The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (20 page)

“I was looking at George,” the official continued, “and saying to myself, ‘Man, you can’t even enjoy this. It doesn’t matter that you’re king of the hill in New York and in the country right now, and millions of people are here to pay homage to you. You’re going crazy because the players got their way on something so silly.’

“But that’s him. If something’s not the way he wants it, big or small, it will set him off. And you don’t want to be on the receiving end of it when George goes off.”

Only Steinbrenner could not rain on this parade. Governor George Pataki was riding with Joe DiMaggio, and Mayor Giuliani’s son, Andrew, was riding with his hero, Jeter.

The shortstop was wearing shades to cover his bloodshot eyes, but through them he saw an unimagined sea of humanity. “You can’t explain this right here,” Jeter said.

His manager gave it a shot. “I tried to count how many wedding proposals Derek Jeter had,” Joe Torre said. “Everyone wanted to marry him up and down the street.”

Jeter was bigger than DiMaggio that day, bigger than any ballplayer or politician on a float. He was as big as Lindbergh, MacArthur, John Glenn, and every other American lion who traveled up the Canyon of Heroes and into a blizzard of confetti, appreciation, and love.

A champion at twenty-two, the Kalamazoo kid had Broadway at his feet in every literal and figurative way.

Derek Jeter was sitting next to his good friend Alex Rodriguez at the 1998 NBA All-Star Game, watching Michael Jordan put on a show worthy of the Madison Square Garden stage.

Jeter loomed as large as Jordan on this night, if only because he held the home court advantage. This was his town and his time.

Jordan was turning thirty-five and in the middle of his final season with the Chicago Bulls; Jeter was twenty-three, he had been chosen as one of
People
magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People,” and he had appeared on
Seinfeld
.

Oh, and he was also dating the poster girl on his bedroom wall, Mariah Carey, just as he had predicted years earlier to everyone back home. Jeter and Carey had met at a Fresh Air Fund gala near the end of 1996 and ultimately started a romance when her marriage to music executive Tommy Mottola came undone.

Jeter had it all. When he left his All-Star Game seat at halftime, Jeter parted a sea of awestruck fans on his way to the men’s room before one of them dared to penetrate his personal space. A hand emerged from the crowd.

The shortstop was willing to give the stranger a quick handshake on the run until he heard the young man’s voice. “Derek, I’m Peyton Manning. You’re having some career.”

Jeter stopped to congratulate the University of Tennessee quarterback who was two months away from becoming the first pick in the NFL draft, and Manning looked as pleased as any Little Leaguer would have been to earn ten seconds of Jeter’s time.

Rodriguez stood in the Garden corridor, near a concession stand, and waited patiently for his friend to return. A-Rod, as he was known, was not accustomed to playing Robin to anyone’s Batman. A year after Jeter was chosen sixth in the 1992 draft, Seattle made the six-foot-three Rodriguez the first overall choice out of Miami’s Westminster Christian High.

Rodriguez was an amateur prospect described by some scouts and agents as the best they had ever seen—an opinion shared by the man who drafted Jeter, Bill Livesey, and the agent who represented Jeter in his first contract negotiations with the Yankees, Steve Caruso.

“Derek’s the second-best high school player I ever saw, and Alex was easily the best,” Caruso said. “Alex was the same height as Derek, but his body was much more developed. With Derek, you sensed he could be a star. With Alex, you knew he’d be a star.”

Caruso was among the finalists to represent Rodriguez before he lost out to Scott Boras. The teenage A-Rod was cocky, of course, “but it was an act,” Caruso said. “That’s what struck me about him. He did not have a lot of self-esteem. . . . You’d tell Alex, ‘You’re a very good player,’ and he’d say, ‘You think so?’ He needed to hear it all the time, where Derek was more confident in himself.”

During his talks with Rodriguez, Caruso found A-Rod to be fascinated with Jeter, or at least with what he would read about Derek in
Baseball America
. “Oh, man, I love Derek Jeter,” Rodriguez told Caruso. Alex said he wanted to be introduced to the Yankee farmhand.

So the agent gave A-Rod’s number to Jeter and had his client give him a ring. Jeter and Rodriguez met face-to-face at a Michigan-Miami baseball game during Jeter’s first spring training, and one nearly became interchangeable with the other.

Over time America discovered they shared the same height, the same complexion, the same green eyes, the same short-cropped haircut, the same leg-buckling effect on women, and, of course, the same passion for being great.

“Looking at him is almost like looking in the mirror,” Rodriguez would say of Jeter. “We are often mistaken for related, for brothers, when we’re together. And now, we spend a lot of time together. We’ve grown close, to be special friends.”

As major leaguers, Jeter stayed in A-Rod’s Pike Place apartment when the Yankees were in Seattle, and Rodriguez stayed in Derek’s Upper East Side apartment when the Mariners were in New York. In those weeks when the American League schedule makers left them miles and miles apart, Jeter and Rodriguez checked each other’s box scores first thing in the morning.

Their love-love relationship was the source of constant clubhouse teasing. When Rodriguez’s high school teammate Doug Mientkiewicz would run into A-Rod, he would jokingly ask him, “Are you going over your boyfriend’s house?”

Jeter heard it, too. “I talk about Alex around here,” the Yankee shortstop said of his home locker room, “my own teammates tell me to shut up.” Jeter’s teammate in ’96, Jim Leyritz, confirmed as much. “We used to give Derek a hard time about it,” Leyritz said of the shortstop’s relationship with Rodriguez. “It was like, ‘Hey, dude, he’s on the other team.’”

Alex and Derek. Derek and Alex. The mention of one automatically inspired the mention of the other.

Jeter won a championship and the American League Rookie of the Year award in ’96. That same season, as he was closing on his twenty-first birthday, Rodriguez became the youngest shortstop ever to make an All-Star team. A-Rod nearly won the AL MVP award (he finished a very close second to Juan Gonzalez of Texas) and became the first AL shortstop in more than half a century to win a batting title with his .358 average, a stat enhanced by his 36 homers and 123 RBI.

A-Rod had the far greater individual season—in fact, it was the greatest offensive season by any shortstop—but he already lusted for what Jeter owned in New York. “I want [a championship] very bad,” he said. “I would trade everything about my year for what [Jeter] had.”

They appeared together on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
in February of ’97, a smiling Jeter wrapping his right arm around a smiling and kneeling A-Rod. The headline announced that the friends were heading “the finest group of shortstops since World War II.”

Their numbers took something of a plunge that year, as Rodriguez lost 58 points from his batting average and Jeter lost 23 points from his. They both reached the playoffs, where Jeter hit for a higher average against Cleveland (.333) than Rodriguez batted against Baltimore (.313) and actually out-homered the more powerful A-Rod in the postseason, slamming two to Alex’s one.

But like Rodriguez’s Mariners, Jeter’s Yankees were eliminated in the first round, and that was the way Jeter preferred to keep score. It did not matter that Mariano Rivera surrendered the big Game 4 homer to Sandy Alomar Jr., or that Bernie Williams was the Yankee star who did not come through. The Yankees failed to win it all, leaving Jeter to view the season as a waste of time.

George Steinbrenner reached the same conclusion. Already steamed over the fact that his defending champs were eliminated by his hometown team, Steinbrenner blew a fuse when he read a
New York Post
story that said his Yanks went right from their Game 5 defeat to the airport to a Greenwich Village club, where they partied through the night.

Steinbrenner immediately picked up the phone and began blasting away. David Cone had organized the boys’ night out, figuring his team needed some cheering up. The Boss told Cone he was extremely disappointed in him, told him he had let down the organization. “I completely agree,” Cone replied. “I apologize. It’s my responsibility. I’m the one who put that thing together, and it won’t happen again.”

It was a fitting punctuation mark on a season shaped by none of the feel-good karma that had inspired a title in ’96. The disagreeable tone was set by Cecil Fielder, who interrupted the Yankees’ otherwise charmed off-season by demanding a trade, ripping Joe Torre for benching him in Game 1 of the Texas series, ignoring Torre’s several phone messages, and demanding a contract extension.

The ’97 team was doomed before the close of spring training. The ’96 team, Tim Raines said, “wasn’t concerned about ‘me’ and ‘I.’ It was a team and that’s why we won the World Series. Everybody pulled for each other and the team actually liked each other, and that’s hard to find in baseball because you usually have different cliques.

“You have a lot of Latinos hanging together. You’ve got the white guys hanging together. You’ve got the black guys hanging together. You’ve got the pitchers hanging together, the infielders, the outfielders, and there was none of that on our [’96 team].”

Jeter moved easily from group to group, clique to clique, race to race, and yet the sturdy bridges connecting the diverse clubhouse groups began to rot in ’97. “We basically came back with the same team, minus John Wetteland, but we weren’t a band of brothers anymore,” said Brian Cashman, who would replace Bob Watson as general manager before the ’98 season.

“Cecil started it off in spring training, and then Charlie Hayes and Wade Boggs were fighting like they weren’t the year before. All the guys who put aside their personal interests in ’96 decided it was time for me, and it really changed the dynamic of our clubhouse. So we purged our clubhouse of a lot of guys guilty of that.”

Club officials wanted the Yanks built around Jeter and his team-centric goals, and they were concerned that too many players with self-absorbed pursuits would hurt the cause. So Fielder, Boggs, and Hayes were among those out, along with Kenny Rogers and Doc Gooden.

Watson was another casualty of the ’97 season. He had no problem trading a left-handed starter, Rogers, for a third baseman hitting .203 in Oakland, Scott Brosius. But Watson refused to deal a left-handed first-round pick, Eric Milton, and a highly rated infield prospect, Cristian Guzman, for Minnesota’s All-Star second baseman, Chuck Knoblauch, whose required wage was too rich for the Twins’ small-market blood.

Minnesota initially asked for Williams and Andy Pettitte, “and I told Mr. Steinbrenner that if we waited there was a good possibility we’d get [Knoblauch] for two broken fungo bats and a bag of BP balls,” Watson said. “Minnesota wasn’t going to spring training with Knoblauch contract-wise, so they would’ve come off Milton and Guzman, too.”

From afar, Steinbrenner had fallen in love with Knoblauch, and once Steinbrenner fell in love with someone else’s player he would not be denied. Knoblauch had speed (62 stolen bases in ’97), a little pop in his bat, and sure enough hands to win a Gold Glove. Steinbrenner saw Minnesota’s second baseman as the perfect long-term partner for Jeter.

So he ordered Watson to do the deal for Milton and Guzman, and the GM refused, telling the Boss he had been hired to protect the franchise’s assets. Steinbrenner would not back down, and neither would Watson.

“Mr. Steinbrenner told me someone else would make the deal, and I told him I’d have to respectfully resign,” Watson said. “He had the trade made, and I packed my little box under my desk and that was it.”

Watson was a burned-out mess, beaten down by Steinbrenner’s relentless verbal assaults. So he stepped down, compelling the Boss to promote the thirty-year-old Cashman. The new GM was ordered to give the Twins what they wanted, and Steinbrenner got his man, a natural leadoff hitter who could move Jeter to the two-hole.

“Joe Montana,” A-Rod said of Jeter, “just found his Jerry Rice.”

Rodriguez had played with Knoblauch in some exhibition games in Japan. “Chuck Knoblauch is such a good player I’m not even sure New York knows what it has,” A-Rod gushed. “Chuck and Derek are both Gold Glove–type guys on defense and great offensive players. I think this probably gives the Yankees the best shortstop–second base combination in the whole league.”

Publicly, A-Rod was saying he wanted Jeter to forge a perfect union with Knoblauch and to watch them live happily ever after. Privately, according to a friend of A-Rod’s, Rodriguez was already jealous of the off-the-charts popularity Jeter enjoyed in the world’s biggest market while he was posting far superior numbers in Seattle.

The self-esteem issues identified by Caruso four years earlier fed A-Rod’s Jeter envy. Rodriguez had once said of the Yankee shortstop, “He’s smarter than me, though. He got 1,200 on his SATs. I got 910. My reading comprehension held me back, because we speak only Spanish at home.”

A-Rod would marvel over the way Jeter handled the New York traffic and the scores of fans who approached his car to request/demand an autograph, and would suggest he could not possibly manage the same hectic pace. For his part, Jeter would say Rodriguez deserved the AL MVP award for setting an offensive standard at short that could not be touched.

“I think we bring out the best in one another,” Jeter said.

At the time Jeter respected Rodriguez’s opinion as much as his game, and so he accepted his February 1998 endorsement of Knoblauch as gospel. Jeter did not want to knock his previous partners, Mariano Duncan and Luis Sojo and Rey Sanchez. “But Chuck can hit, steal bases, turn a double play,” Jeter said, “everything you could want in a second baseman. . . . I’m looking forward to it. We all think we have a shot at winning another championship.”

A shot? As the Yankees gathered at their spring training base in Tampa, Steinbrenner did not want to believe he had made a $72 million payroll investment in a shot. The Boss thought he was paying for a sure thing.