The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter

by Ian O'Connor

  Manuel was working with the Jurassic Pedro, and yet he kept Martinez out there long enough for Matsui to pummel him in Round 2. By the time the Philly manager replaced Martinez with Chad Durbin after the fourth inning, it was too late.

  Jeter smacked Durbin’s fourth pitch for a double, then scored on Mark Teixeira’s single to make it 5–1. Matsui would then belt a two-run double off J. A. Happ to make it six RBI on the night, to clinch the World Series MVP award, and to make the terms of the Phillies’ demise a matter of how, not if.

  It was only fitting that Jeter played a significant role in this clincher, contributing three hits and two runs and watching as the new A-Rod, the selfless A-Rod, agreed to accept two walks to help his team. Rodriguez refused to flail away in the hope of extending his hot streak and beating Matsui and everyone else to the MVP.

  Jeter was the unofficial host of this World Series, just as he had been the unofficial host of the All-Star Game in the old Stadium. On the field before Game 1, Jeter kissed the First Lady, Michelle Obama, and the vice president’s wife, Jill Biden, and he playfully mugged with Yogi Berra before posing for photos with all three. Jeter also caught the ceremonial first pitch thrown by Tony Odierno, the son of the U.S. commander in Iraq, Raymond Odierno, and a veteran of the Iraq war who had lost an arm.

  The following day, Jeter ended up in a news conference before Game 2 to accept the Roberto Clemente Award for his community service. “You’re a wonderful role model not only for the youth of America,” Bud Selig said at the podium, “but also for our players. You have been the face of baseball for many years, and you’re truly deserving of this award.”

  Selig would say he was proud to be the leader of a sport with Derek Jeter in it, and in full uniform the shortstop stepped to the podium and joked that he had the commissioner fooled, too.

  Jeter did everything for the franchise and meant everything to the franchise. Appropriately enough, in a season that would see Jeter win a Gold Glove award, a Silver Slugger award, and a Hank Aaron Award, he secured the very last major league hit of 2009, a single off Ryan Madson in the eighth.

  With two outs and the Yanks holding a 7–3 lead in the top of the ninth, Rivera finished what Pettitte had started. The greatest closer of them all got Shane Victorino to ground to second base, and as Robinson Cano was making his throw to first, his double-play partner was running forward in great anticipation, ready to throw his arms toward the black Bronx night.

  Jeter and A-Rod ended up in a delirious scrum behind the mound, the weight of the world and the World Series lifted from their shoulders. Jeter had his first ring as a captain, a teary-eyed Rodriguez had his first ring, period, and the brand-new Stadium nearly crumbled around them.

  After they ended up on a podium behind second base, there for the official coronation, Jeter held the trophy above his head and said, “It’s good to be back. This is right where it belongs.”

  Soon enough the captain was outside the winning clubhouse, hugging his parents and sister while holding a bottle of Moët & Chandon. Jeter gathered his girlfriend, Minka Kelly, who was tucked tightly under a Yankee cap, and walked her into the clubhouse and toward his locker in the back, away from the madness unfolding in the heart of the room.

  Jeter checked on Kelly, made sure she was all set in this dry corner of victory, and then went off to join the fun. “It feels better than I remember it,” the captain said. “It’s been a long time.”

  Jeter would grab Rodriguez around the neck, put him in a WWE chokehold, and pour champagne over the third baseman’s head as he nearly dragged him to the ground, the two of them giggling the way they had on their sleepovers in a different life, bonus babies talking about someday playing on the same team. Yes, A-Rod had discovered it was a lot more fun to impact a World Series with his bat than with an opt-out clause in his contract.

  Jeter and Rodriguez ended up with their famous girlfriends and their famous teammates at 1Oak, a trendy Chelsea club, where the Yankees took over the place the way the international soccer stars with the Cosmos used to take over Studio 54. Two mornings later, the Yanks all climbed aboard floats and rode in a ticker-tape parade.

  “You feel like you’re the president, waving,” Jeter said. He had met President Obama at the All-Star Game, in the locker room, the two of them congratulating each other and speaking one biracial golden child to another.

  “I’ve been a big fan for a long time,” the president said before turning toward Jeter’s American League teammates. “This guy’s like the old guy around here now, huh?”

  “I’m not the oldest,” Jeter responded through a smile.

  Just the most revered.

  The ticker-tape parade was attended by a couple of million people, and for the fifth time Jeter was the recipient of the loudest cheers and the most marriage proposals.

  “You could do this every day and you wouldn’t get tired of it,” he said.

  It seemed as if Jeter had been doing it every day for the first five years of his career. He would play baseball, he would win in October, he would be honored for winning in October the right way.

  New York watched him grow up, applauding his every baby step into manhood. The Truman Show, that was Jeter’s story—the shortstop said so himself—and a loyal audience approved of the plot line.

  As it turned out, the main character had a steady moral compass. Derek Sanderson Jeter did not just embody the pride of the Yankees as much as any mythic figure before him.

  He proved a prince can become a king without lusting after the throne.

  Epilogue

  The Derek Jeter who finished the 2010 season needing a new contract from the Yankees was not the Derek Jeter who finished the 2009 season as a five-time champ at the very top of his game.

  The captain had endured his worst season as a pro, flailing his way to a career-low batting average of .270, a full 64 points below his average from the year before. Jeter established new personal lows in on-base percentage (.340) and slugging percentage (.370), and his sabermetric numbers in the field took a cruel turn south.

  More than anything, Jeter transitioned from a young thirty-five to an old thirty-six. Overnight, the ageless wonder at short had devolved into the picture of Dorian Gray.

  In the six-game American League Championship Series loss to the Texas Rangers, Jeter appeared positively glacial when measured against the Rangers’ whiz kid, Elvis Andrus. The difference in range, bounce, and athleticism could not be ignored.

  So Yankees fans understood why Jeter’s contract negotiations wouldn’t mirror the last round of talks between player and team a decade earlier, when Jeter had all the leverage and used it to make his $189 million score.

  On the eve of the last great financial face-off between Jeter and the Yankees, the fans understood why Hal Steinbrenner told 1050 ESPN Radio’s Michael Kay that “things could get messy.” They understood a couple of weeks later—with negotiations already under way—why team president Randy Levine told writers assembled at the general managers’ meetings in Orlando the following:

  “Now’s a different negotiation than ten years ago. . . . This isn’t a licensing deal or a commercial rights deal. He’s a baseball player.”

  But the fans could not understand how the purest marriage in sports could descend into a food fight between a dignified icon and the only team he ever wanted to play for, the bitter contract talks stamping 2010 as a year Jeter only wished he could forget.

  The captain’s rocky 2010 actually started near the end of 2009, when his friend Tiger Woods was exposed as a serial adulterer in a scandal that would cost Woods his marriage and good name. Reports said that Jeter had introduced Tiger to one of his mistresses at the center of the storm, Rachel Uchitel, and that Jeter had also dated her at one time.

  With so many superstar sports figures engulfed in scandal, Tiger and Jeter had represented the last men standing. That all changed when Woods crashed his Cadillac SUV into a fire hydrant and tree outside his home in the hours after the first Tha
nksgiving dinner of the rest of his life, unleashing a bimbo eruption to end all bimbo eruptions.

  For Jeter, seeing his name connected to the Woods story in any way was an unfortunate development much too close for comfort.

  “Man, they’re trying to bring me into this thing with Tiger, and I’ve got nothing to do with it,” Jeter told a friend. “You see why I didn’t get married?”

  In fact, reports had Jeter engaged and scheduled to be married to longtime girlfriend Minka Kelly in November of 2010 at Long Island’s lavish Oheka Castle, reports that proved to be false. As it turned out, the captain spent that month fretting over an entirely different event in his life.

  Jeter wanted badly to re-sign with the Yankees, and the Yankees wanted to grant that wish. But they wanted to grant it on their terms. They believed their shortstop was in a state of decline, and they planned on using their negotiating leverage the way Jeter had used his after the 2000 season.

  If the captain’s contract had expired after 2009, he would have been in line for another staggering nine-figure deal. But he spent 2010 hitting more ground balls than any other player in baseball. As the Yankees’ leadoff man, Jeter hit a career-high 3.6 grounders for every ball he put in the air, according to FanGraphs.com, which also reported that Jeter swung at a career-worst 28.2 percent of pitches outside the strike zone.

  The numbers painted a portrait of a ballplayer who had lost bat speed and confidence, a hitter desperate enough to cheat on the fastball. Pitchers kept attacking him low and inside, and Jeter kept slapping those balls harmlessly into the ground.

  On September 15, the captain only hardened the belief that his skills were eroding when he faked getting hit by a pitch from Tampa Bay’s Chad Qualls, a pitch that actually struck the knob of his bat. Jeter allowed an umpire to mistakenly award him first base, and most fans understood why.

  But Jeter’s absurd acting job was beneath him. As soon as the ball hit the knob, Jeter spun around, flung the bat, hopped about, and grabbed his left forearm in apparent agony, bending over and releasing an anguished cry. He gingerly extended his left arm for trainer Gene Monahan’s inspection.

  The home-plate umpire, Lance Barksdale, bought the act, if only because baseball’s Honest Abe was performing it. Barksdale would eject the irate Rays manager, Joe Maddon, only to discover later that Jeter admitted he had pulled a fast one.

  Players, coaches, and columnists were divided over the redeeming value—or lack thereof—of Jeter’s little prank. Dodgers manager Joe Torre made the predictable case for his favorite player, saying, “Hell, yeah, he did the right thing. It’s not like running a red light. Stuff you can do out on the field, whether you can get away with it, it’s not being immoral. . . . Anything you can get away with is fine.”

  This from the same Torre who had rebuked A-Rod for yelling “Ha!” on a pop-up to successfully distract a Blue Jays fielder while running the bases.

  In the end, this scene of a struggling Jeter cheating his way to first reminded some of the 1973 World Series scene of a forty-two-year-old Willie Mays on his knees at the plate, begging in vain for the ump to give his Mets a call.

  Jeter was off-key all season. In July, ninety-nine-year-old public address announcer Bob Sheppard died two days before the eighty-year-old Boss, George Steinbrenner, died after suffering a massive heart attack.

  Steinbrenner’s death was the bigger story, of course, as he was a global figure who had become the most famous owner in the history of American team sports. Jeter was fond of Steinbrenner, the man who made him captain, and the feared employer who forever granted Jeter the exclusive privilege of dousing him with champagne in a winning October clubhouse.

  Remarkably enough, the star owner and star shortstop had only one public run-in (when Steinbrenner suggested after the 2002 season that Jeter was partying too much), and even that tiff ended in a most amicable way—with the two of them dancing in a Visa ad.

  So Jeter was the right Yankee to speak to the crowd before the first home game since Steinbrenner’s death, the first game the Yanks played after the All-Star Game in Anaheim. Without reading from notes, the captain delivered an eloquent tribute to Steinbrenner and Sheppard and called them “two shining stars in the Yankee universe.” It was another clutch performance by a shortstop who made a cottage industry out of them.

  Only that morning, Jeter was angered by a column in the Daily News written by its longtime baseball voice, Bill Madden, who wondered how it was possible that not a single Yankee player, past or present, had bothered to show up for Sheppard’s funeral the day before.

  As the captain and the player who insisted that Sheppard’s taped voice introduce him at the plate after the public address man retired, Jeter instantly became the face of the no-shows. Asked why he didn’t attend the funeral, Jeter maintained that there are different ways of honoring a man’s memory, a fair point for sure.

  But when Jeter said, “To be honest with you, I didn’t know his funeral was yesterday,” many veteran Jeter watchers were stunned. For once, the shortstop had come to work unprepared. This marked the first time in Jeter’s distinguished career that he had given a dog-ate-my-homework explanation for anything.

  The captain survived the slip-up. A few days later, a SportsBusiness Daily survey of sports business executives and media personalities showed that Jeter was far and away the most marketable player in baseball. Jeter received thirty-nine first-place votes in the survey, and the runner-up, Albert Pujols, received all of two.

  The shortstop remained a Madison Avenue heavyweight because of his looks, his relative humility, his ability to dodge controversy, and his talent for treating the biggest October games as if they were pickup games in the park.

  “The greatest thing about Jeter,” Alex Rodriguez said, “is he treats Game 7 of the World Series the same way as the first game of spring training, literally. I’ve never seen a player quite like that.

  “He’s Mr. Simplicity. He keeps it as simple as possible. All players can learn something from Jeter, because he’s a master at it.”

  In August, after going homerless in forty-six at-bats, Rodriguez had blasted the 600th home run of his career the night after Jeter advised him to relax and try for a single. The captain shared his experiences in running down Lou Gehrig for the club’s all-time hits record, and A-Rod seemed to take it to heart.

  When Rodriguez crossed the plate, he was greeted by a beaming Jeter, who had scored ahead of him. The captain gave A-Rod a double high-five, and after the third baseman took his curtain call and retreated down the steps of the dugout, a smiling Jeter was waiting there for another hug.

  Yes, their first championship together had improved an already improving relationship. “It’s been huge,” said general manager Brian Cashman. “The fact that they have a good relationship now, and it’s seamless, it’s just another distraction—like Alex supposedly can’t hit in the postseason—that we don’t have to hear about anymore. It’s just another pressure valve relieved.”

  Only at season’s end, the A-Rod–Jeter discussion didn’t revolve around the return of their feel-good karma; it revolved around their age and loss of range, and whether the Yankees could win another title with them making like bronze statues on the left side of the infield.

  Rodriguez was signed through the 2017 season and still had enough power at the plate to make for a credible designated hitter if needed. Jeter had no such power and for the first time was a Yankee without a contract.

  But despite the questions raised by his 2010 performance, Jeter did arrive at the negotiating table with some friendly facts on his side. He committed the fewest errors of his career (6), managed a league-best .989 fielding percentage, and won his fifth Gold Glove award (an honor mocked in many baseball corners), making him only the sixth shortstop to win at least five and the oldest American Leaguer to win one since a thirty-six-year-old Luis Aparicio claimed his ninth in 1970.

  Jeter stood 106 games short of Mickey Mantle’s franchise record of games played
(2,401) and, of course, needed 74 hits to become the first Yankee to reach 3,000. No, the executives on the other side of the table—Cashman, Levine, and Hal Steinbrenner—couldn’t ignore the history Jeter represented.

  The captain was chiseling himself into the franchise’s own Mount Rushmore, a truth captured a year earlier by one of the best young pitchers in the game, Florida’s Josh Johnson, who pumped his fist after blowing a 96-mile-per-hour fastball by the Yankees’ leadoff man. “Striking out Derek Jeter,” Johnson said. “I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.”

  Yes, Jeter’s legend was a powerful force. Chris Webber, the former NBA All-Star, didn’t remember the teenage Jeter from the time his AAU basketball team defeated the Kalamazoo Blues. But as a grownup, Webber said, “I’ve told that story in every bar I’ve ever walked into, that I once played basketball against Derek Jeter. And then in the parking lot afterward, I usually add that I struck him out once playing baseball.”

  For good reason: Jeter was the biggest star in the biggest city. He made New York an American League town, seizing it from the Mets, and he took the town from the Knicks, too.

  Madison Square Garden was the place to be in the early to mid-nineties, and then two things happened that made a seat behind the Yankee Stadium plate more desirable than a courtside seat at the Garden.

  Pat Riley left.

  Derek Jeter arrived.

  This is what Jeter and his agent, Casey Close, wanted to sell to the Yankees in their contract talks. The captain had been an invaluable asset to the brand, to the new Stadium, and to the YES Network, and he had never embarrassed the franchise the way Alex Rodriguez had.

  Jeter was everything the Yankees wanted their mythology to be. He was the right man to make the final speech at the old Stadium across the street, the right man to pack up that DiMaggio sign he forever reached up and touched in the tunnel and carry it home with the memories.

  Clyde King, the Steinbrenner aide who wanted Jeter demoted before the start of his rookie season in 1996, would come to see Jeter as perhaps the greatest all-around shortstop of all time. “I played with Pee Wee Reese, and Jeter is better,” King would say. “I had a ton of respect for Ernie Banks, but Jeter is better than him, too, because he can do it all.”