The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (32 page)

The Diamondbacks were as devastated as their closer, Kim, who appeared intent on winning as many World Series games for the Yankees as Whitey Ford did. Before the Series, when asked about the Yanks’ dominance, Schilling said, “When you use the words
mystique
and
aura
, those are dancers in a nightclub.”

Mystique and aura were appearing nightly, read the classic Game 5 sign in the Bronx, and when the Yankees boarded their plane for the Arizona desert, they were safe bets to bring another title to a city in dire need of something to celebrate. Jeter was going to separate himself from Nomar Garciaparra, the two-time batting champ, and from Alex Rodriguez, who had smashed 52 homers in the first year of his record $252 million deal.

The ring-free A-Rod and the ring-free Nomar could gorge themselves on individual stats. Jeter? He was about to win his one for the thumb.

Somehow the Yankees had the ninth-inning lead in Game 7. Somehow they had handed Mariano Rivera the ball with three outs to go and the bottom of Arizona’s lineup on deck.

It all started going wrong before Game 6, before Andy Pettitte tipped his pitches and the Diamondbacks teed off on him in a 15–2 victory, leaving the Bank One Ballpark operators to play Sinatra’s “New York, New York” in jest. Bernie Williams had shown up late for pregame warm-ups, very late, and as the Yankees were stretching, Jeter turned to a teammate and said, “Where the hell is he?”

Jeter was furious by the time Williams finally arrived, asking him, “Where the hell have you been?” The center fielder offered a dog-ate-my-homework answer, and Jeter jumped all over him. “What do you think you’re doing here?” the shortstop shouted at Williams. “We’re trying to win a championship, and this is unacceptable. . . . There’s no more important place for you to be than right here with your team for this game.”

This wasn’t the only time Jeter had to rouse Williams out of his oblivious state. “It was Bernie being Bernie,” one team official said, “and I think Derek got sick of it.”

Jeter was not one to chastise teammates in front of others, or even to speak up much in team meetings. Only this time he ripped a page out of the book George Steinbrenner once gave him, a book titled
Patton on Leadership: Strategic Lessons for Corporate Warfare
and inscribed this way: “To Derek. Read and study. He was a great leader as you are and will be a great leader. Hopefully of the men in pinstripes.”

Jeter was not the team captain, even if the conversation about his candidacy had been carried on for a couple of years. But as the Yankees’ de facto captain, Jeter felt the need to go after Williams behind closed clubhouse doors, even if some were looking on.

No news media members were present, and Jeter did not mean for it to become public knowledge. “I don’t think it’s necessary for people to know about things publicly,” the shortstop would say when asked about his confrontation with Williams. “That’s just the way I’ve always handled it.”

Once Jeter was done rebuking Williams a second time near the clubhouse bathroom, all that mystique and aura were flushed down the drain. The Yankees came undone in Game 6 and were losing by a 15–0 count in the fifth inning when Torre applied his own mercy rule and removed Jeter, Tino Martinez, and Jorge Posada from the game.

Jeter ended up in the trainer’s room when he overheard reliever Jay Witasick say, “Well, at least I had fun.” Witasick made this remark after allowing Arizona nine runs, eight earned, while recording all of four outs, inspiring Jeter to give him the Bernie treatment times two. The shortstop had never been angrier.

“Fun? I can’t relate to it,” Jeter would tell
Sports Illustrated
’s Tom Verducci. “I really can’t relate to it. I’ll never forget that. At least you had
fun
? I’ll never understand it. I don’t want to understand it.”

Their nerves frayed, their faith no longer as blind as it had been in the Bronx, Jeter’s Yankees were left to face the 22-game winner, Schilling, in Game 7.

It was a tense struggle between Schilling and Roger Clemens, the 20-game winner who had ten years earlier showered his opponent with tough love, warning Schilling he needed to work harder and stop wasting his outsized skill. The Yankees were trailing the Diamondbacks by a 1–0 count before Jeter singled and scored in the seventh, and before Soriano homered in the soft desert rain to lead off the eighth.

The bullpen doors ultimately opened for Rivera and Randy Johnson, the Game 6 winner who had so memorably emerged from the Seattle pen in ’95 to eliminate Buck Showalter’s Yanks. Rivera survived the eighth and was a prohibitive favorite to survive the ninth.

Arizona’s Mark Grace opened with a single before David Dellucci pinch-ran for him, then Damian Miller dropped down a bunt that headed the closer’s way. Rivera fielded the ball and fired to Jeter at second, but his throw tailed in left to right, two-seamer form, and the shortstop tried in vain to stretch his sore, stiff body for the ball while keeping his foot on the bag.

Dellucci crashed his spikes into Jeter’s left ankle as the throw skipped off the shortstop’s glove and into center field, allowing the Bank One Ballpark crowd to dream this impossible dream: Rivera losing his streak of twenty-three consecutive postseason saves in a winner-take-all game.

A wincing Jeter pulled himself to his feet, limped to the mound for Torre’s conference with Rivera, and hobbled back to his position. Only three innings earlier, Jeter had made another breathless defensive play, leaping high to catch Williams’s relay throw on Danny Bautista’s RBI double, and cutting down Bautista’s attempt to make it an RBI triple with a release that was Dan Marino quick.

Jeter was no longer physically capable of making such a dramatic play. His body was shutting down, and there were still three outs to go.

Rivera got one of them on Jay Bell’s sacrifice bunt, throwing to third to get Dellucci. Even that sequence hurt the Yankees’ cause; Brosius had a shot at a double play but did not throw to first.

Tony Womack followed with the game-tying double into right field, breaking his bat the way Grace had broken his on the leadoff single. Rivera was sawing wood with his cutter, just as he always did, and it did not matter. By the time the closer hit Craig Counsell to load the bases, the Diamondbacks were looking like the Yankees, and the Yankees were looking like the ’98 Padres, the ’99 Braves, and the 2000 Mets.

Luis Gonzalez had blasted 57 homers in the regular season, yet he came to the plate as if he were a slap-hitting middle infielder, choking up for the first time all year. Rivera had struck him out in the eighth, and this time Gonzalez just wanted to get a piece of the ball.

Rivera’s second pitch was a cutter that broke Gonzalez’s bat; of course it did. The ball normally would have taken a benign path into Jeter’s glove, but there was nothing normal about this night. The infield was playing in, so millions of viewers took in a most stunning scene:

Derek Jeter lifting his glove for the hell of it, lifting it the way he would a white flag.

The Diamondbacks mobbed Gonzalez between first and second, and Jeter looped around them and onto the outfield grass to avoid crashing their party on his way to the dugout. Head down, Rivera trudged in the same direction as “We Are the Champions” blared on the speakers. The Yankees did a zombielike stagger off the field while Torre watched from the rail.

Jeter slumped on the dugout bench as the Diamondbacks celebrated November the way he had always celebrated October. Over his first six seasons, Jeter had played in sixteen out of a possible eighteen postseason series, and this was only his second series defeat.

“You expect it to be over when Mo comes in,” Jeter said. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s over.”

Rivera was blaming himself for the loss, blaming himself for the throw that got past Jeter, as the shortstop sat in the corner of a clubhouse as still as a confessional booth at midnight. Torre had already addressed his players, told them they should be very proud of their efforts. The manager noticed that Jeter looked more pissed off than anyone in the room.

Mayor Giuliani hugged George Steinbrenner and told him, “Everyone in New York appreciates what you guys did for us.” Hopelessly burdened by his superstitions, Steinbrenner had been enraged late in the game when the Fox TV crew entered the Yankee clubhouse to set up for a celebration that would never come.

The Boss composed himself and promised his team would bounce back stronger than ever, even if that team would not include O’Neill, Brosius, Martinez, and Knoblauch.

The shortstop would return; Steinbrenner knew that much. And as he limped into the trainer’s room, a World Series loser for the first time, Derek Jeter had no idea he was beginning the second phase of his Yankee career, one that would not be half as charmed as his first.

An eighteen-year-old Jeter, a few months removed from his high school graduation, appears on the Yankee Stadium field, in Yankee colors, for the first time and receives tips from Jim Leyritz and Mike Gallego.

Richard Harbus/AP Photo

Baseball America’s 1994 minor league Player of the Year holds his first trophy in the Bronx.

Mark Lennihan/AP Photo

The rookie shortstop throws his arms toward the sky as Charlie Hayes records the final out of the 1996 World Series, the first of seven trips to the Fall Classic (five of them victorious) for the iconic number 2.

Kathy Willens/AP Photo

Derek Jeter was the one employee who could get away with pouring champagne over George Steinbrenner’s head, as the shortstop did here to celebrate the 1999 ALCS victory over Boston.

Matt York/Reuters/Corbis