The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (35 page)

“If he’s dating a girl,” Martinez said, “it’s dinner and a movie, and no drinking until four in the morning. Maybe when you win the World Series, but other than that, no.

“I mean, he’s a normal guy, and the girls he dates usually are pretty normal. And when they’re not, or they want the big party scene, then they’re gone.”

Discretion was of utmost importance to the shortstop. One woman who briefly dated Jeter would tell a story of the time she and a girlfriend were invited to the shortstop’s home for a small party. Jeter answered the door and politely asked his guests to remove any cell phones or cameras they were carrying and place them on a table, explaining that he wanted to protect his privacy.

When out in a club, Jeter would often ask a wingman, teammate, or staffer to approach a woman he would like to meet and extend an invitation on his behalf. If Jeter and the woman were interested in taking the evening elsewhere, they would often leave separately, through different doors. Sometimes Jeter would leave a club in a separate car while his driver transported the woman to their next meeting place.

Image wasn’t everything, despite Andre Agassi’s claim to the contrary in the Canon ad, but it still meant a lot even to a ballplayer defined by his substance-over-style core. One late night on a West Coast trip, a witness spotted Jeter pulling up to the team hotel in a cab with two female passengers. The witness stayed in the shadows and watched the scene unfold.

Jeter emerged from the cab first and made his way to the hotel elevators. A few minutes later, one female passenger stepped out and followed in Jeter’s footsteps. A few minutes after that, the second female passenger stepped out and took the very same path.

It did not matter whether these women were Jeter’s dates, or his friends, or his Scrabble partners looking for a game at 3:00 a.m. What mattered was his concern over appearances, even in the middle of the night.

Jeter never made a mistake in public, and there was a good reason why. From the spring training fields of Florida to the big league hotels of California, Jeter never forgot Don Mattingly’s warning the day the veteran first baseman told the kid shortstop to run it in:

You never know who’s watching.

Derek Jeter knew 2002 would be a different season even before Ruben Rivera, Mariano’s cousin, was literally caught stealing one day in March—stealing a glove and bat from Jeter’s locker.

Once regarded as a Mantle-like prospect, Ruben had a deal to sell the items to a memorabilia dealer for $2,500, a curious move for an outfielder with a million-dollar wage. “A rookie mistake,” Ruben called it, even though his rookie season had come and gone six years earlier.

“He had six or seven gloves; I didn’t know he would be that mad,” Rivera would explain. Oh, Jeter was mad. “I have no comment on the whole situation,” the shortstop said. “There’s no need to add fuel to the fire.”

That fire was an inferno. Jeter often sold his game-used bats and gear through Steiner Sports Memorabilia and committed more than $250,000 a year in proceeds to his Turn 2 Foundation and its programs designed to keep kids drug- and alcohol-free.

But Jeter never sold his gloves. “I know those gloves are very personal,” said the head of the memorabilia company, Brandon Steiner.

Only this wasn’t just about the glove, among Jeter’s favorites. His space and his standing as unofficial team captain had been violated.

Rivera was released by the Yankees, who likely would have released Mariano’s cousin even if he had swiped the glove belonging to the twenty-fifth man on the roster. But with Jeter as the victim, Rivera’s admission and apology never stood a chance. Brian Cashman agreed to a $200,000 settlement on Rivera’s contract and bid the disgraced Yankee farewell.

This was still very much Jeter’s team, even if George Steinbrenner had given Jason Giambi a seven-year, $120 million deal to restore the Yankee offense to a championship level (and allowed clubhouse access to the Oakland slugger’s personal trainer, Bob Alejo). Giambi was given the full news conference treatment on arrival—as opposed to Jeter’s quickie conference call announcing his $189 million deal— and was fully expected to use Yankee Stadium’s inviting right-field porch to match or surpass his 38-homer, 120-RBI final season with the A’s.

Giambi had shaved his goatee and cut his biker-boy hair in accordance with Steinbrenner’s clean-cut mandates, and he picked number 25 because the digits added up to 7, the number worn by the Mick, his father’s favorite player.

“I know I’m replacing a great Yankee,” Giambi said of Tino Martinez, who had replaced a great Yankee in Don Mattingly. Martinez understood the lure of Giambi’s league-leading .477 on-base percentage and .660 slugging percentage, but he was wounded by the fact that the Yanks did not re-sign him after a 34-homer, 113-RBI season, and by the fact that Roger Clemens was among the teammates who helped recruit Giambi.

Jeter was the one prominent Yankee who made it clear he would not help the team replace his friend, who wound up in St. Louis. “He was the only one who wasn’t afraid to stand up,” Martinez said.

No, Jeter was not afraid to make a stand for a friend. But when it came to social or political issues, even those directly related to the business of baseball, Jeter defaulted to the Michael Jordan, Republicans-buy-sneakers-too approach.

In May of 2002, if soaring home-run totals and bulging biceps had not already made it clear baseball had a major steroids problem, Ken Caminiti stamped the plague official in an explosive interview with
Sports Illustrated
’s Tom Verducci. Caminiti acknowledged having used steroids when he won the National League’s Most Valuable Player award for the Padres in 1996 and said of his sport: “It’s no secret what’s going on in baseball. At least half the guys are using steroids. They talk about it. They joke about it with each other.”

Jose Canseco would put the number of steroid users at 85 percent. “There would be no baseball left if they drug-tested everyone today,” Canseco said.

At the time 50 percent appeared to be the more credible figure, and one approved by the likes of Curt Schilling. Some players were adding thirty to forty pounds of muscle, and they were having trouble finding batting helmets to fit their swelling heads.

Steroids represented a legitimate health crisis in America, as young athletes were in the habit of imitating their big league heroes. Mark McGwire’s admission of androstenedione use in ’98 inspired so many teens to buy andro, a steroid precursor, that fitness stores could not keep it in stock.

Players were using performance-enhancing drugs, and clean teammates were feeling the pressure to use them to keep up with the cheaters. This dangerous dance could not go on forever.

Giambi called Caminiti’s claims “ludicrous” and said he bulked up after McGwire introduced him to his weightlifting program in Oakland. But Murray Chass of the
New York Times
would later report that Giambi’s agent, Arn Tellem, had the Yankees remove steroid-related language from their $120 million contract before his client signed it.

“There is no miracle thing to this game,” Giambi said. “You either have talent or you don’t. Steroids can’t help you hit a ball, that’s for sure.”

Barry Bonds, who broke McGwire’s single-season home-run record after his body all but doubled in size, echoed Giambi’s sentiment. “If you’re incapable of hitting [a baseball],” Bonds said, “it doesn’t matter what you take. . . . I think [steroid use] is really irrelevant to the game of baseball.”

Irrelevant? Players would soon find out that nothing was more relevant to their sport than performance-enhancing drugs. Mike Stanton, the Yankees’ player representative, said drug testing was among the issues on the negotiating table between the union and the owners. It was the perfect time and opportunity for Jeter and other clean players to implore the union to agree to strict testing and penalties to weed out the cheaters and protect the health of the membership.

Jeter was a four-time World Series champ, a star with enough clout to host
Saturday Night Live
. He could have made a difference if he wanted to. Only when asked about Caminiti’s 50 percent figure, Jeter said, “I guess I am the other half. You can’t say half the players unless you know every player in the game.”

His stance grew weaker by the quote. “The bottom line is they don’t test for it,” Jeter said, “so it’s not something that concerns me.”

The shortstop even suggested steroids did not help players drive baseballs over the outfield wall. “Look at [Alfonso] Soriano,” Jeter said of the lean second baseman. “He’s not the biggest or strongest guy, but he’s hitting more home runs than anybody.”

Jeter was like Jordan and Tiger Woods; it just was not in his DNA to lead a cause that had nothing to do with winning titles. He once declined an offer from John F. Kennedy Jr.’s
George
magazine to write one of its “If I Were President” columns because he did not care to make any political statements.

In 2002, Jeter’s only concern was finding a way to win at the old October clip with a new cast of actors. Giambi had replaced Martinez at first, and Robin Ventura had replaced Scott Brosius at third. Paul O’Neill, Chuck Knoblauch, and Luis Sojo were out; Raul Mondesi, Rondell White, and John Vander Wal were among those in.

As it turned out, Jeter’s numbers dropped a bit from his 2001 levels; he batted .297 with 18 homers and 75 RBI. But he did become only the third player since 1900 to score at least 100 runs in his first seven seasons, joining Earle Combs and Ted Williams, and his Yankees did win 103 games and another division crown. Giambi was the 41-homer, 122-RBI, .435-on-base-percentage horse he was hired to be, and Mike Mussina and the reacquired David Wells combined to win 37 games at the top of a staff stacked with the usual assortment of aces.

Joe Torre had no reason to believe he would not be managing in his sixth World Series in seven years, especially after his team won Game 1 of the Division Series against the Anaheim Angels at Yankee Stadium, won it with Jeter opening the scoring on a homer in the first, with Bernie Williams finishing the scoring on a homer in the eighth, and with Giambi delivering a two-run shot in between.

But Torre would not be making a return trip to the Fall Classic. In fact, Game 1 would be recorded as his final victory of 2002.

As championship teams go, these newfangled Yankees had the requisite hitting and pitching. They were about to find out they did not have the requisite heart.

It all started to unravel in the eighth inning of Game 2, after El Duque Hernandez surrendered back-to-back homers to Garret Anderson and Troy Glaus to give the Angels the lead. With the Yankees down 7–5, bases loaded and two outs, Jeter stepped to the plate with a home crowd of nearly 56,695 fully expecting something magical to happen near the right-field wall.

Jeter had hit his second homer of the series in the third inning, after all, and this was his situation, his building, his month. Angels closer Troy Percival worked the count to 1-2 before throwing a pitch the shortstop did not like.

Jeter thought it was ball two. The umpire called it strike three.

The Yankees actually led by a 6–1 count early in Game 3 in Anaheim, only to watch Mussina go down with a groin injury before Jeff Weaver, Mike Stanton, and Steve Karsay failed to protect a 6–4 lead. If nothing else, the Yanks were making a star out of the Angels’ twenty-year-old rookie reliever, Francisco “K-Rod” Rodriguez, who had made all of five regular-season appearances and yet had earned his second consecutive playoff victory by striking out four in two perfect innings.

In the losing locker room, Jeter was reminded his team had survived four Division Series sudden-death games with Oakland over the previous two seasons. “It’s a different group,” the shortstop said. “Some of us have [won sudden-death games], the ones that have been here. But this is a new group. So we’ll find out.”

Reporters were surprised Jeter drew a line in the infield dirt between the new guys and the core guys. It did not sound like him—“You have to build up a history with this team,” Jeter said—but then again, his Yankees had never been in a first-round series where they looked so overmatched.

None of it made sense. The Angels were paying $61 million in salary, or some $80 million less than George Steinbrenner was paying. The Yankees’ roster entered the series with 543 games’ worth of postseason experience; the Angels entered with a grand total of 2, the 2 belonging to Kevin Appier from his time in Oakland.

Anaheim was a faceless lot, but it was also by far the superior team. With men on second and third in the fifth inning of Game 4, no outs and the score at 1–1, Jeter sent a deep fly to left field that Anderson caught on the run, honoring the fifty-fifth anniversary of Al Gionfriddo’s catch of Joe DiMaggio’s shot in the World Series.

DiMaggio kicked the dirt back then, about the only time he reacted emotionally to a play made against him. Jeter did not kick the dirt, but his grimace and slap of the hands amounted to a rare show of on-field negativity. “Garret Anderson really pulled the plug on us,” Torre said.

In the bottom of the fifth, the Yankees gave in as they never had. David Wells allowed a leadoff homer to Shawn Wooten and a couple of one-out singles before Darin Erstad lifted a short fly between Williams and Soriano. Williams quit on the ball, Soriano could not reach it, and Wells—undefeated as a Yankee postseason pitcher—suddenly decided he was not going to try any harder than Bernie did.

The Angels mowed right over Wells, just as they had mowed over the previous three Yankee starters, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, and Mussina. When Anaheim was done in the fifth, done with Wells and Ramiro Mendoza and El Duque Hernandez, it had become the first postseason team since the 1929 Philadelphia A’s to rack up ten hits in one inning.

“It seemed like it lasted forever,” Jeter said.

The Angels were leading 9–2, leaving the Yankee starters with a 10.38 ERA for the series, the same opposing starters who formed what Torre called the best staff he ever had. The Yankees were not coming back from that. The final out came in the form of a Nick Johnson pop-up, and as the winners mobbed one another the way the Diamondbacks had the previous November, Jeter watched stone-faced from the dugout, his chin planted on the green-padded railing and his arms dangling down toward the dirt.