The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (31 page)

Jeter stole it right back in the top of the eighth, Yanks leading 5–3 with one out and Oakland’s Eric Chavez on first. Terrence Long, the same batter whose Game 3 double led to Jeter’s forever flip to Posada, lifted a high foul ball behind third base, and the shortstop chased it the same way he chased Shane Spencer’s errant throw.

Jeter looked at the ball, the stands, the ball, the stands, and the ball again. At the time, he had already driven home what would be the winning run on a sacrifice fly, and at age twenty-seven he had already collected his eighty-sixth and eighty-seventh career postseason hits to break the record held by Pete Rose.

Beane was not in his seat to watch Jeter break Rose’s record or give the Yanks a 4–3 lead; he had left the Stadium after his A’s went up by a 2–0 count in the second inning, too tormented to watch. Beane jumped on a train to Manhattan and tried to forget about the game. He closed his eyes and fantasized about popping back into the Stadium in the ninth inning to watch the A’s win.

“I didn’t want to go through the hell of watching them beat us again,” Beane said. “I figured if I disappeared at that point in the universe, something crazy would happen and we’d win.”

While Beane was riding the subway, Jeter was going over the rail. He went head over spikes and crash-landed flat on his back against the cement floor of the photographers’ pit. The crowd of 56,642 gasped when Jeter disappeared from view, fearing serious injury and an extended at-bat for Long.

There would be neither: Jeter suffered only a cut on his elbow. Of greater consequence, he had caught the ball. Scott Brosius grabbed it out of his glove and fired to second, but Chavez had already tagged up and beaten the throw. It didn’t matter; the A’s were pronounced dead on the spot.

“Got beer spilled on me,” Jeter said. “Nobody caught me. I think people were just reaching for their drinks.”

As Jeter wiped at the spilled beer and climbed back over the rail and onto the field, the fans chanted his name. Not since 1996 had the shortstop heard the Stadium sound half as loud as this.

“It felt good,” Jeter said of the chant. “But really, I’m not kidding when I say my first thought was, ‘We have to score more runs.’”

New Yorkers were using this Yankee playoff run as a reprieve, using the Stadium as a place to go and forget the worst weeks of their lives. A month and four days after the Twin Towers collapsed into a smoldering heap, the city needed a diversion and one of the surest signs that everyday normalcy was within reach—the Yankees winning games in October.

Their best player, Jeter, had plunged into the stands and emerged with the Division Series in the webbing of his glove. Beane made it back for the final two innings, made it back to watch the Yanks become the first team to lose the first two games of a best-of-five at home and then win the series.

Rivera again pitched the final two scoreless innings. “It was so psychological to know he was out there; you knew you weren’t going to beat them,” Beane said. “You had no chance. You knew Rivera had the sickle in hand ready to get you.”

But Jeter was the one who delivered the fatal stab. He batted .444 in the series and saved the Yankees from near-certain elimination with his glove and feet and instincts in Oakland, where the shortstop who shared a birth date with Abner Doubleday (June 26) invented a new way of playing the game.

“We definitely win the series if Jeter doesn’t make that flip play,” Ricciardi said. “But with the Yankees it’s like a mob hit. When they tell you the guy’s killed, you’ve got to see the body in the coffin to believe he’s dead.”

In victory, Joe Torre talked about the look in Jeter’s eye, the same look he saw in the eye of the Tiger—Tiger Woods—when the manager first met Jeter’s friend. The look of purpose and fearlessness. The look of an athlete who does not sweat the potential consequences of putting his body in peril or his big-game reputation on the line.

“It’s a look that you don’t teach,” Torre said.

George Steinbrenner was weeping when assessing the performance that validated Jeter’s look. “I’ve never seen any athlete dominate a sport—football, basketball, or baseball—the way he did in this playoff series,” the Boss said.

But the most poignant praise came from Rizzuto, the Hall of Fame shortstop on seven Yankee championship teams. “I couldn’t carry his glove,” he said of Jeter.

Rizzuto called him the best shortstop he had ever seen, and a figure worthy of comparison to the most graceful and instinctive Yankee of them all, Joe DiMaggio.

“Derek is very comparable to DiMag in that they both have that sixth sense,” Rizzuto said. “They both play the game so naturally and beautifully. Never out of place and always heading to the right spot. Joe never made a mistake and Jeter doesn’t, either.

“I mean, the kid has a gift. Joe’s gift.”

In the tenth inning of Game 4 of the 2001 World Series, Derek Jeter stepped to the plate with a .067 batting average against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Since the start of the five-game American League Championship Series victory over Seattle, Jeter had gone 3 for 32.

He had taken far more punishment on that Game 5 fall against Oakland than he ever admitted, and so Jeter was a shell of his Division Series self against the Mariners, a team that had won a record 116 games in the Year 1 A.A.—After Alex.

Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson had plenty to do with Jeter’s struggles in the first thirty-six innings of the World Series, but the shortstop’s body ached—his hamstring, his shoulder, and his back. The ice packs strapped about his torso and limbs said it all: this was not Derek Jeter trying to win a fourth consecutive title as much as it was the mummified remains of Derek Jeter trying to win again.

“My whole thing has always been, you either play or you don’t play,” Jeter would say. “If you play, I don’t think people want to hear about what’s bothering you or what’s hurting you. I think that is a built-in excuse. . . . It didn’t feel good, but I was all right to play.”

Jeter’s pain threshold was the Yankees’ best friend, and their longtime trainer, Gene Monahan, ranked the shortstop among the toughest players he had ever treated, right there with Thurman Munson and Graig Nettles.

After his fall into the photographers’ pit in the Game 5 victory over the A’s, Jeter was “hobbling around pretty good,” Monahan said. “He had trouble putting his shoes on. He had trouble getting dressed. You could see the pain, and it was a tough time for him. But he’s never going to entertain any thoughts of not playing. His mindset was, ‘This is only going to hurt me for a couple of hours, and I’ve got the night to feel better tomorrow.’”

Through the Seattle series and the first three games of the World Series, Monahan did everything he could to try to piece Jeter back together. “We used a lot of ice, a lot of contrasting back and forth, hot and cold,” the trainer said, “and pretty much when he was at the ballpark we wouldn’t let him do a lot of work on the side. We just saved every ounce of whatever energy and health we could for the innings of the ball game. We got him off his feet, put him up in the training room, and elevated his legs.”

But Jeter needed an off-season more than he needed a training table or a tub. At the time he stepped to the tenth-inning plate in the final moments of Halloween night, Arizona holding a 2–1 World Series lead, Jeter’s biggest contribution to the Yanks had come in the roles of Game 3 host and adviser to the president of the United States.

George W. Bush landed at John F. Kennedy International and flew to Yankee Stadium by helicopter (he touched down on an adjacent ball field). September 11 had changed the terms of engagement, so the Stadium was a police state complete with 1,500 cops, sharpshooters on the roof, bomb-sniffing dogs in the clubhouses, hazmat specialists in the ballpark’s bowels, and an armed Secret Service agent in the umpires’ locker room, dressed for the part.

Scheduled to become the first sitting president to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a World Series game since Dwight Eisenhower, Bush headed to the batting cage to warm up his right arm. He did not want anyone—countrymen, terrorists, anyone—to see the president of the United States show any sign of weakness.

Bush said he wanted to throw the pitch “with a little zip. I didn’t want people to think that their president was incapable of finding the plate.” Bush was wearing a New York Fire Department sweat jacket over a bulletproof vest when Jeter arrived on the scene to shake his hand.

“I hear you’re throwing out the first ball,” the shortstop said. “Are you going to throw the first pitch from the mound or in front of the mound?”

“I think I’ll throw from the base of the mound,” Bush said.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mr. President. You’d better throw from the mound, otherwise you’re going to get booed. This is Yankee Stadium.”

“OK. I’ll throw from the mound.”

Jeter started to walk away to get ready for Game 3 before he stopped, looked over his shoulder, and told the president, “Don’t bounce it. They’ll boo you.”

Bush suddenly did not feel as relaxed as he had five minutes earlier. “The great Derek Jeter, don’t bounce it, they’ll boo you,” the president would say. “All of a sudden the pressure mounted.”

Bush was in the dugout when Yankee Stadium’s iconic public address announcer, Bob Sheppard, introduced him to the full house in his voice-of-God way. The president waved to the crowd, stood tall on the mound behind the rubber, and threw back his head and shoulders in a pose of certainty and strength. A burned and tattered flag found at the World Trade Center site hung above the scoreboard façade behind him. Bush gave the thumbs-up sign to the masses, then fired a perfect strike to backup catcher Todd Greene.

The crowd chanted, “USA . . . USA” as Bush walked off, and then Roger Clemens outperformed the other big sporting act in town, Michael Jordan, who had emerged from retirement to make his Washington Wizards debut at Madison Square Garden. Jordan lost to the Knicks, the Diamondbacks lost to Clemens, and now Jordan’s favorite baseball player—his handpicked Nike heir—had a chance to even the World Series with one swing of his Game 4 bat.

Jeter was given that chance by Tino Martinez, who batted with two outs and one on in the ninth, Arizona up 3–1 and closer Byung-Hyun Kim on the mound. Martinez had nearly been traded to Atlanta the year before, a trade supported by Joe Torre and other club officials before Brian Cashman killed it. The GM decided Martinez was too valuable in the clubhouse and in the lineup to part with, and the first baseman was about to make Cashman a prophet.

Martinez had watched Kim throw first-pitch fastballs in the eighth before turning to his slider. “So I was going to look for that first fastball and hammer it,” Martinez said.

Hammer it the first baseman did, nearly bringing down the Stadium as he rounded the bases. Rivera pitched a 1-2-3 tenth, and the Yankees’ leadoff hitter for the night, Jeter, made a dramatic claim.

“Derek came back to the dugout, put down his glove, and said, ‘This game is over,’” Martinez said. “He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to hit a home run and end it.’ He just meant he was going to find a way to win the game.”

Kim retired Scott Brosius and Alfonso Soriano before Jeter stepped in, the scoreboard flashing his .067 World Series average in big, bright lights. In the dugout, with Torre holding his bat for good luck, Jeter had made a playful reference to Torre’s contract—due to expire at 11:59 p.m., October 31.

“This is the last time I have to listen to you,” the shortstop said, “because once it turns midnight you don’t have a job.”

It was still October when Jeter was getting set in the box. He fouled off the first pitch, the clock struck midnight, and Jeter shot a half smile at the manager he still called Mr. Torre. The scoreboard announced, “attention fans: welcome to november baseball,” and Jeter and Kim engaged in the longest duel of the night—nine pitches, four foul balls, and a full count.

As he fought to stay alive in the at-bat, Jeter represented the battered state of the Yankee offense. Paul O’Neill and Scott Brosius were planning to retire, Martinez was approaching free agency and the realization the Yanks weren’t bringing him back, and the benched Chuck Knoblauch knew he was done in the Bronx, too.

This was a dynasty running on fumes, trying to sputter its way home one last time. So the shortstop who had been hearing his mother implore him to “do something” all week finally did something no major leaguer had ever done: he hit a home run in November.

At 12:04 a.m., Kim’s 3-2 pitch had landed on the other side of the 314-foot sign in right, not far from Jeffrey Maier–ville. The Giants’ Barry Bonds had belted a record 73 homers in the regular season, and none of them packed a wallop like this Jeter shot that cleared the wall by a matter of inches.

A fan held up a sign that read “Mr. November,” and as Jeter approached the plate and the manic pile of teammates surrounding it, he decided to take the kind of lunar leap Bobby Thomson took to punctuate his Shot Heard ’Round the World half a century earlier; Jeter had better hang time.

“It was the only showboating thing I ever did,” Thomson had said.

Jeter could have made the same claim. One of his biggest fans, John Wooden, who likened Jeter to his championship point guards at UCLA, watched from his California home and said he was surprised that baseball’s most selfless superstar engaged in this celebration of self.

“Joe DiMaggio would’ve just rounded the bases and touched the plate,” Wooden said.

Jeter joked that he nearly broke his foot on the plate, but he had his reasons to fly. “I’ve never hit a walk-off home run,” he said. “Not even in Little League.”

The following night, Brosius did in Game 5 exactly what Martinez had done in Game 4: hit a two-out, two-run homer off Kim in the ninth to send the Yankees barreling into extra innings, and to ensure this edition would go down among the greatest World Series of all time.

The remarkable Brosius homer was sandwiched between the Stadium chant for the retiring O’Neill when defeat seemed imminent, and Soriano’s RBI single in the twelfth (after his diving, bases-loaded catch in the eleventh) when defeat seemed impossible to fathom. Under a full moon, Torre called this absurd event “Groundhog Day.”