The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Steinbrenner did not attend the press conference; he sent his son, Hal, and son-in-law, Steve Swindal, in his place. Nobody could understand why the Boss did not wait until the following week, when the Yankees could have thrown Jeter a fitting coronation in the Bronx, rather than this rush job in a modest interleague setting on the road.

  Jeter insisted he did not care. “An honor is an honor regardless of where you get it,” he said.

  If teammates always saw Jeter as their unofficial captain, they remained curious over how he would carry the official label. Many assumed he would take the Mattingly approach and continue to counsel players privately, rather than call them out in front of the group. Jeter had loudly reprimanded Bernie Williams and Jay Witasick before and during Game 6 of the 2001 World Series, but Mattingly had occasionally aired out a teammate, too, especially Paul O’Neill.

  “O’Neill would hit a ball hard right at somebody and he’d be whining halfway to first,” former Yankees manager Buck Showalter said, “and Mattingly would jump his ass and say, ‘Oh, big fuckin’ O’Neill, grow up. You think these people give a shit that you hit the ball on the nose at the right fielder. I don’t want to hear it when you hit one off the end of the bat and it corkscrews over the third baseman’s head.’”

  Like Mattingly, Jeter was not one to pull a Knute Rockne in team meetings, though a couple of weeks earlier in Boston, after three straight losses to Texas, he had told players in one meeting he did not see the same fire in them he had seen when he was injured and watching on TV.

  That period of watching and waiting positively killed Jeter, who had never played in fewer than 148 games. He was going stir-crazy inside the home he purchased in 2001, a $12.6 million apartment in the upper reaches of Trump World Tower. On one visit, Jeter’s sister, Sharlee, found Derek stripped down to his boxer briefs, batting helmet on, his Louisville Slugger planted on his bare shoulder as he prepared to swing at an imaginary pitch. Jeter would run around his 5,425-square-foot place as if he were racing from first to third, yelling at his sister, “I’m back, I’m back.”

  Jeter made it back in time to play 119 games, to collect his 1,500th career hit in August, and to lift his batting average to .324—2 points behind batting champ Bill Mueller of Boston. Jeter would finish his eighth season without earning his first Gold Glove—the award would go to Alex Rodriguez for the second straight season; Omar Vizquel had won it the previous nine years—and the sabermetricians were closing hard on him, presenting more and more numbers that placed Jeter among the very worst defensive shortstops in the game.

  But he always had October as his counterclaim. And after feeling the full force of George Steinbrenner’s mouth and Ken Huckaby’s knee, Jeter wanted this October like none before it.

  By the eighth inning of Game 7 of a classic American League Championship Series against the Red Sox, Derek Jeter was a physical wreck. His left shoulder still ached from his opening-night collision with Ken Huckaby in Toronto, and his left thumb had been rendered useless by a ruptured tendon suffered on a Game 1 dive for a ground ball.

  Of course, Jeter and the Yankees did not disclose the severity of the thumb injury, and when reporters inquired about the omnipresent ice wraps, the shortstop said, “It’s no big deal.”

  Dislocated shoulder aside, no bruise or sprain or strain had ever stopped Jeter from playing a regular-season game, never mind a Game 7 against the Yankees’ defining opponent on the other side of the greatest rivalry in sports.

  Jeter was always getting hit by fastballs on the hands and wrists, the result of his dive-into-the-pitch style and the prevailing opposing strategy of working him inside. So he was used to getting by with swollen knuckles and mangled fingers.

  “He couldn’t even hold the bat one time,” Jorge Posada said. “He didn’t tell Joe Torre and he was hiding it from the trainers, and he told me, ‘Hey, I’ve got one hand. I can find a way to get a hit with one hand.’”

  Again, Jeter’s threshold for pain was one of the Yankees’ most valuable assets. But when word spread internally after Boston’s Game 1 victory that the shortstop had ruptured a tendon in his thumb, some Yankees thought Jeter was done and the series was over. Neither was the case.

  If Jeter was not the same hitter who had batted .429 in the first-round triumph over Minnesota, he was a relevant figure and the ultimate survivor in a series displaying all the hostilities and haunts that had shaped Yankees–Red Sox for decades.

  Jeter had homered off Pedro Martinez to tie the score in the third inning of Game 3, a game that would see a brawl featuring the thirty-one-year-old Martinez throwing seventy-two-year-old Zimmer to the Fenway Park ground, Pedro plunking the Yanks’ Karim Garcia, Manny Ramirez charging Roger Clemens, and a Red Sox employee battling Garcia and Jeff Nelson in the bullpen. “We’ve upgraded it from a battle to a war,” said losing Boston manager Grady Little.

  A ghostly white Zimmer ended up postgame on a stretcher and in an ambulance after his mad, bulls-of-Pamplona dash at Boston’s pitcher, who took a little too much delight in putting the old man down.

  So the series and the teams looked as discolored as Jeter’s thumb late in Game 7, Red Sox up 5–2 and five outs away from a trip to the World Series and a shot to win it all for the first time since 1918. Boston had knocked around Clemens for a 4–0 lead before Mike Mussina made the first relief appearance of his career and kept his team within reach by escaping a two-on, no-out jam in the fourth and by pitching two more scoreless innings beyond that.

  Giambi, the $120 million designated hitter demoted to seventh in the lineup, hit two solo shots off Martinez, and David Ortiz responded with one off David Wells. Little sent Martinez out for the eighth, a move that surprised his starter and his team for this reason: Pedro had finished the seventh by striking out Alfonso Soriano and then pointing a punctuating finger toward the night sky.

  With one out, the bases clear, and an 0-2 count on Jeter in the bottom of the eighth, the Yankees looked beaten, anyway, at least until Jeter ripped the next pitch to right field, a corner of the Stadium almost as kind to him as it had been to Babe Ruth. Trot Nixon took an unfortunate path to the ball, which sailed over his head and into a whole new ball game.

  Bernie Williams singled in Jeter, and Little came out to remove a spent Martinez—or so it seemed. The Boston manager left the mound after he left the ball in Pedro’s right hand. On his way to the dugout, Little crossed the line between blind faith and career suicide.

  Hideki Matsui did what Jeter did—doubled on an 0-2 pitch—and Little did not do a damn thing about it, other than watch Jorge Posada hit a bloop that half the Red Sox roster chased and could not catch. The game was tied, Little removed Martinez, and the Curse of the Bambino felt as real as it had inside Shea Stadium in 1986, the night the ball rolled through Bill Buckner’s legs.

  The Yankees and Red Sox were destined to go extra innings. They had already played twenty-five times in 2003, including this ALCS, the Yanks winning thirteen, the Sox winning twelve. Each team had scored twenty-nine runs in the sixty-three innings of regulation in the series, and given the devout fatalism passed down from New England generation to New England generation, there was little question which team would score the magical thirtieth run.

  So who was going to assume the role of Bucky Dent? And when would that Yankee assume it?

  Aaron Boone had come to New York from Cincinnati in a trade-deadline deal to replace third baseman Robin Ventura, who was sent to the Dodgers. Over the final two months of the regular season, Boone’s new captain had made a hell of an impression on him.

  “When I came over from the National League,” Boone said, “I was under the impression Derek Jeter was a very good player. But when I got to play with him, I had no idea he was that good. I was blown away by how good of a player he is.”

  So when Jeter said something, Boone listened.

  “Like in the first inning he’d come back and I’d ask him how the pitcher was,” Boone said. “And Derek always said, ‘This guy
fucking sucks,’ every single time. That was always his scouting report.”

  Jeter had another scouting report for Boone, this one about Yankee Stadium.

  “Every now and then in the regular season the ghosts will come out,” Jeter told him. “But they come out in October all the time.”

  Boone came to bat in the eleventh inning of Game 7 with all of two hits in the series, and five hits in thirty-one postseason at-bats for a .161 average. “You stink right now,” his older brother, Bret, the Seattle second baseman and World Series broadcaster, had told him the night before.

  “Do something tomorrow,” Bret continued, “and everyone will forget all about that.”

  Tomorrow had finally come, and only because Mariano Rivera pitched three scoreless innings in relief, and only because Boone—benched in favor of Enrique Wilson—pinch-ran for Ruben Sierra in the eighth. He was leading off the eleventh against knuckleballer Tim Wakefield, who had pitched a 1-2-3 tenth and had been MVP brilliant all series.

  Willie Randolph reminded Boone that he was his pre-series sleeper pick, his choice to be the hero. Torre told the third baseman to bring a certain plan to the plate. “Stay through the middle of the field,” the manager said. “It doesn’t mean you won’t hit it out, but stay through the middle.”

  Boone told himself to take a pitch, then changed his mind as he approached the batter’s box. If that first Wakefield knuckleball looked good, he decided he was going to swing.

  Boone was hoping and praying for a single. “But like Derek told me,” he said, “the ghosts will show up eventually.”

  At 12:18 a.m., Wakefield’s first knuckler floated over the plate; Boone raged into it, sent it sky-high to left field, and landed it deep in the seats as the crowd of 56,279 made Yankee Stadium as loud as it had ever been. He knew it was gone on contact. As he ran around the bases, Boone told himself to look around and take it all in.

  Wakefield marched off the field, grabbed his jacket in the dugout, and headed for the tunnel as the Yankees mobbed Boone around the plate. Rivera collapsed on the vacated mound as if he had seen some immaculate vision. Jeter stepped away from the scrum near the plate and did his signature pump of the right fist for the crowd. Wearing a gray hooded sweat jacket on the losing side, Pedro Martinez sat on the bench and wore a mask of sheer disbelief.

  The Curse of the Bambino lived on. “I believe in ghosts,” Jeter said in the winning clubhouse. “And we’ve got some ghosts in this Stadium.”

  The Yankees partied deep into the night, leaving their clubhouse in its old champagne-soaked state. Mussina and the bullpen catcher, Mike Borzello, were the last men in there while Stadium workers were vacuuming the champagne and beer out of the carpet. Mussina and Borzello were sitting in a corner at 3:00 a.m., asking each other the same questions over and over.

  How did we just do that? How did we ever win that game?

  Earlier, in the losing clubhouse, the Red Sox were in desperate need of grief counselors. “If you told me somebody just came in here and shot half my teammates with an AK-47,” said Boston pitcher Bronson Arroyo, “by the looks on people’s faces I would’ve believed it.”

  Arroyo was struck by the presence of the anti-Jeter, Nomar Garciaparra, a great shortstop who hadn’t won a title. “Nomar stood up and talked and he was crying,” Arroyo said. “He was saying, ‘Everyone else other than the twenty-five guys here will never understand what it’s like to play in this uniform, and not being able to get over the hump, and what it’s going to do to us this entire off-season. . . . Don’t let it get to you. We’re all going to have to deal with this shit, and nobody else knows what it’s like.’”

  On the somber plane ride back to Boston, some players had to listen to utility man Lou Merloni, a Red Sox fan while growing up in Framingham, Massachusetts, rail about the fact that he would spend the winter locked up in his own little prison.

  “You guys are going home to Florida, man,” Merloni barked at his teammates. “You don’t have to deal with this shit. I live here. I can’t go to Blockbuster without hearing this shit. Why didn’t Grady take [Martinez] out of the game? I might not come out of my house for two months.”

  It would be another long and cruel winter in New England. But as much as it would shock the Red Sox and the rest of baseball, Boston was nine days away from receiving this glorious bulletin from the south:

  It would be another long and cruel winter in the Bronx, too.

  Florida Marlins phenom Josh Beckett struck out Derek Jeter in the first inning of Game 3 of the World Series, and back in the Yankees’ dugout Luis Sojo heard Jeter give the kind of scouting report the shortstop often gave Aaron Boone.

  “Derek comes in and says, ‘I’m going to get him. I’m going to get this guy. I’m going to kill him. Just kill him,’” Sojo said. “Then he gets the only three hits [Beckett] allows.

  “Jeter’s always saying he’s going to get this guy or kill that guy. I’ve never seen a player with as much confidence as he has. It’s amazing. I think that’s what makes him a winner.”

  Jeter scored three runs in that 6–1 victory, giving the Yankees a 2–1 World Series lead and injecting his heavily favored team with the kind of confidence only its captain could provide. The Marlins were expected to roll over on command; they were spending $120 million less on payroll.

  But in Game 4, Florida scored three first-inning runs on Roger Clemens, who was at the end of his alleged retirement tour. The Marlins weathered Ruben Sierra’s tying two-run triple with two outs in the ninth and beat the Yanks’ Jeff Weaver on Alex Gonzalez’s leadoff homer in the twelfth.

  Jeter had been a big proponent of the Weaver acquisition the year before, and yet the pitcher had been a complete bust, his sagging shoulders suggesting a constant crisis of faith. Weaver did negotiate a 1-2-3 eleventh, retiring the Marlins on eight pitches. But Joe Torre’s decision to push his luck with Weaver rather than summon Mariano Rivera turned the World Series against him.

  The Yankees’ season began to crumble in the hour before Game 5, when Jason Giambi nodded at a columnist talking to Torre behind the batting cage, silently asking for a word with his manager. Giambi would tell Torre he needed to be scratched from the lineup because his bum knee would not allow him to play first base.

  One Yankee coach said he believed Giambi begged out because he could not make the throw from first to second, and because he was afraid David Wells’s pickoff move would put him in the embarrassing position of having to make that very throw.

  Whatever. One inning deep into his start, and one day after he joked about his firm lack of commitment to fitness, Wells followed Giambi’s lead and pulled a no más with his bad back. The Marlins carried a 6–2 lead into the ninth and held on as a Yanks rally—featuring a pinch-hit homer from none other than Giambi—fell short.

  Jeter contributed three hits, two runs, a walk, and an RBI to the lost cause, and given his own history of playing in pain, he was furious Giambi had begged out of the lineup on a night he was healthy enough to hit a home run.

  Asked if players were upset with Giambi, one Yankee said, “It was more like rage, and Jeter was hotter than anyone. It was like, ‘Are you fuckin’ kidding me? It’s the World Series and you’re pulling yourself out because you’re afraid their guys like Juan Pierre and Luis Castillo will bunt all over the place?’ Jason actually made it worse for himself by hitting that home run. My first thought was about Derek, and how sitting would never even cross his mind. He’d go out there at 25 percent feeling he’d find some way to beat you.”

  Game 6 in the Bronx was a damning indictment of the Yankee offense. The formula for victory was in place: Andy Pettitte went seven strong innings, Jeter made one of his signature jump plays in the hole, and Florida sent out a twenty-three-year-old pitcher going on three days’ rest for the first time.

  And yet Josh Beckett dominated the Yankees in his complete-game performance. The Yanks managed five lousy hits, struck out nine times, and lost, 2–0. Yankee batters were terrible all y
ear with runners in scoring position, and that proved to be their undoing against Florida, as they were 7 for 50 in the Series.

  Three foundation players—Jeter, Pettitte, and Posada—made mistakes in the Game 6 field that allowed the two Florida runs. Posada missed a tag, Pettitte threw to the wrong base, and Jeter committed his first World Series error since 1996.

  But this defeat was not about defense or pitching; it was about hitting. In the eighth inning, after Soriano opened with a single, Jeter brought the full house to life by battling Beckett to a full count. Everyone was waiting for Jeter to create some of that same old magic near the right-field wall; instead he ripped a pitch to center field. Once Juan Pierre settled under it, Torre and everyone else on the Yankee side knew it was not meant to be.

  The hundredth World Series game played in Yankee Stadium ended with the Marlins in a dog pile, with their catcher, Pudge Rodriguez, firing his mask into the sky. “It makes you sick,” Jeter said of the fact that another team was celebrating a title in his ballpark. “How else can you feel?”

  Marlins players, wives, and kids ended up on the field. The team owner, Jeffrey Loria, did an amateur-hour run around the bases, looking like some yahoo banker who had just won a fan contest.

  Jeter sat at his locker in full uniform, hoping reporters would keep him there all night so he would not have to take off his jersey for the last time. Players were leaving the building, and Jeter was still sitting there trying to make sense of it all.

  “They just played better than us,” he said. “There’s no sugarcoating it. They pitched better than us, they had more clutch hits. People need to stop saying it’s a big shock.”

  The Yankees had been beaten by the smaller-market Marlins a year after they were beaten by the smaller-market Angels and two years after they were beaten by the smaller-market Diamondbacks. No, George Steinbrenner did not share the glee of the commissioner, Bud Selig, who embraced the virtues of league-wide parity championed by the late NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle.