The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (40 page)

“Derek has four world championships,” Rodriguez said, “and I want him to have ten. That’s what this is all about.”

Ten rings, the same as Yogi?

“Let’s work on making it five first,” Jeter said.

A-Rod wore a pinstriped tie to go with his new pinstriped jersey. He would get number 13, the number Jeter first coveted as a rookie, the same number Jeter’s father wore at Fisk University. Rodriguez was not paying any tribute to a father who had abandoned him as a child; the former Miami high school quarterback wanted to wear the number of his favorite NFL player, Dan Marino.

Before the cameras and notebooks, with Steinbrenner watching on TV in Tampa, Rodriguez kept deferring to Jeter, kept calling him the leader, kept saying he just wanted to be “one of the guys.” Of course, if Rodriguez was a man of many talents, being one of the guys was not among them.

A-Rod was the American League’s Most Valuable Player, a two-time Gold Glove winner, and a shortstop considered by most baseball observers to be a better defender than Jeter, who had yet to claim his first Gold Glove. So the question had to be asked:

Why was Rodriguez the one being asked to move to third?

“That’s a non-issue,” A-Rod claimed.

“I know you’re going to be enjoying this issue for as long as we’re playing together,” Jeter told reporters. “There’s always a spin on it. I’m playing short. That’s my job here. His job here now is to play third.”

Remarkably enough, Cashman made the decision that A-Rod would be the one to move without consulting Torre. The general manager had explained that “you go with the man that brought you to the dance. . . . We have, arguably, the best left side of the infield in the history of baseball, and this is what it’s going to be: Derek Jeter at shortstop, Alex Rodriguez at third base.”

Torre would have made the same call Cashman did, and the GM knew as much in advance. In many ways, Jeter had made Joe. Jeter had helped turn a retread manager into a Hall of Famer, and Torre was not about to betray him now.

But in defending Jeter’s honor, Torre conceded Rodriguez had greater natural talent. “There are things that go beyond ability,” the manager said. “And I’ve said this about Derek in the past. He can’t hit with A-Rod, maybe can’t throw with him. Can’t throw with Garciaparra, can’t do this with Garciaparra.

“But what I know is I wouldn’t trade him for anybody. There is something special about Derek Jeter. What is it about him that makes him what he is? It’s something that you can’t put down on paper.”

When they were young big leaguers who slept in each other’s homes, Jeter and Rodriguez talked about finishing their careers together. That dream died a painful death on the pages of
Esquire
, leaving Jeter and A-Rod to answer questions about their breakup.

“The worst thing that could happen for the media, I think,” Jeter said, “is for me and Alex to get along. I think everyone wants us to disagree, to battle over who’s doing this and who’s doing that. But that’s not the case.”

Yet during this only-in-New-York media event, Jeter said more with his expressions than he did with his words. He looked like he would rather have spent the day getting a few boils lanced from his rump.

Jeter surveyed the scene and understood the game had changed for good. With Pettitte in Houston, only four teammates remained from the glory days—Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, El Duque Hernandez, and Bernie Williams—and Williams was in a fight for his center-field life with Kenny Lofton.

The Yankees had all but kicked Pettitte to the curb in free agency, they were closing in on Bernie, they were letting Torre enter the final year of his contract without an extension, and they were giving the keys to the kingdom to an athlete, Rodriguez, who represented everything Jeter was not.

“The measuring stick is how many championships you win,” the captain said, as if reminding A-Rod that none of his monstrous home runs took his zero off the October scoreboard.

Rodriguez had endured a wild winter, nearly landing in Boston before showing up in the Bronx. Worn down by all the negotiating, by all the back-and-forth between owners and agents and union officials, Rodriguez’s wife, Cynthia, turned to Jeter on the flight up from Tampa and said, “I’m glad this is all over.”

The captain smiled. “The party has just begun,” he said.

If Jeter was in a partying mood, at least for public consumption, his friend and former minor league teammate and roommate, R. D. Long, killed the mood in private.

Years earlier, in his first meeting with the Class AAA Columbus manager, Stump Merrill, Long was reminded of his true identity within the Yankee organization. “He called me into his office once and said, ‘You’re Jeter’s buddy, right?’” Long said. “Not R.D., but Jeter’s buddy.”

Jeter’s buddy walked away from baseball in 1997, at age twenty-six, when he realized he was through chasing the big league dream. But even though Long was out of the game, nobody tracked Jeter’s career more closely than Jeter’s buddy.

And with the Rodriguez acquisition announcing the start of a new era in the Bronx, Jeter’s buddy wanted Jeter to know that the Yankees had just made a huge mistake.

“I told Derek the minute A-Rod [joined] his team,” Long said, “told him that day, ‘The championship run is over. You will not win a championship with Alex Rodriguez on your team unless your karma is bigger than his. . . . You won’t win another one with this guy. You’d better get rid of him some kind of way.’”

Derek Jeter greatly appreciated George Steinbrenner’s willingness to spend whatever it took to surround his shortstop with championship-grade talent. Hours after Andy Pettitte had reached a deal with the Astros, Jeter was sitting with Jay-Z at a high school basketball game at Fordham University when informed of the news.

Jeter said a few complimentary things about his longtime teammate and friend but basically handled the bulletin with the greatest of ease.

“I’m sure we’ll get someone else,” the captain said.

“You already did,” a reporter told him.

The Yankees were finalizing a trade with the Dodgers for Kevin Brown, sending back a package that included a Jeter favorite, Jeff Weaver, who had flopped in the Bronx. To offset their considerable personnel losses, and the second-place finish to the Red Sox in the race for Arizona ace Curt Schilling, the Yankees acquired, among others, Brown, Javier Vazquez, Gary Sheffield, Kenny Lofton, Tom “Flash” Gordon, and Paul Quantrill.

And Alex Rodriguez.

With his budget knowing no bounds, Steinbrenner was forever giving Jeter a chance to win titles, even if the captain would have preferred a less aggressive approach when it came to trading for A-Rod.

“I hope all the writers lay off on this thing, A-Rod versus Jeter,” Steinbrenner told reporters while sitting in a golf cart at Legends Field. “It has no part. It really doesn’t. Let them go about playing baseball. It’s going to be tough enough as it is in the American League East.”

Asked if he planned to take Rodriguez to dinner, Steinbrenner responded, “Jeter should take him to dinner.” The Boss had just read a
USA Today
column explaining how another Yankee captain, Lou Gehrig, learned how to thrive in the shadows of Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio.

Steinbrenner said Jeter should find a way to deal with the new Ruthian presence in his life, just as Gehrig did. “He’ll show that kind of great leadership,” the owner said. “I would bank on it.”

Of course, Gehrig’s mother once criticized an outfit Ruth’s daughter was wearing, and the Yankee stars did not speak to each other for six years.

Jeter and A-Rod would never get away with that, not in this electronic age of 24/7 scrutiny, even if they represented the most fascinating intrasquad feud since Thurman and Reggie.

As spring training opened, Rodriguez finally disclosed his three-year-old secret: after his
Esquire
comments were published, he had made the loneliest ninety-minute drive of his life from the Rangers’ Port Charlotte camp to Jeter’s Tampa home in an attempt to save the very friendship he had torpedoed.

“From that day on,” Rodriguez told a few reporters, “I thought it was over.”

He thought wrong. A-Rod conceded the two shortstops “haven’t been as tight the last three years,” a claim everyone in Yankeedom knew to be a gross understatement.

“We had that discussion,” Jeter said, “and in my mind that was the end of it. In my mind it’s a dead issue, in [Alex’s] mind it’s a dead issue, so we just move on from there. . . . We don’t have problems. Let’s get that out there.”

As much as Jeter cited Rodriguez’s marriage and the players’ off-field demands as the cause of their altered friendship, and as much as he compared their differences to those of brothers who argue and make up, the captain knew this ship was not sailing.

Their relationship would remain under constant observation, something A-Rod would acknowledge in a spring training interview with Matt Lauer on the
Today
show.

“He’s like a brother to me,” Rodriguez said of Jeter. “I mean, we’ve been out to lunch this week three or four times already. And I think they have to see us hold hands and go to a movie so they know that we’ve made up. When we’re fifty years old, they’re going to say, ‘Well, Alex and Derek, are they arguing? Are they best friends? Are they brothers?’ We’re just having fun with it now.”

Jeter was having no fun with this story. He knew people were going to study the vibe between the shortstop and third baseman a lot more closely than they would study the out-of-town scoreboard.

As it turned out, that vibe helped take Derek Jeter right out of his element. In a season-opening loss to Tampa Bay in Tokyo, his first game as Rodriguez’s teammate, Jeter grounded out four times and struck out in five at-bats; A-Rod fared only a bit better, twice striking out looking, popping out, and doubling and scoring a run in four at-bats.

Jeter and Rodriguez were dreadful for much of April; A-Rod went 0 for 16 in a series at Fenway Park, a development all of Boston met with considerable glee. But Jeter seemed to be the one more adversely affected by this tense and awkward pairing on the left side of the infield, as he descended into the worst slump of his life.

With the Red Sox looking to finish a three-game sweep in the Bronx on April 25, Jeter struck out three times in a 2–0 loss, extended his hitless streak to twenty-five at-bats, and actually heard the home crowd of 55,338 turn against him. Booing Derek Jeter? “I never thought I’d hear that,” said Boston’s Kevin Millar, who called the Yankee fans “ruthless.”

Of course, Jeter would never admit that Rodriguez’s presence was unnerving him; the captain would not even use the word
slump
to describe his, well, slump. But several teammates said they thought A-Rod’s arrival was a contributing factor, if not an overriding factor, in Jeter’s struggles at the plate.

“Derek had the whole city to himself,” said one teammate, “and Alex represented a threat to that. It was like Derek was trying to protect his home from an invasion.”

Rodriguez had been stepping to the Stadium plate to music from
The Natural
, and by the end of the home Boston series he had managed to lift his batting average to .257 with three homers, or 75 points and three homers higher than Jeter’s totals.

The shortstop was jumpy in the box, shifting his weight too quickly to his front foot and flailing away at pitches he should have taken. The fans adored him, yes, but they were tired of watching it and decided to let Jeter know it.

“I would boo myself, too,” the captain said. “I wouldn’t want to play on a team where if you’re playing bad, they don’t care.”

Jeter quickly shot down any suggestions that his shoulder and thumb injuries from 2003 were keeping him down. He also made sure to remain available to reporters, and to maintain his even-keeled approach with them.

Jeter did not change his in-game persona, either. If the twenty-fifth man on the roster put down a productive sacrifice bunt, Jeter remained the first Yankee on the top step of the dugout to congratulate him.

The captain did not want any teammates or fans to sense that he was panicking, or that he was growing angry over the boos. Jeter even joked that his parents were not waiting around for him after games anymore. “If your parents walk out on you,” he said, “you know you’re not doing too well. They’re probably getting booed, too.”

Oakland came in on April 27, and Jeter’s 0 for 3 left him 0 for 28. The fans reacted differently this time, as if making up for the unforgiving Sunday crowd. They stood and cheered for the shortstop when he batted in the seventh inning, trying to will him to a hit.

Jeter grounded into a force play.

The following night, the fans gave the shortstop standing ovations in his final two at-bats—“Let’s go, Jeter,” they chanted—before he walked and grounded out, extending his hitless streak to 32, doubling A-Rod’s 0 for 16 in Boston and establishing the longest Yankee run of futility since Jimmy Wynn’s 0 for 32 in 1977.

Just before that closing groundout, Bubba Crosby had whiffed on a feeble swing and then stopped on his way out of the box when the crowd erupted in cheers. Crosby thought the umpire had somehow ruled it a ball, at least until it became obvious the crowd was only responding to the hitter on deck.

“That’s what happens when you bat in front of Jeter,” Crosby said.

That’s what happens when four championships and more than eight years of dignity and class are rewarded with clemency for thirty-one consecutive failures at the plate.

“The fans have been great,” Jeter said. “They’ve been cheering for me going up, but afterwards they haven’t had anything to cheer about.”

On the night of April 29, for the third and final game of the series against Oakland, Jeter took extra batting practice and listened as the human good luck charm, Yogi Berra, told him he once went 0 for 32, too.

Jeter had heard advice from teammates, friends, people on the street. He had engaged in private lessons with the new hitting coach and former captain, Don Mattingly. The 0 for 32 had cost Jeter 2 full points from his lifetime batting average, which fell to .314, and had left fans actually feeling sorry for him.