The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (25 page)

Jeter was not trying to ascend to this throne, and he certainly did not want to land there by way of a tragic turn of events. “But he knew it was something he wasn’t going to be able to escape,” Long said. “He assumed the role without claiming it.”

If he was not the crowned king of New York, Jeter was at least the blossoming prince of Madison Avenue. He had endorsement deals with Nike, Coach leather products, Skippy peanut butter, Florsheim Shoes, the Discover Card, Fleet Bank, and Acclaim Entertainment, and he asked all of his corporate benefactors to get involved with his Turn 2 Foundation initiative to keep kids off drugs. Michael Jordan recruited him to be part of his brand and to be the only baseball player featured in a commercial starring Jordan’s handpicked stable of athletes, one that included Roy Jones, Ray Allen, and Randy Moss.

Jeter turned down endorsement opportunities every week to avoid overexposure, to align himself only with companies he felt matched up with his image, and, of greatest consequence, to keep his focus on winning championships.

His was a life of substance over style, of dependability over drama. “Derek was the most low-maintenance star I’ve ever been around,” said the Yankees’ PR man, Rick Cerrone. “He never told us he wouldn’t do something, he had no entourage, he had no special interview rules. People loved him as a baseball superstar, and women loved him as a sex symbol, but he never carried himself like that.”

Cerrone received a nonstop supply of requests from parents of sick children who wanted to meet Jeter, and the shortstop met as many of those children as he possibly could. He did not offer kids a signed ball and a pat on the cap on his way to the batting cage. Jeter forever took the time to make meaningful eye contact with the boys and girls, to engage them in conversation, to give them his batting gloves, and to introduce himself to emotional mothers and fathers he addressed as “ma’am” and “sir.”

“It was like the Walt Disney thing, plussing the experience,” Cerrone said. “Derek Jeter always plussed the experience.”

So on the night of August 6, 1999, Jeter arrived at Seattle’s Safeco Field—the Kingdome’s successor—as an unblemished and unchallenged baseball star. He was batting .352 with a career-high 20 homers, obliterating his employer’s arbitration claims that he could barely get the ball out of the infield.

Jeter was not happy when he received the news that Joe Torre was giving him a rest; the manager thought it was a good time for a break after his shortstop had been hit on the left wrist by a Jose Paniagua pitch the previous night. But Jeter settled in and watched as his first-place Yankees carried an 11–5 lead into the bottom of the eighth.

Alex Rodriguez launched a three-run homer off Jason Grimsley to make the game interesting, just not nearly as interesting as Grimsley made it when he hit Edgar Martinez in the side two pitches later, one pitch after sailing a fastball over his head.

Grimsley was ejected by home plate umpire Gary Cederstrom, and the Yankees knew what was coming in the top of the ninth, the inevitable retribution putting their dugout on edge. Frankie Rodriguez had recently touched off a Dodger Stadium brawl by throwing at Mark Grudzielanek’s head, and he was staying in the game to start the ninth as Jose Mesa warmed up in the pen.

Luis Sojo’s at-bat came and went quickly without incident—he was retired on the first pitch. But baseball’s code of frontier justice would have spared Sojo during a longer stay at the plate anyway, as he did not have the resumé or skill set required in the eye-for-an-eye tradeoff Seattle was seeking.

Martinez was a career .300-plus hitter coming off four consecutive 100-plus RBI seasons, and Rodriguez was not about to drill the ninth batter in the Yankee order, Sojo, who was only in the lineup to give the sore Jeter a rest.

But the leadoff hitter, Chuck Knoblauch? Now he was a worthy target, and everyone in both dugouts realized it. So on the second pitch, Rodriguez did what baseball’s unwritten law told him to do. He threw a fastball that glanced off Knoblauch’s rump.

Had Cederstrom ejected the Mariners’ reliever right then and there, tempers might have cooled and both teams might have called it a draw and moved on. When Cederstrom did not eject Rodriguez the way he had ejected Grimsley, the Yankees started screaming at the pitcher and the ump.

Rodriguez shouted back as he left the field—Lou Piniella had taken him out of the game—and Joe Girardi, the on-deck batter, returned verbal fire, compelling Rodriguez to throw down his glove and charge the Yankee catcher.

“And now we’re going to have the biggest fight you’ve ever seen in your life,” Bobby Murcer, the former Yankee turned broadcaster, said on the air.

Rodriguez fired off a couple of unanswered punches that knocked down Girardi, and if it looked like the catcher—a devout Christian—had never before struck anyone, there was a good reason: he hadn’t.

The dugouts and bullpens emptied, and it was immediately clear this would not be any garden-variety scrum. Don Zimmer fell to the ground and got trampled. Jim Leyritz and Shane Spencer and half the Yankee roster were trying to get to Frankie Rodriguez in front of the Seattle bench.

Bernie Williams slammed Mariners catcher Dan Wilson to the ground, and Chili Davis pinned Steve Smith, a Seattle coach, and wrapped both hands around Smith’s throat as if he were about to squeeze the life out of him. Zimmer staggered back to his feet, but he appeared to be hyperventilating.

“It was like a war zone out there,” Williams said.

And on the perimeter of this hand-to-hand combat, Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez were enemies acting like the best of friends. They were smiling, pretending to jab each other, just looking like a couple of guys making plans to meet up after the game. A-Rod joked with Jeter that he would come after him in the event of a second brawl.

“Those two guys aren’t going to fight,” Murcer’s partner, Ken Singleton, said on the air. “They’re probably going somewhere later.”

A-Rod held his cap and slapped it twice against Jeter’s chest. Just then, Seattle pitcher Jamie Moyer approached A-Rod from behind, pushed Rodriguez’s mitt into his stomach, and nudged him gently while shooting him a look that screamed, “This isn’t the time or place.”

An umpire wedged himself between Jeter and Rodriguez, not that it was necessary, and fifteen minutes after the clash started, both teams headed back to their benches. As the Yankees spilled into their dugout, Chad Curtis, a forty-fifth-round draft choice hitting .238, decided to confront Jeter.

The teammates ran in different circles and had little in common. Curtis was a grinder, and Jeter was a star. Curtis was married and devoutly religious, and Jeter was single and a Catholic reticent about expressing his religious views outside of the on-field prayer he whispered to himself following the national anthem, when he crouched low to the field, bowed his head, asked God to protect all players from injury, and made the sign of the cross.

At the time of the brawl, the Yankees were considering putting Curtis on waivers to make room for Strawberry’s return. The team saw Curtis as an expendable player, in part because he tried to impose his religious beliefs on some teammates who tired of the sell.

A man who took to wearing a bracelet marked “WWJD” (“What Would Jesus Do?”), Curtis twice approached Jeter about joining him in prayer groups and chapel services, and twice Jeter declined the invitation. “Chad was really confrontational with guys,” said one Yankee official. “He’d take all the porn on the road and in the bathrooms and throw it out . . . It caused problems. You can’t force all of your stuff on people.”

The Yankees were concerned about rumors Chuck Knoblauch was partying too hard, and Curtis took those concerns to an extreme. “Chad used to knock on [Knoblauch’s] door,” the official said, “and he’d shout, ‘Are you in there? Are you in there? I want to make sure you’re not out.’ Chad was really militant on that.”

Curtis lived in a black-and-white world with no shades of gray, except when it came to fighting. With grown men rolling in the dirt and acting like silly boys in a schoolyard, Curtis suspended his religious views and let the other guy worry about turning the other cheek.

So he was appalled by the sight of Jeter and A-Rod fraternizing on the jagged edges of a frightening brawl, especially with Zimmer down and out. Curtis was as old school as Ty Cobb. He did not see a fight as the appropriate time for opposing players to renew their vows of friendship.

“You are a good player,” Curtis told Jeter, “but you don’t know how to play the game.”

Jeter reportedly shouted at Curtis, “Get out of my face” several times and appeared a lot closer to punching his teammate than he had been to punching A-Rod or any other Mariner. The confrontation continued in the clubhouse. Curtis approached Jeter and the shortstop kept saying, “Not now . . . not now.” He did not want a starring role in a tabloid spectacle.

Curtis did not listen. In full view of Yankee beat writers, Curtis again tried to explain to Jeter why he was not playing the game the right way. Jeter was desperate to end the conversation. Sojo came over to help break it up, but by then the damage was as conspicuous as the two welts on Girardi’s forehead.

“He disagrees with what I have to say,” Curtis said of Jeter. “I disagree with him. We’re allowed to disagree.”

Jeter said he would have helped up Zimmer had he seen him on the ground and conceded little else. He maintained he was merely talking to A-Rod about the Paniagua pitch from the night before and comparing that to the plunkings that led to the brawl.

“It’s a situation where, hey, [Curtis] didn’t know what we were talking about,” Jeter would say. “Unless you know what’s going on, then you shouldn’t approach someone in that manner.”

Curtis called his actions “a small piece of mentoring” and believed he was only helping a younger player understand the consequences of his action, or inaction. “I wasn’t real mad,” Curtis said. “It was just, ‘Dude, you know that’s not the time to go and shadowbox with your buddy.’”

In the coming days, some Yankees would privately agree that Curtis had a valid point, that Jeter acted irresponsibly given the intensity of the fight. “Chad was right, but he handled it the wrong way,” Leyritz said. “I don’t think Derek and Alex realized the extent of the hostility that was going on because they were pretty far away.”

One of Torre’s coaches, Willie Randolph, the former second baseman and captain who was instrumental in Jeter’s development, scolded the shortstop for his new-school approach to an old-school fight. But David Cone, among the most respected player voices, said he had seen dozens of friendly exchanges on the fringes of brawls and thought it did not matter whether Curtis had a point.

“Chad was out of line, and he lost a little face in that situation among the leaders in the clubhouse,” Cone said. “We looked at Jeter, we looked at Chad Curtis, and to me that’s a no-brainer. That’s an easy pick.”

Curtis eventually apologized; Jeter did not see the need to do the same. He was allergic to the bee sting of criticism, and it was harder for him to forgive and forget than it was to accept an 0-for-4 day at the plate. Curtis was dead to Jeter, and there was no resurrection on the schedule.

Less than two weeks after the Seattle brawl, Jeter’s reputation took another direct hit, one that could not be blamed on a backup outfielder. Jeter was so busy celebrating the twenty-eighth birthday of his good friend Jorge Posada, and enjoying the spaghetti dish cooked up by Posada’s wife, Laura, that he forgot to show up for the team photo.

Joe Torre slapped Jeter and Posada with small fines and publicly moved to minimize the impact of their absence. But the manager did not leave two open spaces in the rows of players gathered for the picture, making it more difficult for a graphics designer to Photoshop the shortstop and catcher into the shot. “I’m sure they are [mad],” Jeter said, “but nobody said anything. I forgot, that’s the bottom line.”

Suddenly Jeter’s uncharacteristic behavior had some asking if he was fit to be the team’s first captain since Don Mattingly, a role his manager wanted him to assume in the near future. Did Jeter still deserve the honor? Or did these two incidents suggest that the role model, star, and spokesman had not yet grown into the role?

Derek Jeter finished the season with staggering numbers—a .349 batting average, 24 home runs, and 102 RBI—even if he fell slightly short of the sums posted by his Boston rival, Nomar Garciaparra, who had beaten him out for the All-Star Game start at Fenway Park.

Jeter had mimicked Garciaparra’s hyper batting ritual in that game to everyone’s delight, but nobody was laughing when the Yankees faced the Red Sox in the 1999 American League Championship Series, the first time these ancient blood rivals had ever met in the postseason (the famous Bucky Dent game in ’78 counted as a regular-season tiebreaker).

Jeter had batted .455 in the Division Series sweep of Texas, starting the clinching rally in the first inning of Game 3 with a triple to left that led to a three-run homer by Darryl Strawberry, back from his drug suspension with a bang.

The Rangers had proven to be willing postseason stooges for the Yankees, losing three Division Series to them in four years. The Red Sox? They finished with 94 victories, only 4 behind New York, and with Pedro Martinez at the very top of his game, good enough to strike out 17 Yankees in September in his most indelible start in the Bronx, the Red Sox were a wild card in every literal and figurative way.

Boston also had the batting champ, Garciaparra, to match against the two-time world champ, Jeter. And when Game 1 at Yankee Stadium was headed Boston’s way, Jeter drew first blood.

Down 3–2 in the seventh, one out and a man on second, Jeter hit an RBI single to center off Derek Lowe, ultimately allowing Bernie Williams to win it in the tenth with a homer off Rod Beck. When Garciaparra responded with a vengeance in Game 2, delivering a three-hit performance that included a two-out, two-run homer off Cone, the Yanks came from behind again to win by a run.

Garciaparra exploded one more time in Game 3, exploded for four hits and three RBI on a day when Martinez was his brilliant self and Roger Clemens was reduced to an emotional and physical wreck in his return to Fenway, where fans all but welcomed him with pitchforks and torches. The Yankees lost 13–1, Jeter struck out twice in three at-bats, and the crowd let him hear about it.