The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (17 page)

A center fielder and pitcher, Maier was the best twelve-year-old ballplayer in Old Tappan, a good baseball burb. Jeffrey was so hell-bent on chasing and catching the ball, he once stopped a ten-year-old travel game cold by slamming into the outfield fence and cutting open his head in pursuit of a home-run shot.

Jeffrey felt the back of his skull and saw the blood trickling down his right hand. He was more upset he did not catch the homer than he was about a gash that would require seven stitches to close.

His parents were vacationing in Bermuda when they sent back word that their son was not to play in another travel game until they returned. On arrival in Old Tappan, Dick and Jane Maier were told by their housekeeper that Jeffrey was at his team’s game, watching in the stands.

Dick and Jane headed to the field, only to find that their son was refusing to talk to them. You did not take baseball away from ten-year-old Jeffrey Maier without paying a heavy price.

Nothing had changed two years later, when Jane Maier wrote a note to the principal of Charles DeWolf Middle School asking that her son be excused from his final October 9 period, a gym class, because he had an appointment with his orthodontist.

She had no idea Jeffrey had a date with destiny instead.

“I should’ve known we were in trouble,” Fern Altman said, “when Jeffrey got in our car with his mitt on.”

His black Mizuno mitt. Jeffrey’s parents had challenged him to bring home a ball. His grandmother, up from Florida for the bar mitzvah, had told him that morning, “If the Yankees don’t know how to do it, you show them how.”

Jeffrey was a Derek Jeter fan making it to Yankee Stadium for the second time. The year before, he had joined his father at a Yanks-Indians game played on August 13, hours after Mickey Mantle died inside Baylor University Medical Center. Jeffrey persuaded Cleveland’s Dennis Martinez to sign his glove.

Dick Maier loved Mantle; he had his basement decorated with testaments to the Mick and Joe DiMaggio and other baseball icons. Growing up in Washington Heights, listening to every game he could find on the radio, Dick made his first trip to Yankee Stadium for a Red Sox game, hoping he would catch a foul ball from DiMaggio or Ted Williams.

He caught one from Jerry Coleman instead.

Some forty-five years later, Dick’s son had failed to catch a David Justice foul ball during a Braves-Mets game at Shea. Jeffrey wanted desperately to get one. His black Mizuno had served him well on the Little League fields of Old Tappan, so he figured it might do the same around the great lawn of the Bronx.

Before Jeffrey jumped into the Altmans’ car wearing his Emmitt Smith T-shirt (“E=TD2” read the vague tribute to the Dallas Cowboys’ star) and his mitt, his father gave him a piece of homespun advice about sitting in right field. Jeter likes to go the opposite way, Dick told Jeff. Whenever there’s a hard-throwing pitcher on the mound and Jeter at the plate, be ready.

The Altmans crossed the George Washington Bridge, drove down the Major Deegan, and pulled into a Stadium parking lot. Their five tickets were divided—three in the front row, and two five rows back. Bob and Fern decided the three boys—their son, Brian, Jeffrey, and Matthew Saland—should stay together, and that they should keep their eyes fixed on the kids from the rear.

Through seven and a half innings Ripken had a couple of hits, making Brian a happy—if isolated—face in the crowd, and the Yankees were down by only a 4–3 count, leaving Jeffrey and Matthew hopeful the home team could still pull this off.

But from their seats in the sixth row, Brian’s parents were growing concerned over the hostile vibe being projected around them. The fans in right field, Fern Altman said, “were out for blood. As time went on, everybody was getting very drunk and the atmosphere was way too rowdy for us.”

The Altmans were not about to leave; the boys would never have allowed it. So when Jeter came to bat against Armando Benitez with one out in the eighth, nobody on, Jeffrey Maier had one thought in his head as he sat in Section 31, Box 325, Row A, Seat 2:

This is the situation Dad talked about. Jeter in the box, power thrower on the mound, a talented boy with a glove in the right-field stands.

“I was on high alert,” Jeffrey would say. “I was ready to go.”

So was Jeter. He already had two infield singles and a stolen base to his Game 1 name, but he had stranded two runners on his most recent trip to the plate.

This time around, he lashed at the second pitch he saw from Benitez, a high 94-mile-per-hour fastball that drifted from left to right and over the heart of the plate. The ball sailed high into the black Bronx night, toward the right-field wall. Tony Tarasco, the Orioles’ defensive replacement for the banged-up Bonilla, carefully worked his way back to the Nobody Beats the Wiz sign.

Behind Tarasco, behind the blue wall, a kid wearing a dark T-shirt and a black glove scrambled out of his seat and down a small flight of stairs as he tracked the majestic flight of Jeter’s shot.

Jeffrey Maier was going after the ball as fearlessly as he had gone after it the day he gashed open his head on the jagged edges of a Little League fence.

The New York–born Tarasco settled under the ball right next to the Wiz sign, lifted his glove, and pressed the small of his back against the padding on the wall. Tarasco did not jump. He did not think he had to jump. The ball was heading right for the webbing of his mitt, until it wasn’t.

A boy’s glove had beaten a man’s glove to the spot.

Maier had reached over the wall, following a twelve-year-old’s instinct rather than the grown-up ordinances that prohibited spectators of all ages from interfering with the game, never mind a crucial play in the ALCS. Jeffrey felt the baseball smack into the heel of his glove and watched it bounce free as he tried to bring it into his body.

A dangerous scramble ensued on the Maier side of the wall, while a nasty argument broke out on the Tarasco side. Rich Garcia, the right-field umpire, was jabbing his index finger toward the sky to signal a home run as Jeter circled the bases. Tarasco immediately got up in the ump’s face and berated him.

An enraged Benitez ran all the way from the mound to confront Garcia next, before Orioles manager Davey Johnson arrived to pull his reliever away. As Johnson jumped all over Garcia and earned his own ejection, Jeffrey Maier was receiving high-fives from dozens of fans and being lifted onto the shoulders of a stranger.

Maier had lost the fight for the loose ball he had knocked over the wall; Marc Jarvis, a thirty-five-year-old Connecticut man, came up with the prize. “I was at the bottom of the pile with the ball in my bare hand,” Maier would say, “and I was getting absolutely pummeled.”

One man kept yelling at Jeffrey that what he did was wrong, that he should not have interfered with the game, but the other adult fans were treating Maier as if he were Derek Jeter himself.

Five rows behind this chaotic scene, Bob and Fern Altman were ready to have a stroke. “It was a mob mentality,” Fern said. “It was very scary to be responsible for three children in that situation.”

Bob Altman pushed through a widening knot of fans to get down to the three boys and found Jeffrey on the stranger’s shoulders, riding high as he pumped his arms.

“Holy shit,” Bob told himself, “that guy is going to drop Jeff onto the field.”

Bob immediately pulled Maier down to safety and looked the boy in the eye.

“Jeff, what happened? Did you stick your hand over the wall?” he asked.

“No,” Maier answered. “I just looked up and stuck my hand out and I went for the ball.”

“OK. That’s your story. Stick to it.”

A columnist from the
Daily News
was the first media member on the scene, followed by one from
Newsday
, and then by dozens of reporters, photographers, broadcasters, and cameramen. Security guards told the Altmans they needed to move Jeffrey out to the corridor if he wanted to conduct any interviews, and out to the corridor the scrum went.

“And then it was lights, camera, action,” Fern Altman said.

Suddenly Jeffrey Maier was on NBC with Jim Gray. Wave after wave of reporters came at the Yankees’ angel in the outfield, and the kid answered their questions with an innocent smile.

“I’m a Yankees fan,” he said, “but I didn’t mean to do anything to change the outcome of the game or do anything bad to the Orioles.

“I feel like something amazing just happened. I didn’t think anything like this would ever happen to me. It’s pretty cool . . . I usually make those catches in Little League. But this time, I don’t care that I dropped it.”

A Yankees public relations official eventually led Maier, the Altmans, and Matthew Saland to an office where all phone lines were blinking red.
Good Morning America
was on hold, and so was Letterman. The PR official asked the Altmans if they wanted to talk to the shows’ producers, and Bob and Fern said they just wanted to return to their seats.

“You can’t,” the official told them. “The game is under protest, and we can’t guarantee your safety. The best thing for everyone is if you guys left the game right now.”

The official gave the Altmans a phone number, told them to dial it in the morning, and then had the party of five escorted to the Stadium exits. They started driving back to Bergen County, New Jersey, turned on the radio to catch the end of the game, and forgot that Jeffrey had given the press his parents’ unlisted number.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey’s father was driving home from his software job in Manhattan and listening to John Sterling and Michael Kay call Game 1 as it tumbled into extra innings. Dick Maier was on the Palisades Interstate Parkway when he heard the announcers mention that a controversial Jeter homer had made it a 4–4 game in the eighth, that a young boy had reached over the wall to steal an out from Tony Tarasco’s glove.

When they identified the boy as little Jeff Maier from Old Tappan, Dick said, “I almost had a heart attack. I started going about twenty miles over the speed limit just to get home to see it.

“I mean, I’m the biggest Yankee fan you could meet. My idol is Mickey Mantle. And I’m hearing them say on the radio that my son might have helped the Yankees get to the World Series.”

Soon enough, Bernie Williams hit a towering eleventh-inning homer off Baltimore’s Randy Myers, whipping a crowd of 56,495 into a frenzy and leaving the Orioles to rail against the forces that conspired against them.

Johnson announced his protest was not based on Garcia’s ruling—the Orioles manager knew full well he could not protest a judgment call. He said he was protesting Game 1 because the Yankees promised him that outfield fans would be blocked from getting past the railing and down to the wall.

In fact, before the game Orioles and Yankees officials met with the umpiring crew and discussed the potential for fan interference. “That was specifically covered,” said Kevin Malone, Baltimore’s assistant general manager. “They had issues with it in the past, and we were assured they’d be on top of it. It was bizarre. We overemphasized it in the meeting, and then it happened anyway. You think if you focused on it you’d get it right, so that was overly aggravating.”

Tarasco claimed he had no doubt he would have caught Jeter’s shot had Maier not beaten him to the ball. “It was like a magic trick,” Tarasco said. “The ball just disappeared in midair. Merlin must be in the house, man. Abracadabra.”

After watching the replay, Garcia agreed fan interference should have been called but disputed Tarasco’s claim that he would have made the catch. The ump believed Jeter deserved a double and felt badly that he gave the rookie two extra bases instead.

The game had taken four hours and twenty-three minutes to play, so most of the Yankees were too tired and too frayed to embrace the notion that a twelve-year-old boy had just bailed them out. Asked about the replays of Maier’s obvious interference, Joe Torre said, “Anybody see the replay of Bernie’s home run? That wasn’t bad, either.”

For his part, Jeter said he simply saw Garcia signaling a home run and that he was not about to argue. “He should’ve jumped,” the shortstop said of Tarasco. Jeter would eventually concede he had gotten a little help from a little friend.

“Afterward you could see there was a little interference there,” he would say, “but I don’t care.”

None of baseball’s elders cared either. Baltimore’s protest was shot down, and Jeter had the first postseason homer of his career.

“And it was so huge for us because that ball was going to be caught,” Yankees reliever David Weathers said. “I don’t care what anyone says. We were in the bullpen, and we saw it. We saw Tarasco, who’s a very good outfielder, camp under it. We were all like, ‘Oh, man,’ and then the crowd went crazy. It changed the whole series.”

It changed Jeffrey Maier’s life. He had left home that afternoon a seventh-grade athlete unknown outside the boundaries of his sleepy town, and he returned to Old Tappan that night as one of the country’s most famous ballplayers.

When the Altmans pulled up to the Maier home, a stretch limo was already waiting in the driveway to take Jeffrey and his family to the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan so he could appear on
Good Morning America
. It made sense: the kid was America’s most wanted man.

The next morning, with the Maiers and Altmans gathered in the ABC studio, Bob Altman assumed the role of press agent as major news media outlets jockeyed for time with Jeffrey.

Altman made it clear the family wanted lunch, limo service, and free tickets to Game 2 to grant any outlet exclusivity. “The
Daily News
comes back and says, ‘OK, we’ll give you two stretch limos, lunch at the All-Star Café, and after the game we’ll get you into the dugout and clubhouse to get autographs from the players. We’ll get you seats in the front row, behind the dugout, but it’s got to be exclusive to the
Daily News
. You can’t talk to the
New York Post
.’”

Altman brought the offer to Dick Maier, who accepted the terms. Jeffrey bounced from
Good Morning America
to
Live with Regis & Kathie Lee
to the All-Star Café, with photographers shooting his every step. While all this was going on, Jeffrey’s grandparents were returning to their retirement community in Lake Worth, Florida. Dave and Anne Maier had no idea what had happened the previous night, so when they saw the neighbors out waiting for them, they thought a community resident had passed away.