The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Justin Verlander struck him out looking with the bases loaded in the first inning, and Joel Zumaya struck him out swinging on four pitches in the eighth, the last three clocked at more than 100 miles per hour. A-Rod said he did not see those pitches and claimed he did not hear the boos that followed each of his three strikeouts.

  “The playoffs aren’t over,” Rodriguez reminded. “This is just getting started. . . . My chin is up. My chin isn’t going anywhere.”

  On his way out of Yankee Stadium, George Steinbrenner was asked for an assessment of A-Rod’s performance, or lack thereof. “I didn’t like him that well,” the Boss responded.

  Torre didn’t like him that well, either. But since Sheffield was struggling at the plate and at a position that was practically foreign to him, first base, where he moved like a Sunday beer leaguer, Torre decided to bench Sheffield, put Giambi back at first, insert Bernie Williams as the DH, and try to revive A-Rod by promoting him to cleanup.

  Even though forty-three-year-old starter Randy Johnson was going with a herniated disc in his lower back and had not pitched since September 23, this one looked like a two-foot putt. Kenny Rogers, forty-one, was starting for the Tigers, and this fearsome Yankee lineup had a .391 batting average against him.

  Rogers had not beaten the Yanks in more than thirteen years, and he came across as a Charmin-soft October opponent. He had never won a playoff game, and he was an unmitigated disaster while pitching for the Yanks in the ’96 postseason, and again for the Mets in the ’99 postseason, when he walked in the run that sent the Braves to the World Series.

  Rogers had been chased out of New York not once, but twice, and he certainly did not forget what Torre had said about him in a bygone book. In Chasing the Dream, published after the Yanks won the ’96 title despite Rogers’s wretched pitching, Torre wrote that the left-hander “could not seem to conquer his anxiety” and that he wished doctors could put confidence in liquid form and “hook up some device to his left arm and just inject it.”

  Upon making his first spring training appearance after the book’s release, Rogers said, “If I read it I’d probably just throw it in the trash.”

  All these years later, before 43,440 screaming people inside Comerica Park, Rogers did not need any injection of faith. He was tired of pitching passively against the Yanks, tired of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

  So he attacked the strike zone and dared the world’s greatest lineup to attack back. “I wanted this game as much as I wanted any in my life,” Rogers would say.

  It showed. As he drew strength from the Detroit crowd, Rogers allowed the Yanks only five hits over seven and two-thirds scoreless innings. He struck out eight and walked two. As he left the mound to a standing ovation, to the sounds of fans chanting his name, Rogers tipped his cap and touched his heart.

  “That’s not the Kenny I remember,” A-Rod would say.

  Rodriguez was not the Alex whom Kenny remembered, either.

  Johnson could not keep up with Rogers in this duel of forty-somethings, and the Yankees lost by a 6–0 count, running their scoreless streak to fourteen innings. But again, the Big Unit was not the big topic. Rodriguez had gone 0 for 3 to stand 1 for 11 in the series and 4 for 38 in his last eleven postseason games, without a single RBI to his name.

  A-Rod likened the suddenly new and improved Rogers to Sandy Koufax and admitted, “There’s tension in this clubhouse.” Yes, it revolved around third base.

  Rodriguez was batting .091 in this Division Series; Jeter, .583. Something had to be done. Torre’s attempt to lift A-Rod’s spirits by lifting him in the order did not take; Rodriguez’s lone contribution came when he was hit by a pitch.

  A-Rod was going down, and it appeared he was taking the entire lineup with him. The Tigers entered the series hoping to keep it close; if they were allowed, they would have run Dean Smith’s old four-corners offense to bleed the clock.

  And now? Now all they had to do was beat Jaret Wright at home to advance to the American League Championship Series.

  “That’s why you don’t go on numbers, you don’t go on the past,” Jeter said. “You don’t play the game on paper. You’ve got to go out there on the field and perform. . . . I’m confident we can get back to New York. We have to find a way.”

  The next morning, Torre thought he had found a way. He spent the moments after Game 1 in the Yankee Stadium interview room talking about Jeter’s fearlessness in the postseason, talking about how his shortstop “seems to just relish this atmosphere.” Jeter would show up in the same room that night and disclose his simple October game plan.

  “You have to try to treat the postseason like a regular-season game,” he said.

  Teammates marveled over Jeter’s ability to maintain a May pulse rate in the all-or-nothing October tournament. John Flaherty, a Yankee from 2003 to 2005, recalled a dreadful swing Jeter took in a playoff game in the Bronx, at a crucial moment in that game, and then the sight of Jeter staring into the dugout “and laughing his ass off.

  “I’m stressed out just watching, and he’s laughing, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘How can any human being be that relaxed in that spot?’ And then the next thing you know it’s, boom, base hit. Derek just believes he’s the best player on the field, and it doesn’t matter that a lot of the time he’s not the most talented. He knows he’s going to beat you anyway.”

  If only Rodriguez could carry the same mentality to the postseason plate. A-Rod treated the first inning of every Game 3 of the Division Series like the fourth quarter of a tied Super Bowl. Worse yet, he was more concerned about the perception of his performance than he was about the performance itself.

  So Torre figured he needed to try something drastic. He came up with a beauty.

  He posted a Game 4 lineup with Alex Rodriguez batting eighth.

  Eighth. One team official who thought Torre did not grasp the impact of this move was itching to approach him and ask, “Do you realize you’ve just decided to bat Babe Ruth eighth?” The official thought better of it.

  Torre was incredulous when questioned about the A-Rod move by the media and claimed he was “just trying to win a ball game.” But this would be the equivalent of, say, Tony Dungy demoting Peyton Manning to the position of long snapper in the AFC playoffs.

  “That was the end of Alex and Joe,” one team official said.

  That was the end of the Yankees, too. Detroit steamrolled them again, taking an 8–0 lead before the doomed visitors scored three garbage-time runs. Wright was awful, this as Wang waited in New York so he could pitch a Game 5 on full rest, a Game 5 that had been called on account of hubris.

  The Yanks were completely shut down by a twenty-three-year-old kid, Jeremy Bonderman, whom the Tigers acquired in the three-way deal that landed Jeff Weaver in the Bronx, with a thud. Torre’s team could not even get a man on base until the sixth inning and made it twenty consecutive innings in the series without a single run.

  Just as A-Rod did not respond to batting cleanup, he did not respond to batting eighth. He grounded out in his first at-bat, grounded out in his second at-bat, and flied out in his third. So once more, the Yankees allowed an underdog playoff opponent to bathe itself in champagne.

  How could this have happened? George Steinbrenner was spending more than $200 million on salaries, and he had finally given Cashman the control over baseball operations he needed. The franchise was flourishing, the YES Network was feeding the beast with more and more cash, and hardhats in the Bronx were moving the earth across the street for the construction of a new Yankee Stadium.

  How could this empire have been toppled by the likes of Kenny Rogers and Jeremy Bonderman?

  “They annihilated us,” Rodriguez said.

  A-Rod did not just go 0 for 3; he also made a critical error in the field. Rodriguez finished the series 1 for 14 (.071), leaving him 3 for 29 (.103) in the Yanks’ last two first-round losses, and 4 for 41 (.098) in his last twelve playoff games, with no RBI.

  Naturally, after Steinbren
ner had gone six seasons without a title, after the Boss had spent almost $1 billion on wages along the way, and after he had watched the Mets sweep the Dodgers on the same day his Yanks were eliminated, the hunt for scapegoats was on.

  Cashman maintained he would not trade A-Rod, who swore he wanted to remain a Yankee unless “they’re dying to get me out of here.” Publicly, Rodriguez took responsibility for his plunge to eighth in the order. “I’ve got no one to blame but myself,” he said.

  Privately, he felt betrayed by Torre, who he rightfully believed would have never pulled the same humiliating stunt with a struggling Jeter.

  No, A-Rod was not rooting for Torre to be retained. The manager had only one year left on his contract, and as much as Steinbrenner clashed with Don Zimmer, the Boss did notice that Torre had not reached a World Series since his bench coach quit following the 2003 loss to the Marlins.

  An old pitching staff came undone on Torre’s watch, and the big-name mercenaries hired by Steinbrenner and Cashman buckled while the one blue-chip recruit they decided against signing, Carlos Beltran, was leading the Mets to the NLCS.

  In a statement Steinbrenner called the defeat in Detroit a “sad failure” and barked, “This result is absolutely not acceptable to me.” None of it sounded good for Torre, who was being fired in a Daily News story that claimed A-Rod’s manager in Seattle, Lou Piniella, would be the next Yankee manager, a report Torre would survive.

  Jeter was about the only Yankee who escaped this first-round loss unscathed. He had a great statistical series, enhancing his legacy as a clutch October player. The manager who beat him, Leyland, would later call Jeter “the ultimate person. . . . Every man would like to have a son like that. Every guy would like to have somebody like that marry his daughter.

  “He’s a dream player, that’s what he is. I don’t think anyone in the history of the Yankees has handled New York any better than Derek Jeter.”

  But as the shortstop stepped toward another winter of his discontent, his ability to handle New York as easily as he would a hanging curve was about to be tested to the max.

  Eight days after Post baseball columnist Joel Sherman wrote that Jeter’s refusal to support A-Rod for the good of the team should cost him the league MVP award, Daily News baseball columnist John Harper wrote that Jeter hurt his team’s chances of winning a title by freezing out A-Rod and wrote it under the headline “Yanks’ Captain Abandons Ship.”

  Sherman and Harper were widely respected voices in the city, so their rebukes did not go unnoticed. But Jeter was like most athletes—criticism from players, especially teammates, hurt more than criticism from credentialed media members paid to deliver it.

  So when Darryl Strawberry, friend and former teammate and big-brother figure, chose to publicly implore Jeter to do the same thing columnists had been telling him to do for months, the captain officially became a casualty of the first-round flameout in Detroit.

  “I hope Jeter [will] embrace [Rodriguez] this year, in spring training, and bring him into the full circle as a part of the Yankee family,” Strawberry said. “If Jeter does it, I think everybody else will respond.”

  Strawberry would later say, “I just wanted Derek to accept him more in the clubhouse. I wanted Derek to put their differences aside and accept Alex so they can move forward and play well as teammates.”

  Jeter was being squeezed from all sides, and some team officials were hoping the public pressure would make the captain crack. But before Jeter could consider adjusting his approach, Rodriguez had a little surprise for him.

  A-Rod was tired of living the lie, tired of batting eighth, tired of everything that went with being a ring-free megastar on Derek Jeter’s team.

  Rodriguez was ready to take the fight to the captain, once and for all.

  12. Moment of Truth

  Derek Jeter claimed four championships in his first five years and played in five World Series in his first six, and he did it largely with teammates he believed placed winning above all else.

  Jeter wanted those days, and that group, to live on forever, to disprove the notion that clubhouse karma and harmony in sports did not matter, and to allow him to run down Yogi Berra’s record of ten titles. Jeter joked about that record with Yogi, telling the Hall of Fame catcher his total was inflated by the fact that there were no playoffs bridging the regular season to the World Series back in the day.

  “You were born at the wrong time,” Berra would shoot back.

  Jeter would laugh and slap down the oversized cap on Yogi’s head. But make no mistake: the shortstop was as serious about chasing Yogi’s record as his friend Tiger Woods was about chasing Jack Nicklaus’s record of eighteen major titles.

  So Jeter was hurting and bleeding in the months before the start of spring training in 2007. He had gone six full years without a parade, and he was starting to wonder if R. D. Long’s prediction that he would never win a ring with Alex Rodriguez as a teammate was slowly morphing into prophecy.

  A-Rod was ruining the Yankee experience for Jeter, though the third baseman was hardly the lone reason the Canyon of Heroes—once as regular a stop for Jeter as the local Starbucks—suddenly seemed a million miles away.

  Jason Giambi was another living symbol of everything gone wrong. He was a bloated one-trick pony whose trick was enhanced by steroids, a lumbering base runner and brutal defensive player who pulled himself out of the only World Series he appeared in. Replacing Martinez with Giambi was the beginning of the beginning of the end.

  After the signing of Mike Mussina, Brian Cashman kept acquiring pitchers who were missing that distinct gene needed to thrive in New York under win-or-else conditions. Jeff Weaver. Jose Contreras. Kevin Brown. Javier Vazquez. Carl Pavano. Randy Johnson. Jaret Wright. None proved to be strong enough, mentally or physically, to do what the Cones and Pettittes and El Duques and Wellses did for Joe Torre when it mattered most.

  And Torre himself had lost that human touch he so deftly applied to his dynastic teams. Big-name position players who were brought in after the championships dried up—Giambi, A-Rod, Gary Sheffield, Kenny Lofton, Johnny Damon—never believed they could build up the gravitas with Torre enjoyed by Jeter and his fellow dynasty keepers.

  Asked if Torre could have done something specific to avoid the postseason failures that started piling up like soiled laundry on a locker room floor, Sheffield said, “I think believing in what you have, more than anything. It’s easy to do when you have Jeter and Mariano and Posada on the main stage and you’re just focusing on those guys and thinking they’ve done it before and they’re going to do it again, as opposed to embracing the guys that just came in and believing in them also.

  “We have track records also. We know how to win. . . . You want to make the guys who just got here feel like part of the family, too, and I don’t think that was established enough.”

  Sheffield was traded to Detroit a month after the Tigers eliminated the Yankees, and though his accessibility made him popular with many reporters who covered him, the slugger’s outspoken nature and history of semi-plausible claims left him labeled as a loose cannon.

  But on the issue of Torre and how the manager had different strokes for different folks, one team official confirmed Sheffield was shooting straight.

  “Players would come in with All-Star or Hall of Fame credentials,” the official said, “and they were always on the outside looking in.”

  Of course, nobody embodied that truth more than A-Rod.

  “There was just always a tension, and you could just see it,” the official said, “and then in small ways Torre would promote it, too, because he would never call out Jeter on anything but he’d have no problem doing it to Alex. With Jeter, he’d never bat him eighth, but he’d do it to Alex.

  “So Joe would treat Derek one way and Alex another, and you’ve got to treat all of your best players the same. Your twenty-fifth man, you can treat any way you want. But that’s why the clubhouse went offline, because there were rules for some, and r
ules for others.”

  One name player who left the Yankees, and left them unhappily, put it this way: “I wasn’t in the club. I wasn’t in Joe’s club.”

  The Yankees were a fractured lot, and their lack of cohesion showed up in the postseason, when younger, cheaper, leaner, and meaner opponents whipped them with an underdog’s carefree, nothing-to-lose approach. Despite their overwhelming firepower, the Yanks ended up hoist by their own petard.

  The captain was sick of it, too.

  “In the off-season he wouldn’t knock individual guys,” Martinez said of Jeter, his fellow Tampa resident, “but he felt the team wasn’t there to win a World Series. He thought they were more there to have fun and collect a paycheck and go home, and that really drove him crazy.

  “When the season was over, he’d come to Tampa and he wasn’t the same. He was always a little bit flustered. He wouldn’t go out. He’d go out to eat, but he wouldn’t go out to have fun. He was always thinking about trying to make the team better, who we should get, that type of attitude.”

  Jeter could talk to his friend Martinez because Tino represented what he wanted to recapture. Those Yankees were team players, gamers, legends of the fall.

  “When we played together,” Martinez said, “David Cone would pitch with a broken arm. We all had aches and pains in the postseason, but we never wanted a built-in excuse for not playing well, and we didn’t want to give the other team an advantage.

  “I hated it when [Paul] O’Neill didn’t play because he was hurt, he hated it when I didn’t play, we both hated it when Bernie [Williams] didn’t play, so we all played hurt together.”

  No Yankee ever played hurt more than Jeter, and the captain felt he was surrounded by players who did not have the same toughness he had, the same toughness his old teammates had, physically or mentally.

  “Derek would just say, ‘It’s not the same. It’s not the same as it was when we played when everybody wanted to win,’” Martinez said. “I would tell him, ‘You’ve just got to keep playing hard every day like you do. You can’t control the whole team. You can’t control guys’ attitudes and wanting to win or not. You’re not going to convince them to want to win.’