by Ian O'Connor
But as Jeter measured the developing seventh-inning situation on October 13, as the shortstop watched Spencer’s sailing throw and Washington’s waving arm and Giambi’s chugging feet, Billy Beane was not the cool ex-jock lording over a Revenge of the Nerds revolution.
Beane was just another guy who thought he was watching a tied ball game, even after Jeter decided to abort his cutoff position, dash across the grass separating the mound from second base, and chase down a throw he realized was too high for either Soriano or Martinez to catch.
“I ignored Jeter’s movement,” Beane said. “It was like, ‘Where is he going?’ I was so convinced that we had scored. You’re thinking, ‘There’s no way Jeter’s connecting these dots on this play to make it work.’”
Washington had the same feeling as he moved down the line, escorting Giambi home. Back when he had scouted Jeter in the minors, Washington was the one who decided Derek was “not no goddamn shortstop” and wrote him up as a future third baseman. If Oakland’s third-base coach had long accepted the fact that he was wrong, he was about to discover just how wrong he was.
By the time Jeter caught the ball on a bounce on the first-base line some twenty feet from the plate, running toward the Yankees’ dugout and away from Posada, Washington knew he had made the right choice. Jeter’s intangible brilliance was not going to overtake the tangibles of the play, not this time.
Momentum and time and gravity were all working against the Yankee shortstop. But somehow he called an audible on the fly. Jeter converted himself into a wishbone quarterback and delivered a pitch to the tailback that would have made J. C. Watts proud.
Jeter did not just make a backhanded flip to Posada; he had the presence of mind to flip the ball against the grain of his body, so the catcher would receive it on the third-base side of the plate. “That son of a bitch threw the ball back this way,” Washington would say, “because he knew it would tail back in. He threw it so all Posada had to do was catch and tag.”
Before the ball reached Posada, Ramon Hernandez, the on-deck batter, stopped begging and pleading with both arms for Giambi to slide. Hernandez’s arms went slack, almost in a disgusted way. He knew Giambi was coming in standing up.
“If he slides,” Posada said, “I don’t have a chance.”
Giambi did not slide. He was locked in on Posada, expecting the catcher to block the plate and force a collision. He should have focused on Hernandez instead.
“It would have been close either way,” Giambi said.
Posada slapped the tag on his right calf a millisecond before Giambi’s right foot landed on the plate, and the umpire was up to the moment. Kerwin Danley stepped into the scene with purpose, cocking his right hand and throwing a punch that would secure as memorable a play as a shortstop ever made, the infield’s answer to Willie Mays’s over-the-head catch on Vic Wertz’s drive in the 1954 World Series.
Wearing number 7 as a tribute to Mickey Mantle, his father’s favorite player, Giambi had just claimed an un-Mantle-like piece of October lore. Mussina was backing up the play, already resigned to a 1–1 score and a no-decision or worse on his record. The pitcher could not believe Posada held on to the ball or even his mitt after Giambi’s left knee swung through the tag. “Holy shit,” Mussina told himself. “He’s out?”
Jeter usually reserved his signature fist pump in the air for series-clinching outs in the postseason, but he could not resist this time. He clenched his famous right fist and screamed as Giambi looked over his shoulder at Danley’s call.
Jeter did not know it at the time, but this was a fitting moment for him to take a stand. In the coming years Jeremy Giambi would admit to taking steroids, and his brother, Jason, would testify about his own steroid use before a federal grand jury. They were both wearing the colors of a team built around sabermetrics, the analytical approach that would be used like a bayonet to puncture Jeter’s standing in the game.
The disparate forces of steroids and sabermetrics collided at the plate that day, and there was no mathematical formula to explain why Jeter—patron saint of the clean ballplayer, punching bag of the sabermetric set—walked away without a scratch.
Giambi, the corner cutter who did not slide. Beane, the new-age executive who had no sabermetric chart that could evaluate this play. Washington, the doubting Thomas who had sent Giambi home.
In one artful flip of his wrist, Jeter had made believers of them all.
Across the field, A’s manager Art Howe and his players were still trying to make sense of the play. Washington had smoke blowing out of his ears and nostrils, and not because Jeter had just poured a bucket of Gatorade on that old minor league scouting report.
“I walked into the dugout and everybody’s patting Giambi on the back for the effort,” Washington said. “And I point-blank told Giambi right there, ‘You’ve got to fuckin’ hit the dirt.’ That’s exactly what I said. He didn’t say anything.”
Up in his executive suite, Beane was locked in the same state of shock that gripped the hushed crowd of 55,861. His A’s had lost a Game 5 to the Yanks the previous fall, and now they had opened the Game 3 door to the same crushing fate. “This was in the heart of the Yankee aura,” Beane said. “It was a time when you were a club like Oakland, and you were playing the Yankees, at no point did you think they’re not going to come back and beat you.”
Mariano Rivera held the A’s scoreless over the final two innings, but when general manager Brian Cashman said, “It was like Superman flying out of the sky to save the season,” he was not talking about his indomitable closer.
Jeter sat at his locker, ice pack on his shoulder, and told everyone he was just doing his job. “I was supposed to be there,” he said, before batting away the premature obits printed in the hours before Game 3.
“Other people may have thought we were dead,” Jeter said. “But nobody in here thought we were dead.”
Jeter and Torre and Don Zimmer swore the Yankees practiced that very play in spring training, with the shortstop acting as a trailer or free safety. A couple of years earlier, during a defensive drill (“We had interns running the bases,” Zimmer said), a Yankee right fielder retrieved a ball from the corner, fired toward the plate, and overthrew both cutoff men.
The coaches had never seen that kind of overthrow before. “We looked at each other and said, ‘What are we going to do if that happens in the game?’” Zimmer said. “Well, there’s not going to be a play at second or third; what’s the shortstop doing? We found a spot for him. . . .”
But Scott Brosius put all that inside baseball talk in perspective. Of Jeter, Brosius said, “He doesn’t practice the old running-toward-the-dugout-and-flip-it-back-home play.”
J. P. Ricciardi, Oakland’s director of player personnel and a Boston Celtics fan out of Worcester, Massachusetts, likened the play to Larry Bird’s indelible steal of Isiah Thomas’s inbounds pass in the 1987 Eastern Conference finals.
Ricciardi’s boss, Billy Beane? He was not angry over Giambi’s failure to slide, and he was not exasperated over Danley’s failure to see the play as a tie-goes-to-the-runner proposition. Beane was simply awed by Jeter’s grace.
“It’s almost as if Derek designed it,” he said, “like, ‘Hey, I’ve got to go into the dugout anyway.’ It had to be perfect and fit right into his schedule. There were two outs, he flipped to Posada on his way to the dugout, and just sort of disappeared.
“Derek Jeter even has an elegant way of breaking your heart.”
It wasn’t quite so elegant on the night of Game 5, a Bronx night made possible by the Game 3 and Game 4 victories in Oakland, a night that started with Phil Rizzuto following up his ceremonial first pitch by pulling a second ball out of his pocket, trotting toward the first-base line, and then flipping the ball back to his designated catcher, Clay Bellinger, in perfect Jeter form.
The Yankee Stadium crowd loved it, and so did the eighty-four-year-old Rizzuto, who had not told a soul about his planned tribute, not even his bride of fifty-eight
years, Cora.
“You’re stealing my thunder,” Jeter told the Scooter as they met in the dugout.
Jeter stole it right back in the top of the eighth, Yanks leading 5–3 with one out and Oakland’s Eric Chavez on first. Terrence Long, the same batter whose Game 3 double led to Jeter’s forever flip to Posada, lifted a high foul ball behind third base, and the shortstop chased it the same way he chased Shane Spencer’s errant throw.
Jeter looked at the ball, the stands, the ball, the stands, and the ball again. At the time, he had already driven home what would be the winning run on a sacrifice fly, and at age twenty-seven he had already collected his eighty-sixth and eighty-seventh career postseason hits to break the record held by Pete Rose.
Beane was not in his seat to watch Jeter break Rose’s record or give the Yanks a 4–3 lead; he had left the Stadium after his A’s went up by a 2–0 count in the second inning, too tormented to watch. Beane jumped on a train to Manhattan and tried to forget about the game. He closed his eyes and fantasized about popping back into the Stadium in the ninth inning to watch the A’s win.
“I didn’t want to go through the hell of watching them beat us again,” Beane said. “I figured if I disappeared at that point in the universe, something crazy would happen and we’d win.”
While Beane was riding the subway, Jeter was going over the rail. He went head over spikes and crash-landed flat on his back against the cement floor of the photographers’ pit. The crowd of 56,642 gasped when Jeter disappeared from view, fearing serious injury and an extended at-bat for Long.
There would be neither: Jeter suffered only a cut on his elbow. Of greater consequence, he had caught the ball. Scott Brosius grabbed it out of his glove and fired to second, but Chavez had already tagged up and beaten the throw. It didn’t matter; the A’s were pronounced dead on the spot.
“Got beer spilled on me,” Jeter said. “Nobody caught me. I think people were just reaching for their drinks.”
As Jeter wiped at the spilled beer and climbed back over the rail and onto the field, the fans chanted his name. Not since 1996 had the shortstop heard the Stadium sound half as loud as this.
“It felt good,” Jeter said of the chant. “But really, I’m not kidding when I say my first thought was, ‘We have to score more runs.’”
New Yorkers were using this Yankee playoff run as a reprieve, using the Stadium as a place to go and forget the worst weeks of their lives. A month and four days after the Twin Towers collapsed into a smoldering heap, the city needed a diversion and one of the surest signs that everyday normalcy was within reach—the Yankees winning games in October.
Their best player, Jeter, had plunged into the stands and emerged with the Division Series in the webbing of his glove. Beane made it back for the final two innings, made it back to watch the Yanks become the first team to lose the first two games of a best-of-five at home and then win the series.
Rivera again pitched the final two scoreless innings. “It was so psychological to know he was out there; you knew you weren’t going to beat them,” Beane said. “You had no chance. You knew Rivera had the sickle in hand ready to get you.”
But Jeter was the one who delivered the fatal stab. He batted .444 in the series and saved the Yankees from near-certain elimination with his glove and feet and instincts in Oakland, where the shortstop who shared a birth date with Abner Doubleday (June 26) invented a new way of playing the game.
“We definitely win the series if Jeter doesn’t make that flip play,” Ricciardi said. “But with the Yankees it’s like a mob hit. When they tell you the guy’s killed, you’ve got to see the body in the coffin to believe he’s dead.”
In victory, Joe Torre talked about the look in Jeter’s eye, the same look he saw in the eye of the Tiger—Tiger Woods—when the manager first met Jeter’s friend. The look of purpose and fearlessness. The look of an athlete who does not sweat the potential consequences of putting his body in peril or his big-game reputation on the line.
“It’s a look that you don’t teach,” Torre said.
George Steinbrenner was weeping when assessing the performance that validated Jeter’s look. “I’ve never seen any athlete dominate a sport—football, basketball, or baseball—the way he did in this playoff series,” the Boss said.
But the most poignant praise came from Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame shortstop on seven Yankee championship teams. “I couldn’t carry his glove,” he said of Jeter.
Rizzuto called him the best shortstop he had ever seen, and a figure worthy of comparison to the most graceful and instinctive Yankee of them all, Joe DiMaggio.
“Derek is very comparable to DiMag in that they both have that sixth sense,” Rizzuto said. “They both play the game so naturally and beautifully. Never out of place and always heading to the right spot. Joe never made a mistake and Jeter doesn’t, either.
“I mean, the kid has a gift. Joe’s gift.”
In the tenth inning of Game 4 of the 2001 World Series, Derek Jeter stepped to the plate with a .067 batting average against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Since the start of the five-game American League Championship Series victory over Seattle, Jeter had gone 3 for 32.
He had taken far more punishment on that Game 5 fall against Oakland than he ever admitted, and so Jeter was a shell of his Division Series self against the Mariners, a team that had won a record 116 games in the Year 1 A.A.—After Alex.
Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson had plenty to do with Jeter’s struggles in the first thirty-six innings of the World Series, but the shortstop’s body ached—his hamstring, his shoulder, and his back. The ice packs strapped about his torso and limbs said it all: this was not Derek Jeter trying to win a fourth consecutive title as much as it was the mummified remains of Derek Jeter trying to win again.
“My whole thing has always been, you either play or you don’t play,” Jeter would say. “If you play, I don’t think people want to hear about what’s bothering you or what’s hurting you. I think that is a built-in excuse. . . . It didn’t feel good, but I was all right to play.”
Jeter’s pain threshold was the Yankees’ best friend, and their longtime trainer, Gene Monahan, ranked the shortstop among the toughest players he had ever treated, right there with Thurman Munson and Graig Nettles.
After his fall into the photographers’ pit in the Game 5 victory over the A’s, Jeter was “hobbling around pretty good,” Monahan said. “He had trouble putting his shoes on. He had trouble getting dressed. You could see the pain, and it was a tough time for him. But he’s never going to entertain any thoughts of not playing. His mindset was, ‘This is only going to hurt me for a couple of hours, and I’ve got the night to feel better tomorrow.’”
Through the Seattle series and the first three games of the World Series, Monahan did everything he could to try to piece Jeter back together. “We used a lot of ice, a lot of contrasting back and forth, hot and cold,” the trainer said, “and pretty much when he was at the ballpark we wouldn’t let him do a lot of work on the side. We just saved every ounce of whatever energy and health we could for the innings of the ball game. We got him off his feet, put him up in the training room, and elevated his legs.”
But Jeter needed an off-season more than he needed a training table or a tub. At the time he stepped to the tenth-inning plate in the final moments of Halloween night, Arizona holding a 2–1 World Series lead, Jeter’s biggest contribution to the Yanks had come in the roles of Game 3 host and adviser to the president of the United States.
George W. Bush landed at John F. Kennedy International and flew to Yankee Stadium by helicopter (he touched down on an adjacent ball field). September 11 had changed the terms of engagement, so the Stadium was a police state complete with 1,500 cops, sharpshooters on the roof, bomb-sniffing dogs in the clubhouses, hazmat specialists in the ballpark’s bowels, and an armed Secret Service agent in the umpires’ locker room, dressed for the part.
Scheduled to become the first sitting president to throw out the c
eremonial first pitch at a World Series game since Dwight Eisenhower, Bush headed to the batting cage to warm up his right arm. He did not want anyone—countrymen, terrorists, anyone—to see the president of the United States show any sign of weakness.
Bush said he wanted to throw the pitch “with a little zip. I didn’t want people to think that their president was incapable of finding the plate.” Bush was wearing a New York Fire Department sweat jacket over a bulletproof vest when Jeter arrived on the scene to shake his hand.
“I hear you’re throwing out the first ball,” the shortstop said. “Are you going to throw the first pitch from the mound or in front of the mound?”
“I think I’ll throw from the base of the mound,” Bush said.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mr. President. You’d better throw from the mound, otherwise you’re going to get booed. This is Yankee Stadium.”
“OK. I’ll throw from the mound.”
Jeter started to walk away to get ready for Game 3 before he stopped, looked over his shoulder, and told the president, “Don’t bounce it. They’ll boo you.”
Bush suddenly did not feel as relaxed as he had five minutes earlier. “The great Derek Jeter, don’t bounce it, they’ll boo you,” the president would say. “All of a sudden the pressure mounted.”
Bush was in the dugout when Yankee Stadium’s iconic public address announcer, Bob Sheppard, introduced him to the full house in his voice-of-God way. The president waved to the crowd, stood tall on the mound behind the rubber, and threw back his head and shoulders in a pose of certainty and strength. A burned and tattered flag found at the World Trade Center site hung above the scoreboard façade behind him. Bush gave the thumbs-up sign to the masses, then fired a perfect strike to backup catcher Todd Greene.
The crowd chanted, “USA . . . USA” as Bush walked off, and then Roger Clemens outperformed the other big sporting act in town, Michael Jordan, who had emerged from retirement to make his Washington Wizards debut at Madison Square Garden. Jordan lost to the Knicks, the Diamondbacks lost to Clemens, and now Jordan’s favorite baseball player—his handpicked Nike heir—had a chance to even the World Series with one swing of his Game 4 bat.