by Ian O'Connor
“I feel sorry for the next Yankee manager,” he said, “because he’s the one who’s going to have to tell Jeter he can’t play shortstop anymore.”
Joe Torre’s Yankees were on the verge of total collapse in Toronto in the final days of May, which meant Joe Torre was likely on the verge of being fired. His team was 21-29 and a staggering fourteen and a half games behind the Red Sox in the division. Torre’s pitching was terrible, and the free agent signed a few weeks earlier to save his staff, Roger Clemens, was closing hard on his forty-fifth birthday.
The season opened with a historic burst of power from Alex Rodriguez, who became the fastest man to collect thirteen and fourteen homers in a season by hitting them in his eighteenth game. The predictable story line went like this: A-Rod was a new man after telling the truth about his broken relationship with Derek Jeter, who conceded Rodriguez was playing a game with which he was not familiar.
“You enjoy it and you appreciate it,” Jeter said. “I can’t relate to it. You’ll never see me do it. . . . He’s as hot as I’ve ever seen a player.”
Jeter was not driving balls over the wall at any such rate, and he was not fielding his position the way he had the previous season. The shortstop committed six errors in the first eleven games; in 2006, he did not commit his sixth until the fiftieth game.
But near the end of May, Jeter was still hitting .350 with an on-base percentage of .425. He was not the problem. A-Rod was not the problem, either, even if his .371 batting average on May 1 had plunged below .300 four weeks later.
Rodriguez had 19 homers and 44 RBI, and he also was making a concerted effort to stay out of trouble, to field baseball questions only and to keep his interaction with the news media to a minimum. Larry Bowa, a blunt, tough-love type hired as Torre’s third-base coach before the 2006 season, asked Rodriguez why he kept making silly comments in the press, and wasn’t satisfied with the third baseman’s answer.
So Bowa and Mike Borzello came up with their own penal system. “Every time you make a stupid comment you’ve got to give us a hundred dollars,” Bowa told A-Rod, who did not fight the plan.
“We got about three or four hundred dollars from him,” Bowa said, “and then he realized, ‘Hey, I’d better stop making these stupid statements.’ And he stopped.”
Rodriguez was helped by the presence of Doug Mientkiewicz, his teammate and friend from Westminster Christian High in Miami. Brian Cashman had signed the first baseman—and the member of the 2004 championship Boston team who recorded the final historic out of the World Series sweep of St. Louis—knowing Mientkiewicz could serve as a buffer between A-Rod and Jeter and the rest.
Mientkiewicz wasn’t afraid to tell Rodriguez what he did not want to hear. “I’ve never called him A-Rod in my life; he’s always been little Alex to me,” Mientkiewicz said. “I never got wrapped up in the aura. As soon as he walked in the clubhouse door I’d scream at him, ‘Cheer up. It’s not about you. Every day you don’t come to the yard with a smile on your face I’m going to kick you in the nuts. You think the game is hard with your talent level? Try playing it with mine.’
“It made Alex smile. [Jorge] Posada told me, ‘We should’ve brought you over here a long time ago,’ because I helped everybody else see Alex in a different light. Alex let some of his guard down and let the guys see he’s human.”
Only a humanized A-Rod and a productive Jeter could not prevent the Yankees from coming unglued. Torre called a team meeting on May 28, before the first game of the Toronto series. Jeter had already been on record as far back as April trying to disarm those calling for Torre’s head, saying after a lost series to the Red Sox, “There shouldn’t be any questions. He’s in no way responsible. . . . You should never talk about his job. It’s unfair and it should stop.”
Of course, it did not stop. The Yankees were not helping their manager with their play or their preparation, and Torre thought it was time to drop the hammer. He ripped into his players for a general lack of effort and focus, and nearly all veteran witnesses agreed it was the angriest Torre had ever been.
“There were some fired-up people in that meeting,” Mike Mussina said. “Even Derek was fired up, more than the standard, ‘We’re not doing this, we’re not doing that.’ . . . It was about as serious a meeting as I was involved in in my years as a Yankee.”
It lasted some fifty minutes, and Jeter was not the only player who spoke; Andy Pettitte was among those who delivered their own impassioned pleas. But Jeter was the captain, so he had the E. F. Hutton effect on his teammates.
“Now is when you find out what kind of player you are,” Jeter barked in the meeting.
The captain did not get up in front of the group unless there was something to say. Sometimes he spoke when Torre called on him, and sometimes he thought the manager had already covered what needed to be said.
“Sometimes in those meetings,” one Yankee said, “you didn’t want to talk after Joe because Joe was so good at it. And sometimes players would say things and you’re like, ‘You’re the person Torre was talking about.’ From past years, Kenny Lofton comes to mind. And you’re sitting there saying, ‘Just shut up.’ Gary Sheffield, on the other hand, he was straight to the point and a lot of times said things we needed to hear.”
Following Torre was a tough act, no matter who you were. Jeter was very careful in picking his spots. He grew more willing to speak up after his appointment as captain in 2003, but he did not believe in wasting anyone’s time.
“If Derek said something,” Mussina said, “we knew he was frustrated or upset or bothered by what was going on. . . . He wouldn’t pick out anybody. It was we are not getting guys over. We are not working counts like we do when we’re successful. We are not playing good defense. Derek understood that he had to talk like the manager, that it had to be we and not you.”
Jeter’s leadership was a popular subject in and around the Yankee clubhouse. The debate over whether the captain should have shielded Rodriguez from the storm of fan abuse often fueled the discussion, but there were sidebar issues that had little or nothing to do with A-Rod.
No right-minded teammate or observer ever doubted Jeter’s lead-by-example work ethic, his willingness to play in pain, and his talent for playing big in the biggest games. But if there were a few Yankees who thought Jeter should have imposed his will on the team in more of an in-your-face way, whether by being more vocal and demonstrative or by telling a pitcher he needed to hit an opposing batter to retaliate for a downed Yank, Jason Giambi was in that group.
Giambi had tremendous respect and affection for Jeter, who had publicly backed him at his lowest point. Yet even though he was a steroid cheat, a party boy, and a guy who had benched himself for a World Series game, Giambi fancied himself capable of filling a leadership void.
“I can really help this team,” Giambi had told one teammate. “There are things that need to be said, and I can’t say them. This is Derek’s team. I can’t be the guy to go out there and say it. In Oakland, I could kind of run that ship and get on guys and send a message, but I feel like I have to hold back here.”
Jeter always felt as if he did more leading and guiding and captaining than even his teammates knew. When it came to individual admonishment or advice, the captain almost always preferred to deliver it in a quiet corner, his rebukes of Bernie Williams and Jay Witasick in the 2001 World Series notwithstanding. Jeter would take aside the young, impressionable likes of Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera and sternly remind them to hustle at all times.
Asked how often he pulled players aside who needed direction or a kick in the butt, Jeter said, “A lot more than you think. . . . I don’t think you have to do it through the media. I don’t think you have to do it when you have a camera in your face, so that people say, ‘Oh, look what he did.’ Why would you do that? I never understood it, so I’ll never be that way. . . . If I had a problem with someone or had a problem with what someone said, I’ll tell him. I don’t think it has to be a bigger story than
necessary by going through the media.”
If Torre did not want to confront a player, or if he felt that player would better respond to a peer, the manager often asked Jeter to deliver his message. “I’ve seen Joe go up to Jeet many times and say, ‘You wanna handle it?’” Bowa said. “And Jeet would always say, ‘I’ll take care of it,’ and he would.”
As a team leader, Jeter had a strong record of making low-profile newcomers feel at home. Nick Green, a utility infielder who played all of forty-six games for the 2006 team, said Jeter treated him “like a friend you’ve known forever that you’ve never met.”
Aaron Small, the obscure pitcher who somehow went 10-0 with the 2005 team, recalled Jeter introducing himself to him in spring training, eating lunch with him, treating him as if he were David Cone. A few weeks after he had met Small, Jeter insisted the two come up with the kind of personal secret handshake the captain had with other teammates.
No, Jeter did not have to speak to lead. He performed one of his jump throws from the hole during Small’s first Yankee Stadium start, and the journeyman pitcher stood there on the mound, mouth agape. “Just like a kid watching it on TV,” Small said.
Ron Villone, the much-traveled relief pitcher, spoke of how Jeter would come to the mound and express his appreciation for the number of innings he had thrown. “Derek would give me an energy boost, a mental boost on the mound,” Villone said. “I watched him for years do that with other pitchers, and that confidence in his voice really helped me.”
Mientkiewicz remembered Jeter sitting him down on arrival in Tampa and telling the first baseman he was available to answer any questions about New York, the Yanks, the media, whatever. Jeter then went about needling Mientkiewicz every day, with Posada’s help, calling him Pete Rose (“I have no idea why,” Mientkiewicz said) and making him feel comfortable. “He’d already accepted me into that clubhouse,” the first baseman said.
Mientkiewicz recalled Jeter showing necessary leadership “by playing when he could barely walk” and by validating the new recruit’s presence even when that recruit overstepped his bounds.
“In one meeting when we were losing I basically called everybody out, and I was hitting .205 or something,” Mientkiewicz said. “I said, ‘You know what, guys, you always had a swagger that made me want to kill you. Jeet, I’ve got a picture of me trying to break up a double play in 2003, and my foot is above your belt and I’m trying to kill you. You guys had swagger. Where is it? You’re not stapling my name to the first team that doesn’t make the playoffs in Joe Torre’s tenure.’
“And Jeter came up to me after and said, ‘Coming from you that got the attention of a lot of people.’ I was a newcomer, a small piece of a big machine, and Jeter took it to heart.”
Off a poor feed from Robinson Cano to start a potential double play against Boston, Jeter would bounce a throw to Mientkiewicz, who was kneed in the head by the hitter, Mike Lowell, as he tried to scoop the ball. The first baseman ended up face first in the dirt and landed in the hospital with a mild concussion and a fractured wrist.
“And Derek was the first guy on my phone to say how sick he felt,” Mientkiewicz said. “He felt awful, and I told him it was just part of the game. But just hearing his voice meant something to me.”
The stories of Jeter taking in new Yankees and young Yankees far outnumbered the one relayed by Ricky Ledee, who told people Alex Rodriguez was more helpful to him in Texas than Jeter had been in the Bronx. For the captain, it always came back to Alex, somehow, some way.
Following their blowout meeting in Toronto, the Yankees lost their next two games to the Blue Jays and then woke up to the very last thing any of them needed—Alex Rodriguez pictured on the front page of the New York Post with an attractive woman not his wife.
“stray-rod” screamed the headline, and A-Rod was left to explain to his spouse, Cynthia, why he was in the company of a woman later identified as stripper Joslyn Noel Morse. Inside the Yankee clubhouse, word of a player caught fooling around on the road was met with a Captain Renault–like reaction: teammates were shocked, shocked, to find that adultery was going on in here.
Either way, Rodriguez was brought to his knees. His quest for a season of pure baseball, and pure baseball only, had been shot to hell. One member of the Yankees’ traveling party even tried to convince A-Rod that someone in Jeter’s camp had tipped off the Post photographer.
It was a positively absurd suggestion, as Jeter would be the last athlete to have endorsed such a devious plot. But this potentially divisive claim underscored the notion that the A-Rod–Jeter armistice was a fragile one.
Did Jeter and Rodriguez engage in open hostilities? Shouting matches? Shoving matches? No, even if one false report had them squaring off in Ali and Frazier form.
Truth was, even if Jeter and Rodriguez almost never entered or exited the clubhouse side by side, they did occasionally lunch together on the road. In the past A-Rod had wanted more than that, of course, because he was an emotionally needy star who craved positive reinforcement and Jeter’s full approval. But the captain would extend himself only so far for the third baseman.
“Jeet never said one negative word about Alex to me, ever,” Bowa said. “I don’t think they’re ever going to dine together or go on vacations together, but I don’t think they hate each other.”
Mientkiewicz echoed Bowa’s sentiments and said age created distance between Jeter and Rodriguez. “Grown men don’t have sleepovers and order pizza and rent movies from Blockbuster,” Mientkiewicz said. “Alex never said anything negative about Derek, and with Alex having such a phenomenal year, Jeet would just sit there and shake his head and say, ‘That’s just not normal. What we’re watching right now is just not normal.’”
Nothing was ever normal about A-Rod. Hours after the Post ran its Stray-Rod story, Rodriguez was running out Posada’s two-out pop-up in the ninth with the Yanks holding a two-run lead. As Toronto’s Howie Clark settled under the ball and prepared to end the inning, A-Rod yelled “Ha” as he passed Clark, who backed away from the play under the assumption that his shortstop, John McDonald, had just called him off.
The ball fell, the Yanks added a run to their lead, and McDonald and an entire roster of Blue Jays wanted to choke the life out of A-Rod. Blue Jays manager John Gibbons told Rodriguez his was a bush-league play and summoned the spirit of Curt Schilling and the 2004 Red Sox when he said, “That’s not Yankee baseball.”
The chief representative of Yankee baseball was asked for his reaction. “I don’t know; you will have to ask [Rodriguez],” Jeter said. “I wasn’t out there.”
Torre initially backed his third baseman, saying catchers trying to run down pop-ups near enemy dugouts hear “I got it” all the time. But after realizing A-Rod was getting trashed all around baseball—and the Stray-Rod story and photo sure did not help Rodriguez in this case—Torre decided Toronto had a point.
“It was probably something he shouldn’t have done,” the manager said a couple of nights later. “It was probably inappropriate to do it at the time he did it.”
Suddenly Rodriguez had another reason to feel isolated. A year after Jeter would not shield him from the fans, Torre would not shield him from the Blue Jays.
George Steinbrenner and front-office officials were upset that their manager did not do more to protect Rodriguez. “Alex made a good, smart baseball play,” one team official said. “It was gamesmanship that paid off and helped us win. The old-timers would say they did that stuff all the time, and good for Alex, he got away with it.
“But Torre got to a point where his image was more important than the Yankees. He backtracked because public opinion said Joe Torre’s a good man, and that’s cheating, and how could he feel that way. He left Alex out in the wind to get pummeled, and he never would’ve done that to Derek.”
No, Torre never would have done that to Derek. Of course, Derek never would have put Torre in a position to defend his captain for yelling “Ha” at an opposing infielder.
Nevertheless, if the manager had a flaw or three in his approach, he remained a master at guiding a team through a 162-game season. The great basketball coach Chuck Daly used to say a head coach’s job is to navigate the turbulence of an endless regular season and find a way to land the plane.
No coach or manager knew how to land the plane like Joe Torre.
“There’s only one manager in baseball who would’ve let us make the playoffs that year, and it was Joe,” Mientkiewicz said. “And there was only one captain who would’ve let us make the playoffs that year, and it was Derek. That’s because neither one ever panics.
“We had some real knock-down, drag-out meetings, but Jeter never worried and always believed. He always said, ‘We’re one pitch or one play away from reeling off eighteen of twenty, and if you believe it, it’s going to happen.’”
The night Rodriguez yelled “Ha” in Toronto marked a turning point; including that victory, the Yanks would finish the season 73-39, would nearly erase Boston’s entire fourteen-and-a-half-game divisional lead, and would seize the wild card to give Torre a dozen postseason appearances in a dozen years on the job.
Along the way, A-Rod would crack his 500th homer, and Jeter would pass Joe DiMaggio on the career hit list with number 2,215. Jeter would also complete a remarkable stretch that started the previous August in which he hit safely in 59 out of 61 games, becoming the only major leaguer since 1900 not named DiMaggio to have no more than two hitless games over a span of 56 or more, according to Trent McCotter of the Society for American Baseball Research.
But Jeter never measured himself by his numbers, no matter how impressive they were. One number defined him—four—his collection of World Series championships, and the shortstop would have gladly given back his captaincy if it meant upgrading that defining number to five.
The Yankees were down 2–0 in their best-of-five Division Series with the Cleveland Indians, George Steinbrenner had threatened to fire Joe Torre if he did not win three straight sudden-death games from his hometown Indians, and Derek Jeter responded to the pressure the way any self-respecting captain would.