The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  He thought wrong. A-Rod conceded the two shortstops “haven’t been as tight the last three years,” a claim everyone in Yankeedom knew to be a gross understatement.

  “We had that discussion,” Jeter said, “and in my mind that was the end of it. In my mind it’s a dead issue, in [Alex’s] mind it’s a dead issue, so we just move on from there. . . . We don’t have problems. Let’s get that out there.”

  As much as Jeter cited Rodriguez’s marriage and the players’ off-field demands as the cause of their altered friendship, and as much as he compared their differences to those of brothers who argue and make up, the captain knew this ship was not sailing.

  Their relationship would remain under constant observation, something A-Rod would acknowledge in a spring training interview with Matt Lauer on the Today show.

  “He’s like a brother to me,” Rodriguez said of Jeter. “I mean, we’ve been out to lunch this week three or four times already. And I think they have to see us hold hands and go to a movie so they know that we’ve made up. When we’re fifty years old, they’re going to say, ‘Well, Alex and Derek, are they arguing? Are they best friends? Are they brothers?’ We’re just having fun with it now.”

  Jeter was having no fun with this story. He knew people were going to study the vibe between the shortstop and third baseman a lot more closely than they would study the out-of-town scoreboard.

  As it turned out, that vibe helped take Derek Jeter right out of his element. In a season-opening loss to Tampa Bay in Tokyo, his first game as Rodriguez’s teammate, Jeter grounded out four times and struck out in five at-bats; A-Rod fared only a bit better, twice striking out looking, popping out, and doubling and scoring a run in four at-bats.

  Jeter and Rodriguez were dreadful for much of April; A-Rod went 0 for 16 in a series at Fenway Park, a development all of Boston met with considerable glee. But Jeter seemed to be the one more adversely affected by this tense and awkward pairing on the left side of the infield, as he descended into the worst slump of his life.

  With the Red Sox looking to finish a three-game sweep in the Bronx on April 25, Jeter struck out three times in a 2–0 loss, extended his hitless streak to twenty-five at-bats, and actually heard the home crowd of 55,338 turn against him. Booing Derek Jeter? “I never thought I’d hear that,” said Boston’s Kevin Millar, who called the Yankee fans “ruthless.”

  Of course, Jeter would never admit that Rodriguez’s presence was unnerving him; the captain would not even use the word slump to describe his, well, slump. But several teammates said they thought A-Rod’s arrival was a contributing factor, if not an overriding factor, in Jeter’s struggles at the plate.

  “Derek had the whole city to himself,” said one teammate, “and Alex represented a threat to that. It was like Derek was trying to protect his home from an invasion.”

  Rodriguez had been stepping to the Stadium plate to music from The Natural, and by the end of the home Boston series he had managed to lift his batting average to .257 with three homers, or 75 points and three homers higher than Jeter’s totals.

  The shortstop was jumpy in the box, shifting his weight too quickly to his front foot and flailing away at pitches he should have taken. The fans adored him, yes, but they were tired of watching it and decided to let Jeter know it.

  “I would boo myself, too,” the captain said. “I wouldn’t want to play on a team where if you’re playing bad, they don’t care.”

  Jeter quickly shot down any suggestions that his shoulder and thumb injuries from 2003 were keeping him down. He also made sure to remain available to reporters, and to maintain his even-keeled approach with them.

  Jeter did not change his in-game persona, either. If the twenty-fifth man on the roster put down a productive sacrifice bunt, Jeter remained the first Yankee on the top step of the dugout to congratulate him.

  The captain did not want any teammates or fans to sense that he was panicking, or that he was growing angry over the boos. Jeter even joked that his parents were not waiting around for him after games anymore. “If your parents walk out on you,” he said, “you know you’re not doing too well. They’re probably getting booed, too.”

  Oakland came in on April 27, and Jeter’s 0 for 3 left him 0 for 28. The fans reacted differently this time, as if making up for the unforgiving Sunday crowd. They stood and cheered for the shortstop when he batted in the seventh inning, trying to will him to a hit.

  Jeter grounded into a force play.

  The following night, the fans gave the shortstop standing ovations in his final two at-bats—“Let’s go, Jeter,” they chanted—before he walked and grounded out, extending his hitless streak to 32, doubling A-Rod’s 0 for 16 in Boston and establishing the longest Yankee run of futility since Jimmy Wynn’s 0 for 32 in 1977.

  Just before that closing groundout, Bubba Crosby had whiffed on a feeble swing and then stopped on his way out of the box when the crowd erupted in cheers. Crosby thought the umpire had somehow ruled it a ball, at least until it became obvious the crowd was only responding to the hitter on deck.

  “That’s what happens when you bat in front of Jeter,” Crosby said.

  That’s what happens when four championships and more than eight years of dignity and class are rewarded with clemency for thirty-one consecutive failures at the plate.

  “The fans have been great,” Jeter said. “They’ve been cheering for me going up, but afterwards they haven’t had anything to cheer about.”

  On the night of April 29, for the third and final game of the series against Oakland, Jeter took extra batting practice and listened as the human good luck charm, Yogi Berra, told him he once went 0 for 32, too.

  Jeter had heard advice from teammates, friends, people on the street. He had engaged in private lessons with the new hitting coach and former captain, Don Mattingly. The 0 for 32 had cost Jeter 2 full points from his lifetime batting average, which fell to .314, and had left fans actually feeling sorry for him.

  “A streak like that,” Jeter said, “you wouldn’t want to wish on anyone, even other teams. Guys on other teams even have been giving me support.”

  When the Yankees’ leadoff man dug in against Oakland lefty Barry Zito, he absorbed a louder ovation than any .161 hitter had ever heard in the first inning of a game in which his team was already trailing 2–0. The Yankee Stadium crowd was back on its feet, trying to do what it could to help. Only this was Jeter’s burden to bear.

  Zito owned one of the best curve balls in the game, but he decided to open with a fastball. On his end, Jeter decided to open with a cut that released all of his mounting pressures and frustrations, like a volcano blowing its top. The ball traveled well over 400 feet, over the left-center wall, into Monument Park. Jeter’s first homer of the year left the Stadium shaking to its core.

  Jeter did a slight fist pump as he rounded first, but his face remained expressionless. “I was smiling on the inside,” he confessed. Jeter had his first hit since an infield single against the White Sox nine days earlier, and he was so haunted by the drought, he figured his home-run ball might crash into a bird in flight and fall into an outfielder’s glove.

  The shortstop touched home with the fans chanting his name. Jeter lost himself in a procession of high-fives near the dugout, and when he found his manager, “he kind of head-butted me in the chest,” Joe Torre said. Jeter took his curtain call, liberated at last. “It was like the world was off his shoulders,” Torre said.

  Jeter did not care that his first hit of the night would also be his last. “It’s like a bad dream is over with,” the captain said. He was batting .165 and loving every precious second of it.

  On July 1, Derek Jeter proved himself to be the toughest shortstop and the toughest man in the toughest rivalry.

  He had rediscovered his stroke to hit .400 over June and blast an A-Rodian nine homers in the month, driving the Yankees to a seven-and-a-half-game lead in the American League East and a potential series sweep of the Red Sox.

  With two
outs and runners on second and third in the top of the twelfth, Trot Nixon at the plate, the Yankees and Red Sox had already played a game right out of the 2003 ALCS. Boston was burning to win once in New York, to avoid leaving town with an insurmountable eight-and-a-half-game deficit.

  Pedro Martinez made the early statement by hitting Gary Sheffield between the numbers with a pitch in the first inning, after Sheffield had the audacity to step out and call for time with Pedro starting his delivery. Sheffield shouted at Martinez and took a few steps toward the mound, but the Red Sox were going to fight for this one.

  Twenty-four of them, anyway.

  Nomar Garciaparra had missed the first fifty-seven games of the season with Achilles tendinitis but had returned to the lineup on June 9 and played in the first two games of this latest Yankees series. Only on this crucial night in the Bronx, Garciaparra told manager Terry Francona his right Achilles was too sore to go.

  Garciaparra started stretching the tendon in the ninth inning to see if he could at least enter as a pinch hitter, yet he said he could not get it loose enough to play. As it happened, Garciaparra’s Achilles was as frayed as his relationship with the team.

  If Nomar had been as beloved in Boston as Jeter had been in New York, the Red Sox star was mortally wounded by the off-season pursuit of A-Rod and by what he considered a low-ball contract offer from management. Garciaparra had become distant, cold, lost in his own isolated world. But the brooding and the growing disconnect between player and team had largely been secrets contained within the walls of Boston proper until the witching hour of July 1.

  Few outside those walls had ever questioned Garciaparra’s work ethic and Jeter-like commitment to excellence, at least until this night, until this game, and until this little pop fly Nixon had hit over A-Rod’s head in the twelfth. Garciaparra was on the bench, and Jeter was on the run. In a matter of seconds, Nomar would be No-more.

  Rodriguez had given up on the play; he went through the motions on a trot toward the plunging ball. Meanwhile, Jeter was flying for the left-field line and tracking the ball with his glove hand extended. The shortstop had been playing the left-handed Nixon to pull the ball, so he had a long way to go. It looked like two runs for the Red Sox and a round of applause for the captain for giving it the ol’ college try.

  Only Jeter made the catch just inside the line, drawing a late October sound from the midsummer crowd. There was only one problem: Jeter did not have time to hit the brakes. He had two full strides to make a pick-your-poison choice: crash into the low wall knees first, or take flight and take his chances.

  Jeter decided to dive headfirst into the crowd with the same speed and ferocity of Pete Rose diving headfirst into third. The captain figured his landing would be cushioned by the beer-stained lap of some overweight fan stuffed inside a T-shirt bearing the Jeter name and number.

  “When I fell into the stands in the playoffs against Oakland,” Jeter would say of the 2001 Division Series, “I landed in the photographers’ pit and it was all cement. So I thought on this one I would try to jump over the photographers’ pit and run into somebody, but there was nobody there.”

  Millions of Yankee fans would have killed to get close to Jeter, to touch him, to be in his presence for even a nanosecond. In midair, realizing there was no canceling this flight, Jeter needed just one of those fans to be there for him.

  In a crowd of 55,265, not a single soul was there to save Jeter from himself.

  Having given no thought to the shoulder he had wrecked the year before, Jeter went face first into a vacated chair three rows back, his legs and spikes kicking up toward the sky on impact. “I always get a laugh out of it when people say, ‘You could’ve stopped,’” Jeter would say. “No, you can’t stop. I was running full speed and I caught it like three feet from the wall.”

  The fall in Game 5 of the Oakland series actually hurt more and caused a drastic decline in Jeter’s performance across the balance of the postseason. “In the Oakland one,” Jeter said, “a lot of things hurt.”

  But this regular-season dive against Boston was not just about pain. It was about a $189 million captain risking his million-dollar smile to make a play pretty boys are not supposed to make.

  As Jeter was helped to his feet in the crowd, Rodriguez reached in, put his right hand on his forehead, and then started waving for the trainer with his left. A-Rod saw the blood on Jeter’s chin, the blood splatter on his jersey, and the growing mouse under his right eye.

  “He looked like he got punched by Mike Tyson,” Rodriguez said.

  With photographers firing away, Jeter was helped by a couple of fans and a couple of cops. He put his right hand to his mouth to feel for blood, then closed his lips and rolled his tongue to make certain his teeth were intact. He stepped on top of the wall, rising above the applauding fans, before lowering himself to the field and wobbling away with Jorge Posada on one side and the trainer, Gene Monahan, on the other.

  Jeter dabbed his sweatband against his mouth, checking again for blood, and the crowd gave him a standing ovation as he crossed the field. Monahan held a towel to Jeter’s chin, and before the shortstop went down the dugout steps he flipped the ball to a kid. Of course he did.

  Just as Manny Ramirez was homering in the top of the thirteenth, an ambulance beyond the left-field wall flashed its red lights before it transported the Yankee captain to Columbia-Presbyterian. But whenever Jeter made a play like the one he had just made, the Yankees knew they could not lose.

  With the Yanks down to their last strike, Miguel Cairo doubled in the tying run before John Flaherty delivered the game winner four hours and twenty minutes after the first pitch was thrown. A-Rod and others said it was the best game they had ever played in, and their moods were brightened when the team disclosed that x-rays on Jeter’s battered cheek were negative. The captain was diagnosed with a lacerated chin, a bruised right cheek, and a bruised right shoulder.

  “He took off like a 747,” Rodriguez said. “If they had said he’d broken his shoulder, you wouldn’t be surprised. If they had said he’d broken his jaw, you wouldn’t be surprised.”

  A-Rod actually finished the game at shortstop, his old position, but only after he turned a remarkable double play on a bases-loaded, no-out smash from Kevin Millar in the eleventh, finishing the play with a throw to the plate from one knee.

  Nonetheless, Rodriguez was humbled by the physical sacrifice Jeter had made. “Greatest catch I’ve ever seen,” A-Rod said. “It was unbelievable. He’s just so unselfish. He put his body in a compromising spot. It was hard to watch.”

  Even as the handsome face of baseball, Jeter was willing to take a punch. He was the full-scholarship player with a walk-on’s approach. So once he got inside with the medical and training staff, Jeter needed to make one thing perfectly clear.

  “We’re trying to organize the injury,” Monahan said, “and the first thing out of his mouth to the doc and myself was, ‘I’m playing tomorrow.’ That was the epitome of toughness right there.”

  On the losing side of the Stadium, the Red Sox were shaking their heads over the way Jeter gave up his body to record an out in a regular-season game his team did not need to win. Curt Schilling was sitting at a table in the Red Sox clubhouse when he was approached by the Boston Herald’s Tony Massarotti, who made a remark about Jeter’s play.

  “You know what,” said Schilling, pointing to the fingers of his left hand, “that’s why he’s got four of those big fucking rings right here.”

  At that moment in time Jeter had a higher standing in the Red Sox clubhouse than Nomar did.

  As a former member of the 2001 Oakland A’s, Boston center fielder Johnny Damon had not gotten over Jeter’s Division Series flip to the plate before watching the Yankee shortstop batter and bloody himself on his dive.

  Damon said the respect for Jeter inside the Red Sox clubhouse grew with each team-first move the Yankee made. “Not one player on any of my Boston teams ever had a single negative thing to say about hi
m,” Damon would say.

  The Red Sox GM, Theo Epstein, had his first brush with Jeter’s greatness as a young San Diego Padres official during the ’98 World Series. “You hear all the glowing things said about him and your natural inclination is to think that it can’t be all true,” Epstein would say, “and that he’s built up by the media. . . . You come and see him play twenty times a year against you and you realize, hey, he’s the real deal. He’s earned every bit of his reputation . . . You’d want your kid, if he grows up to play ball, to be that type of player and person.”

  If Jeter was baseball’s most respected figure even before Trot Nixon lofted that ball over Alex Rodriguez’s head, Garciaparra was not far behind. But something changed forever the moment Jeter made the catch and turned his landing into an X Games stunt gone wrong.

  A television camera caught Garciaparra alone on the bench, with the rest of his teammates on the dugout rail, while Jeter was risking life and limb. For a franchise and a fan base waiting some eighty-six years for a championship, the juxtaposition was impossible to ignore.

  “It was just straight superstition that Nomar always sat in a certain place in the dugout,” Boston pitcher Bronson Arroyo said. “And our fans were like, ‘Look, Derek Jeter’s diving into the stands and busting his face up, and Nomar’s sitting on the goddamn bench and not even cheering for the team.’ It was just one of Nomar’s superstitions, and he got ripped for it.”

  Just as Jeter had millions of kids holding up their right hands to plate umpires as they stepped into the box, Garciaparra had every Little Leaguer in New England adjusting and readjusting his batting gloves after he stepped out of the box. Nomar was the Ted Williams of his day.

  But Garciaparra’s defensive abilities were in serious decline, along with his passion for remaining in Boston. Red Sox management confronted a question Yankee management never wanted to answer: How do you trade an iconic shortstop?

  On July 2, as promised, Derek Jeter reported to work at Shea Stadium to open a series against the Mets, a team he positively owned. “Like Chipper Jones,” former Mets GM Steve Phillips said, “Jeter was captain of the Mets killers.”