no hometown discounts on the back end. “We never got the break they said they’d give us,” said Cashman, who lumped in Mariano Rivera with Jeter. “We offered above what we had to offer and they took us.”

  Jeter and Rivera were in the clear, but Cashman would make sure that future homegrown stars paid the pre-arbitration price. Meanwhile, if the Yankees felt like they’d been had by Jeter and Close, imagine how the Texas Rangers felt after they got through negotiating with Rodriguez and Scott Boras.

  Rodriguez grew up a Mets fan, and after Jeter proved in the World Series that a world-class shortstop was the difference between the two New York teams, A-Rod seriously considered taking on Jeter in his own backyard. But Mets owner Fred Wilpon did not have the Steinbrennerian stomach for the free agent fight and never made A-Rod an offer despite all the tabloid noise that he should.

  Instead Wilpon had his general manager, Steve Phillips, paint Rodriguez as a perk-crazy jerk more interested in the Mets giving him merchandise tents, marketing offices, billboards, and chartered jet service than he was in the Mets building him a championship-level team.

  A-Rod was left to sign with a club that had never won a playoff series in a football-mad market that paid less attention to the Rangers than it did to its teenage quarterbacks under the Friday night lights. And for his uber-agent, Boras, a quarter of a billion dollars over ten seasons was not enough. No, Boras needed the extra two mil so he could brag at cocktail parties that he had doubled Kevin Garnett’s record $126 million NBA deal.

  “I’m almost embarrassed and ashamed of this contract,” A-Rod said.

  Almost.

  “I don’t know if Michael Jordan or Bill Gates or Alexander the Great,” Rodriguez continued, “I don’t know if anybody is worth this money.”

  He sure did not believe Derek Jeter was worth the money. If that was not painfully clear in his ESPN Radio interview, Rodriguez hammered home the point in an interview published in Esquire magazine and in excerpted quotes that reached the New York news media in the early hours of March.

  A-Rod conducted his radio and magazine interviews on December 19, so by the time he was made aware Jeter was upset over his comments to ESPN’s Dan Patrick, it was too late to pull back his comments to Esquire and writer Scott Raab.

  The Raab article was not about Jeter, and the seven deadly sentences were buried deep in a 7,000-word profile. Not that it mattered. Rodriguez was sitting with Boras and Raab in the Miami Heat’s American Airlines Arena after a Heat-Lakers game, tape recorder rolling on the table, and just as clearly as Boras had walked his client into a bad deal in Texas, the agent walked A-Rod into a shit storm that effectively terminated his relationship with Jeter.

  “It was Boras who added fuel to the fire that Jeter never had to carry a ball club,” Raab would say. “Alex was asserting these things, but Boras was playing the role of reinforcing this idea that Alex was at a totally different level than Derek Jeter.”

  In the Esquire piece, Boras compared Jeter’s 2000 power numbers (15 homers, 73 RBI) and Nomar Garciaparra’s power numbers (21 homers, 96 RBI) to A-Rod’s (41 homers, 132 RBI). “There’s a big difference,” the agent said.

  And Rodriguez followed up: “Jeter’s been blessed with great talent around him. He’s never had to lead. He can just go and play and have fun. And he hits second—that’s totally different than third and fourth in a lineup. You go into New York, you wanna stop Bernie and O’Neill. You never say, ‘Don’t let Derek beat you.’ He’s never your concern.”

  Armed with killer quotes, the press corps covering the Yankees advanced on Jeter’s locker. The shortstop was wearing a playful, what-have-I-done-now smile when he saw the writers approach, but his face tightened into a knot when one started reading from the Book of Alex.

  Jeter was stunned. Rodriguez had already assured him his radio comments had been misinterpreted, a claim Jeter did not buy. But this? He’s never your concern?

  Jeter told reporters he would call Rodriguez, but there was a better chance of Jeter volunteering to play second base than there was of a peace treaty emerging from these talks.

  A-Rod immediately tried to backpedal from his comments and called Raab in a frantic bid for help. “Scott, you’re killing me, man,” Rodriguez told him. “I thought we were doing a nice, fun article. . . . Derek’s really pissed off. He’s really upset with me, really angry.”

  Raab heard dismay and anguish in A-Rod’s voice. He offered to fax Jeter a letter stating that Rodriguez had said many positive things about him in their ninety-minute interview, too, and A-Rod took up Raab on the offer.

  The writer’s fax to Legends Field in Tampa read like this:

  Dear Derek,

  I talked with
Alex on Friday night and he was understandably upset that his friendship with you might be hurt because of a few of his remarks in the Esquire article. I hope that is not the case. In the course of our interview, Alex also spoke sincerely of his professional respect and personal affection for you, and I’m sure he did not intend to sound controversial or negative.

  I’m sorry for any friction the article may have created, and I wish you a healthy, successful season.

  Raab never heard from Jeter; Rodriguez heard plenty. A-Rod made the ninety-minute drive from the Rangers’ base in Port Charlotte to Jeter’s base in Tampa. Rodriguez waited outside Jeter’s home while the Yankee star—fully aware that A-Rod had made the drive—made Rodriguez wait and wait and wait until he was done eating at an area nightspot.

  When Jeter finally returned home, he found an emotional A-Rod ready to beg for forgiveness from a man not inclined to grant it.

  Jeter provided no details on this summit. He and Rodriguez would insist in the days to come that they arrived at an understanding, that their friendship would live on. A-Rod professed his undying affection for Jeter and his unmitigated respect for his leadership skills. “I feel like he’s a brother of mine,” Rodriguez maintained.

  “I gave him the benefit of the doubt,” Jeter said. “I don’t anticipate him saying anything else. I’ve known him for a long time. We’ll be friends after this.”

  Distant acquaintances? Maybe. Close friends? No shot.

  Rodriguez had gotten a rare second chance from Jeter, who was not interested in the fact that A-Rod gave his radio and magazine interviews on the same day. Two interviews plus two attacks equaled one fracture that would never fully heal.

  Rodriguez had earned the Chad Curtis treatment. In Jeter’s unforgiving world, A-Rod had become a non-person.

  “If you do something to hurt [Jeter], that’s it, you’re done,” said Mike Borzello, the Yankee bullpen catcher who was close to the shortstop.