The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Beane was married to his metrics, if only because they helped him build a consistent contender on an absurdly small budget and helped him become the breakout star of Moneyball.

  Only no matter how much he worshiped at the metric altar, Beane said, “One guy I’ll never criticize if the metrics don’t match up with the player is Derek Jeter. It’s like someone saying they don’t like the mole on Cindy Crawford’s face. . . . As someone who believes in metrics, I’m here to give you the good news: I still think Jeter is an incredible player.”

  Beane was hardly alone. All over baseball, big-time talents—Troy Tulowitzki, Hanley Ramirez, and B. J. Upton among them—were wearing number 2 because Jeter wore number 2. The Yankee captain had established a living legacy—the kids who grew up admiring him now had their own legions of admirers.

  And just as Jeter spoke of one day running a charitable foundation like Dave Winfield’s, young players spoke hopefully of one day making the kind of difference Jeter had made with his Turn 2 Foundation.

  Much the way the Yankees represented the Steinbrenner family business, Turn 2 was the Jeter family business. The shortstop was the founder, his father the vice chairman, his sister the president, and his mother the treasurer. Born over that pizza in a Detroit hotel room during Jeter’s rookie year, Turn 2 had given more than $11 million to the cause of keeping kids away from alcohol and drugs, focusing its efforts in the Kalamazoo area, Tampa, and New York.

  Jeter was touched by the letters he had received from parents thanking him for the support his foundation had given their children through troubled times. He established a program designed to compel high school students to set an example of community service, academic achievement, and social activism. The shortstop called it Jeter’s Leaders, and according to his website, DerekJeter.com, he built it around what he called “10 pillars of leadership,” which included morality, communication, being trustworthy, and leading by example.

  Of course, Jeter was the ultimate lead-by-example captain, his mere presence inspiring his teammates to play at a higher level. The young pitcher Phil Hughes called Jeter “the pillar we all lean on” and spoke of visits the captain would make to the mound to calm his hyperactive mind.

  “He’ll call time and give you a couple of words of encouragement,” Hughes said, “just to let you catch your breath. You don’t see that from a lot of guys. Guys on defense are worried about their next at-bat, or they’re waiting for the third out, but [Jeter’s] going to do everything he can to help you win.

  “When you’re a young pitcher you’re out there and it’s like being a kid afraid of the dark. To have Derek Jeter there, it’s like when you’re that scared kid and your mom is there and it’s, ‘OK, things are better now.’”

  Hughes described Jeter as “a larger-than-life figure” who was nonetheless “very approachable, a down-to-earth guy.” As he grew older, Jeter took on more of a mentoring role with the younger Yankees.

  On the night he tied Gehrig’s hits record, Jeter marched to the mound in the first inning to order Joba Chamberlain to straighten up. Chamberlain had already surrendered two runs and had two men on and only one man out when the shortstop had seen enough.

  “He doesn’t really give too many like, ‘I’m-getting-in-your-face’ talks,” Chamberlain said. This was one of them. Jeter sternly told the reliever to calm down and start making the pitches that had made him successful.

  Joba struck out the next two batters and, while confined to an innings limit, retired the last eight Rays he faced.

  Jeter did not only show tough love to the young Yanks. He remained willing to confront a veteran if the situation warranted it, even if that situation involved his closest friend on the team.

  In 2008, an injured Jorge Posada had failed to show up for a rehab session one day after he traveled to Tampa with the Yanks’ blessing. Posada was supposed to return the following day for a pregame session with trainer Gene Monahan, only he did not make it back in time.

  Given that he had recently signed Posada to a four-year, $52.4 million deal, Brian Cashman was furious. When Jeter saw the GM in an agitated state and asked what was wrong, Cashman told him about Posada’s absence. The next day, a Yankee employee who had witnessed Cashman’s outburst and who later saw Jeter in the clubhouse told the GM, “Hey, I just want you to know that Derek jumped Posada’s ass after you left.”

  In 2009, Jeter told a friend that he had spoken with Nick Swisher about taming his wild faux-hawk hairstyle; the captain apparently did not believe the hair was very Yankee-like. Asked about approaching Swisher, Jeter responded to a reporter, “Who told you that?” before declining comment. Far more often than not, with Yankees new and old, Jeter was a leader who believed in positive—if quiet—reinforcement.

  On arrival in the Bronx, A. J. Burnett texted Jeter that he would be honored to have the captain playing behind him. “No,” Jeter texted back, “it will be an honor to play behind you.”

  As it turned out, the honor belonged to every Yankee who watched Jeter’s remarkable 2009 unfold. The captain elevated his traditional stats along with his sabermetric scores, finishing with a .334 batting average, a .406 on-base percentage, and more steals (30) than he had in 2007 and 2008 combined as his 103-59 Yanks won the AL East by eight games.

  Jeter nailed down his eleventh division title and thirteenth postseason appearance in fourteen years as a full-time shortstop, and he did it by absorbing Cashman’s criticism over dinner after the 2007 season and by using it to create a more athletic version of his aging self.

  Some longtime Jeter teammates, friends, and observers were stunned he admitted to changing his fitness regimen in an attempt to improve his defense—conceding weaknesses, of course, never came easily to the captain.

  One such teammate recalled being shocked years earlier when Jeter started doing quickness and lateral movement drills before pregame stretching, sometimes with fellow Yankees and fans watching. “I always thought he’d do that in the weight room or someplace nobody would see it,” the teammate said. “He’d get out that ladder and step between the ropes, or he’d have on resistance bands around his ankles going side to side, and knowing his personality a few of us couldn’t believe the first time he did that in full view.”

  In the end, if Jeter was strong enough to overcome his flaws, physical and otherwise, he still had failed for eight consecutive seasons to accomplish his one and only goal. He was tired of hearing about the parity in baseball created by revenue sharing. He was tired of hearing about smarter opponents, tired of hearing about the Red Sox and their two championships—on Jeter’s watch—after an eighty-six-year drought.

  The captain was running low on patience and time. He needed to win a World Series title, and who woulda thunkit:

  He finally had the partnership with Alex Rodriguez to make it happen.

  They sat at the same table inside a Minneapolis hotel ballroom, two happy couples celebrating a return to the American League Championship Series: Derek Jeter and actress Minka Kelly, Alex Rodriguez and actress Kate Hudson. The Yankees had swept Minnesota in their best-of-five Division Series, and the left side of their infield was the principal reason why.

  Jeter batted .400 with an on-base percentage of .538; A-Rod batted .455 with an on-base percentage of .500. The shortstop hit a big home run in Game 1; the third baseman hit a bigger home run in Game 2, a two-run shot off closer Joe Nathan in the ninth that ultimately allowed Mark Teixeira to win it with his own homer in the eleventh.

  In the seventh inning of Game 3, with the Twins leading 1–0 and with excommunicated ex-Yankee Carl Pavano back from the dead, Rodriguez homered off his former teammate before Jorge Posada did the same, sending the Yanks back to their hotel for a merry little feast.

  Though the Post’s Page Six had reported Kelly and Hudson were picking up where Jeter and A-Rod left off—“Kate Hudson Feels Minka Kelly Brushback,” read the headline—witnesses saw the two couples exchanging easy banter and generally enjoying each other’s
company.

  It was just the four of them at a table for about an hour. “There were tables everywhere, a lot of different groups to sit with,” said one witness. “So they literally chose to sit with each other.”

  One friend of Rodriguez’s was glad he had moved on from Madonna and settled in with Hudson, whom the friend described as grounded enough to make for an ideal A-Rod partner for the long term. On the Minka front, a friend of Jeter’s said the shortstop appeared more serious about the Friday Night Lights star than he’d been about past actresses, singers, and starlets.

  But the relationship Yankee officials, players, coaches, and fans cared about most was the rapidly improving one between Jeter and Rodriguez, who did their Jordan and Pippen thing in the Twins series—Jeter scored four runs, and A-Rod drove him home for three of those four.

  Rodriguez was a dynamic force against the Twins, good for six RBI, finally distancing himself from the horrific postseason numbers that had dogged him since the back half of the 2004 ALCS. With his own eyes, Jeter could see the value of a liberated Rodriguez.

  “I’ve had conversations with Derek about this,” said Buck Showalter, who managed Jeter briefly in 1995 before managing Rodriguez in Texas in 2003. “Derek understands Alex’s positives and negatives. He loves the statistical return he gets from Alex, and he’s come to understand the way Alex is.”

  This is what the rest of baseball feared, the coming together of the most talented player, Rodriguez, and the most resourceful player, Jeter.

  A-Rod and Jeter were so different as people and athletes, common ground was harder to find than a Bucky Dent fan in Boston. Their contrasting experiences at the four-hour-and-fifty-minute 2008 All-Star Game at the old Yankee Stadium had said it all. Long after he was removed from the game, Jeter hung on the dugout railing through all fifteen innings, all the way until the American League won at 1:38 a.m.

  Rodriguez? A day after he spoke of his love for the Stadium and all things pinstriped, A-Rod played four innings, showered, dressed, and bolted the premises to start his night on the town, leaving Jeter to see everyone to the door hours later.

  Jeter and Rodriguez were the odd couple in every way. Even their pregame approaches to hitting were different; Jeter was not as maniacal or lathered up as Rodriguez in his preparation. The captain took about thirty to thirty-five swings before batting practice, another thirty to thirty-five during BP, and then another fifteen before the game. The shortstop was more of a feel hitter, someone who wanted to see his stride on video before making an adjustment.

  “Derek’s not one of those guys who does multiple tee drills or a net drill like Alex,” said Yankees hitting coach Kevin Long. “Alex does a lot of very precise, detailed drills to help his swing, and Derek’s not nearly as—I don’t want to say anal, but he doesn’t get as sophisticated with it.”

  Nothing Jeter did mirrored what Rodriguez did, and the rest of baseball only hoped their differences in style, skill, and personality would widen the divide between them, until the Yanks finally threw up their hands, swallowed a huge portion of A-Rod’s contract, and traded him to another owner with stars in his eyes.

  But when the Yankees clinched the AL East title, the papers ran photos no enemy of the Yankee state ever wanted to see.

  These were not pictures of Rodriguez grabbing a reluctant Jeter the way the Babe grabbed a reluctant Gehrig. The photos captured a beaming Jeter lifting A-Rod’s cap off his head with his left hand and pouring a bottle of bubbly over A-Rod’s bowed scalp with his right.

  At last, the captain had baptized Rodriguez a Yankee, and even those old October haunts, the Angels, were sweating the potential fallout. As it turned out, their fears were well founded.

  The first run of the ALCS was scored by Jeter, who had singled before Rodriguez drove him home with a sacrifice fly. The captain added another RBI single, CC Sabathia outpitched John Lackey, and in Bronx temperatures unfit for a polar bear the Yankees took Game 1 from the warm-blooded Californians, 4–1.

  The following night, again in Lambeau-like weather, Jeter hit a big homer; Rodriguez again hit a bigger one on an 0-2 pitch from Brian Fuentes to lead off the eleventh inning, Angels up a run; and the Yanks would win it in the thirteenth when Maicer Izturis made a wild throw to second base.

  If the ending of this brutal, five-hour-and-ten-minute marathon was stunning, it was fitting at the same time. The Angels were supposed to be the most fundamentally sound team in the sport, with the smartest manager, Mike Scioscia, and yet they spent the first two games of the ALCS making the kinds of forced and unforced errors the top-heavy Yanks had always made against them.

  Maybe their thinking caps were frozen under their ski masks and hoods. In the first inning of Game 1, Chone Figgins and Erick Aybar set the alarming tone by staring at each other as a pop-up fell untouched to the earth, allowing the Yankees another run and a 2–0 lead. In the thirteenth inning of Game 2, Figgins would fumble the remains of Izturis’s errant throw as Jerry Hairston Jr. raced home and into a mob of Yankee teammates who knocked him down.

  The Angels swore the weather did not affect them, but they did not look any more comfortable in the Bronx than Tom Landry’s Cowboys looked in the Ice Bowl.

  Scioscia’s team never seemed right in this series and even extended its bungling ways to the base paths. The Angels did survive Jeter’s leadoff homer and A-Rod’s fourth-inning blast to win Game 3 in eleven innings, and they did barely overcome A-Rod’s Game 4 pounding to win a topsy-turvy Game 5 and send the series back to New York.

  But these were not the 2002 or 2005 Angels. Of greater consequence, these were not the 2002 or 2005 Yankees.

  Game 6 was an efficient Pettitte-to-Joba-to-Mariano execution, and when the clock struck midnight, the great Rivera secured the last of his six outs, a strikeout of Gary Matthews Jr. that sent Jeter and Mark Teixeira running into Rodriguez’s arms to celebrate A-Rod’s first trip to the World Series.

  “I couldn’t be more excited,” the slugger would say amid another champagne bath he was sharing with Jeter. “I feel like a ten-year-old kid.”

  Four years after he said he had played like a dog against the Angels, Rodriguez batted .429 with a .567 on-base percentage and 3 homers and 6 RBI. Jeter did not quite keep up with A-Rod, but he could smile over the first of his two homers in the series, the one that gave him 19 in his postseason career, or one more than Mickey Mantle or Reggie Jackson hit in theirs.

  Of course, Mantle collected his 18 in 65 postseason games and Jackson collected his 18 in 77. Jeter would enter his first World Series since 2003 with 20 homers in 132 postseason games, trailing only Manny Ramirez (29) and Bernie Williams (22).

  One by one, the singles hitter with the inside-out swing was taking down the mightiest of October sluggers. Working with the benefit of extra playoff rounds, Jeter would face the defending champion Philadelphia Phillies with more postseason hits (164), runs (94), and games played than any other man dead or alive.

  Not that he cared about writing another edition of his record book; Jeter just wanted to end his World Series drought. And when someone asked Jeter what he would have said in 2000 if warned he would still have four trophies in 2009, the captain didn’t blink.

  “DAMN!” he said. “That’s exactly what I would’ve said.”

  On the night of November 4, 2009, the Yankees stood twenty-seven outs away from their twenty-seventh championship, and their first in the new Stadium. The Steinbrenners had spent more than $1.6 billion in wages on this pursuit since losing their dynasty in the Arizona desert eight years earlier. A one-for-the-thumb victory for the core four Yankees—dynasty holdovers Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and Jorge Posada—would make the investment worth it.

  The Yankees held a 3–2 lead over Philadelphia entering Game 6, and Cliff Lee’s pitching and Chase Utley’s power (the second baseman had tied Reggie Jackson’s World Series record with five home runs) were the chief reasons the Phillies remained alive.

  Lee dominated the Yanks
in Game 1, allowing one run and six hits—three of them to Jeter—in going the distance. But New York took the next three games, leaning on the lumber of Hideki Matsui and Alex Rodriguez, who struck out six times in eight hitless at-bats over the first two games in the Bronx before rediscovering his stroke in Philly.

  Rodriguez slammed a Cole Hamels pitch off a TV camera in right field in Game 3, inspiring the first use of instant replay in postseason history (the double was upgraded to a two-run homer) and turning the World Series in the Yankees’ favor.

  A-Rod was hit by a pitch for the third time in the Series before he won Game 4 with an RBI double off Phillies closer Brad Lidge, and before he found that his two doubles and three RBI in Game 5 were not enough to eliminate the home team.

  Philly was a proud reigning champ, but there was a grim sense of inevitability entering Game 6 at Yankee Stadium. Slugger Ryan Howard had twelve strikeouts and no homers in the first five games, and manager Charlie Manuel did not have a starter other than Lee capable of holding down Joe Girardi’s lineup.

  The Phillies were starting thirty-eight-year-old Pedro Martinez, who had done a serviceable job in the Game 2 loss but who wasn’t even half the pitcher he had been when the Yanks ran him down in that epic Game 7 six years earlier.

  And sure enough, before the 50,315 fans packed into the new Stadium, Martinez served up a two-run homer to Matsui in the second inning and a two-run single to Matsui in the third, after Jeter started the rally with a single of his own. Manuel was managing this game as if it were the middle of summer. At least when Grady Little stayed with Martinez much too long in the 2003 ALCS, Pedro was still Pedro, or damn close to it.