The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Players were using performance-enhancing drugs, and clean teammates were feeling the pressure to use them to keep up with the cheaters. This dangerous dance could not go on forever.

  Giambi called Caminiti’s claims “ludicrous” and said he bulked up after McGwire introduced him to his weightlifting program in Oakland. But Murray Chass of the New York Times would later report that Giambi’s agent, Arn Tellem, had the Yankees remove steroid-related language from their $120 million contract before his client signed it.

  “There is no miracle thing to this game,” Giambi said. “You either have talent or you don’t. Steroids can’t help you hit a ball, that’s for sure.”

  Barry Bonds, who broke McGwire’s single-season home-run record after his body all but doubled in size, echoed Giambi’s sentiment. “If you’re incapable of hitting [a baseball],” Bonds said, “it doesn’t matter what you take. . . . I think [steroid use] is really irrelevant to the game of baseball.”

  Irrelevant? Players would soon find out that nothing was more relevant to their sport than performance-enhancing drugs. Mike Stanton, the Yankees’ player representative, said drug testing was among the issues on the negotiating table between the union and the owners. It was the perfect time and opportunity for Jeter and other clean players to implore the union to agree to strict testing and penalties to weed out the cheaters and protect the health of the membership.

  Jeter was a four-time World Series champ, a star with enough clout to host Saturday Night Live. He could have made a difference if he wanted to. Only when asked about Caminiti’s 50 percent figure, Jeter said, “I guess I am the other half. You can’t say half the players unless you know every player in the game.”

  His stance grew weaker by the quote. “The bottom line is they don’t test for it,” Jeter said, “so it’s not something that concerns me.”

  The shortstop even suggested steroids did not help players drive baseballs over the outfield wall. “Look at [Alfonso] Soriano,” Jeter said of the lean second baseman. “He’s not the biggest or strongest guy, but he’s hitting more home runs than anybody.”

  Jeter was like Jordan and Tiger Woods; it just was not in his DNA to lead a cause that had nothing to do with winning titles. He once declined an offer from John F. Kennedy Jr.’s George magazine to write one of its “If I Were President” columns because he did not care to make any political statements.

  In 2002, Jeter’s only concern was finding a way to win at the old October clip with a new cast of actors. Giambi had replaced Martinez at first, and Robin Ventura had replaced Scott Brosius at third. Paul O’Neill, Chuck Knoblauch, and Luis Sojo were out; Raul Mondesi, Rondell White, and John Vander Wal were among those in.

  As it turned out, Jeter’s numbers dropped a bit from his 2001 levels; he batted .297 with 18 homers and 75 RBI. But he did become only the third player since 1900 to score at least 100 runs in his first seven seasons, joining Earle Combs and Ted Williams, and his Yankees did win 103 games and another division crown. Giambi was the 41-homer, 122-RBI, .435-on-base-percentage horse he was hired to be, and Mike Mussina and the reacquired David Wells combined to win 37 games at the top of a staff stacked with the usual assortment of aces.

  Joe Torre had no reason to believe he would not be managing in his sixth World Series in seven years, especially after his team won Game 1 of the Division Series against the Anaheim Angels at Yankee Stadium, won it with Jeter opening the scoring on a homer in the first, with Bernie Williams finishing the scoring on a homer in the eighth, and with Giambi delivering a two-run shot in between.

  But Torre would not be making a return trip to the Fall Classic. In fact, Game 1 would be recorded as his final victory of 2002.

  As championship teams go, these newfangled Yankees had the requisite hitting and pitching. They were about to find out they did not have the requisite heart.

  It all started to unravel in the eighth inning of Game 2, after El Duque Hernandez surrendered back-to-back homers to Garret Anderson and Troy Glaus to give the Angels the lead. With the Yankees down 7–5, bases loaded and two outs, Jeter stepped to the plate with a home crowd of nearly 56,695 fully expecting something magical to happen near the right-field wall.

  Jeter had hit his second homer of the series in the third inning, after all, and this was his situation, his building, his month. Angels closer Troy Percival worked the count to 1-2 before throwing a pitch the shortstop did not like.

  Jeter thought it was ball two. The umpire called it strike three.

  The Yankees actually led by a 6–1 count early in Game 3 in Anaheim, only to watch Mussina go down with a groin injury before Jeff Weaver, Mike Stanton, and Steve Karsay failed to protect a 6–4 lead. If nothing else, the Yanks were making a star out of the Angels’ twenty-year-old rookie reliever, Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez, who had made all of five regular-season appearances and yet had earned his second consecutive playoff victory by striking out four in two perfect innings.

  In the losing locker room, Jeter was reminded his team had survived four Division Series sudden-death games with Oakland over the previous two seasons. “It’s a different group,” the shortstop said. “Some of us have [won sudden-death games], the ones that have been here. But this is a new group. So we’ll find out.”

  Reporters were surprised Jeter drew a line in the infield dirt between the new guys and the core guys. It did not sound like him—“You have to build up a history with this team,” Jeter said—but then again, his Yankees had never been in a first-round series where they looked so overmatched.

  None of it made sense. The Angels were paying $61 million in salary, or some $80 million less than George Steinbrenner was paying. The Yankees’ roster entered the series with 543 games’ worth of postseason experience; the Angels entered with a grand total of 2, the 2 belonging to Kevin Appier from his time in Oakland.

  Anaheim was a faceless lot, but it was also by far the superior team. With men on second and third in the fifth inning of Game 4, no outs and the score at 1–1, Jeter sent a deep fly to left field that Anderson caught on the run, honoring the fifty-fifth anniversary of Al Gionfriddo’s catch of Joe DiMaggio’s shot in the World Series.

  DiMaggio kicked the dirt back then, about the only time he reacted emotionally to a play made against him. Jeter did not kick the dirt, but his grimace and slap of the hands amounted to a rare show of on-field negativity. “Garret Anderson really pulled the plug on us,” Torre said.

  In the bottom of the fifth, the Yankees gave in as they never had. David Wells allowed a leadoff homer to Shawn Wooten and a couple of one-out singles before Darin Erstad lifted a short fly between Williams and Soriano. Williams quit on the ball, Soriano could not reach it, and Wells—undefeated as a Yankee postseason pitcher—suddenly decided he was not going to try any harder than Bernie did.

  The Angels mowed right over Wells, just as they had mowed over the previous three Yankee starters, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Mussina. When Anaheim was done in the fifth, done with Wells and Ramiro Mendoza and El Duque Hernandez, it had become the first postseason team since the 1929 Philadelphia A’s to rack up ten hits in one inning.

  “It seemed like it lasted forever,” Jeter said.

  The Angels were leading 9–2, leaving the Yankee starters with a 10.38 ERA for the series, the same opposing starters who formed what Torre called the best staff he ever had. The Yankees were not coming back from that. The final out came in the form of a Nick Johnson pop-up, and as the winners mobbed one another the way the Diamondbacks had the previous November, Jeter watched stone-faced from the dugout, his chin planted on the green-padded railing and his arms dangling down toward the dirt.

  Fireworks exploded out of the fake rock formation in left center as photographers moved in to capture this stunning image of Jeter. After a few minutes the shortstop grabbed his cap and glove and headed for the tunnel and the quickest postseason exit of his big league life.

  “It’s not a good feeling,” Jeter said. “I mean, you have one g
oal, and that’s to get to the World Series and win a championship. You shouldn’t accept losing.”

  To a man the Yankees accepted the fact that Anaheim was the superior team. Torre said the Angels reminded him of his ’96 champs. The Angels scored 31 runs on 56 hits in the four games, and the Yanks could not get the ball to Mariano Rivera after Game 1.

  “We’ve changed our personality a little bit,” Torre said.

  For the worse.

  There was a small-picture moment in Game 4 that made a big-picture statement about what had become of the dynastic Yanks. Tim Salmon hit a tapper to Wells in the fourth inning, and the left-hander turned and fired to first, his throw low and inside.

  Giambi had a choice: go for the ball and a possible catch while getting pancaked by Salmon, or let Wells’s errant throw sail away while the runner headed to second base.

  Tino Martinez? Every veteran Yankee knew what choice he would have made. But the hulking Giambi—who had a good series at the plate—chose to preserve his body and let the Angels have their way.

  Anaheim did not score in the inning, but that was not the point. The old Yankees always went for the ball, regardless of the consequences, and Giambi’s Yankees did not.

  “They wanted it more than us,” Jorge Posada said of the Angels. “It seemed like some of [our] guys were just acting like we lost a regular-season game. I can’t understand that.”

  Neither could Jeter. He became the first man to collect 100 postseason hits, and he batted .500 for the series, but he was not asking anyone to spray him with champagne over that.

  The Angels had never won a playoff series and had gone 2,527 games without appearing in one, and yet, “No team has ever played better against us than that team has,” Jeter said.

  “They did everything better than we did . . . I don’t see anyone beating them.”

  Jeter was right. The Angels would defeat the Giants in a seven-game World Series classic the Yankee shortstop could not bring himself to watch.

  After the Game 7 loss to the Diamondbacks the previous fall, Steinbrenner barked, “I believe in what Ernest Hemingway said. The way to be a good loser is to practice at it. And I ain’t going to be practicing.”

  Suddenly Steinbrenner and Jeter and the rest of the Yanks were practicing how to lose. They would get damn good at it, too.

  George Steinbrenner was not going to absorb any humiliating defeat in silence. This was not the programming he had in mind when he launched his own TV station, the YES Network, in March. The more he thought about the money spent on the 2002 Yankees and the different ways the no-frills Angels had dismantled his team, the more Steinbrenner stewed.

  The Boss needed a suitable forum, and he got one in a wide-ranging December interview scheduled to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his purchase of the Yankees on January 3, 1973. Given the opportunity to discuss his three decades of ownership with Wayne Coffey of the Daily News, Steinbrenner teed off on figures past and present, but especially present.

  He pointed out that Joe Torre had been fired three times before he became a certain Hall of Famer with the Yankees, and that Torre had come so far “because of an organization, and he’s got to remember that.” Steinbrenner also fired a hard jab at Don Zimmer and the rest of Torre’s staff, saying he wanted the coaches “to understand that just being a friend of Joe Torre’s is not enough.”

  Only the Boss did not become the Boss by taking on managers and coaches. The old Big Ten football man was never afraid to sack his star quarterbacks, a truth discovered the hard way by the likes of Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, and Don Mattingly.

  So Steinbrenner blitzed Derek Jeter from the blind side.

  Never mind that Jeter had batted .500 against the Angels, or that Jeter had 101 postseason hits at age twenty-eight. Steinbrenner cared only that his shortstop had not won him a title since the Boss guaranteed him $189 million of his hard-earned cash.

  Jeter had gone from winning his fourth title and signing the monster contract to losing in the World Series and then losing in the first round. Jeter had gone from hitting .339 and signing the monster contract to hitting .311 and then .297. Naturally, Steinbrenner was not paying nine figures for this.

  Asked if he saw Jeter as a strong candidate to become the team’s first captain since Mattingly, whom the Boss once ordered to get a haircut, Steinbrenner actually questioned the shortstop’s focus, declared that Jeter didn’t need to do as many commercials as he did, and worried aloud about his late-night habits.

  “When I read in the paper that he’s out until 3 a.m. in New York City going to a birthday party, I won’t lie,” Steinbrenner told the News. “That doesn’t sit well with me. That was in violation of Joe’s curfew. That’s the focus I’m talking about.

  “Jeter’s still a young man. He’ll be a very good candidate for the captaincy. But he’s got to show me and the other players that that’s not the right way. He’s got to make sure his undivided, unfettered attention is given to baseball. I just wish he’d eliminate some of the less important things and he’d be right back to where he was in the past.”

  Jeter was stunned when he read Steinbrenner’s comments. The very essence of what he believed himself to be—an athlete devoted exclusively to winning—was being debunked by his own employer.

  Steinbrenner’s criticism of Jeter’s endorsement load made little sense, as the shortstop and his agent, Casey Close, turned down more sponsorship deals than they ever accepted. Jeter spent most of his off-season a long way from Madison Avenue, in Tampa, so he could work out at the Yankees’ facilities. He was a lot more concerned about his bat speed than he was about his portfolio.

  Close also wanted to avoid overexposure, and to pick corporate partners that best matched up with his client’s image. In fact, at least one prominent marketing expert criticized the strategy for failing to fully capitalize on Jeter’s earning power.

  Sonny Vaccaro, who fired the first shot in the sneaker company revolution by signing Michael Jordan for Nike, said Close erred when he agreed to put Jeter under the Jordan brand umbrella and group him in a commercial with lesser lights such as the NBA’s Ray Allen, the NFL’s Randy Moss, and boxing’s Roy Jones.

  “Derek Jeter was good-looking, articulate, free of scandal, a champion, and he played for one of the greatest brands in sports,” Vaccaro said. “Jeter was a premier guy and he allowed himself to become second fiddle, ancillary.”

  But just as Jeter was not trying to break Alex Rodriguez’s salary record, Close was not trying to drive Jeter past Jordan and Tiger Woods on the endorsement front. Jeter’s goals were to protect his image and win as many championships as possible, and not in that order.

  The Yankees had not won since 2000, a drought of biblical proportions in Steinbrenner’s world. Jeter believed that was the primary reason the Boss bashed him.

  So he met with Steinbrenner and left the sit-down believing he had sufficiently explained to the Boss that the gossip pages often printed bogus information about his nocturnal travels, and that he had no interest in becoming another Broadway Joe.

  But the shortstop grew angry again in February after his quote in the Daily News following Steinbrenner’s controversial remarks—“I’m not going to change. Not at all”—inspired the screaming back-page headline “party on.” Jeter believed the line was taken out of context, and that the headline gave fans the impression he was more interested in carousing than he was in making sure the Yankees did not suffer another first-round defeat.

  Jeter had not been this angry about a tabloid headline since the Post’s “shortslop” in ’96, and he decided to punch back at all New York metropolitan-area outlets that covered him on a regular basis. A day after assuring the Yankees’ beat writers gathered at the team’s minor league complex that he would address the Steinbrenner controversy when he reported to camp, the Associated Press ran an interview with Jeter that covered all the bases in a way the shortstop never did.

  “He’s the Boss, and he’s entitled to his opinion,
right or wrong, but what he said has been turned into me being this big party animal,” Jeter told the AP’s Steve Wilstein in the interview arranged by Close. “He even made a reference to one birthday party. That’s been turned into that I’m like Dennis Rodman now.

  “I don’t think that’s fair. I have no problems with people criticizing how I play. But it bothers me when people question my work ethic. That’s when you’re talking about my integrity. I take a lot of pride in how hard I work. I work extremely hard in the off-season. I work extremely hard during the season to win. My priorities are straight.”

  Jeter said the Daily News “party on” headline sent fans a message that “couldn’t be farther from the truth” and repeated his claim to Steinbrenner that the gossip pages were putting him in clubs and bedrooms he had never visited.

  “I’m not a hermit,” Jeter said. “It’s not like I’m locked up in my house. . . . They’ve got me dating everyone imaginable. A lot of it I wish I would have.”

  The writers who regularly covered Jeter were upset he chose to give his side to the AP, and to a columnist he did not know. Jeter was not apologizing. He said Steinbrenner’s remarks had gone national—Jeter was pestered about them at the Super Bowl in San Diego—and so he decided to go national, too.

  Upon arriving in camp on February 17, Jeter met with close to a hundred reporters in the Yankees’ dugout at Legends Field and acknowledged he was concerned his pristine reputation had been splattered with mud for the first time.

  “Image is important, because that’s who I am,” Jeter said. “It’s not like I have this false image. I don’t want Yankee fans to think I don’t care if we win or lose, that I’m caught up in the New York nightlife.”

  Of course, there was one sure-fire way to prove that to any fan inclined to doubt Jeter’s commitment for the first time—win. Win it all. To help Jeter toward that end, his most prominent critic, Steinbrenner, opened his vault again and signed Cuban pitcher and defector Jose Contreras to a four-year, $32 million deal and signed Japanese slugger Hideki Matsui to a three-year, $21 million deal.