The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (44 page)

But when the fans turned ugly in the Bronx, Jeter told them to knock it off. “If you’re a Yankee fan and you want us to win,” he said, “we need Jason to do well. They should be cheering him.”

Only a year later, the shortstop was not campaigning for any such clemency for A-Rod. Rodriguez was drowning and the captain refused to pull him in. The fans were taking out their past postseason frustrations on A-Rod. He was the face of the disastrous 2004 loss to Boston and the slugger who delivered 48 homers and 130 RBI in the 2005 regular season before batting .133 with no homers and no RBI in another Division Series loss to the Angels, a performance that compelled A-Rod to admit he had “played like a dog.”

Rodriguez was the enduring symbol of a $203 million payroll ousted in the first round. “We can win three World Series,” A-Rod said, “and with me it’s never going to be over.”

Yankee fans were just hoping for one World Series title from A-Rod, and when he struggled in 2006, the Stadium crowds were no more forgiving of him than they were of Giambi. Only Giambi had an influential teammate in his corner.

Alex Rodriguez did not.

“I can’t tell the fans what to do,” Derek Jeter said.

He told them what to do in Giambi’s case. In fact, when the Stadium crowd had cheered for struggling second baseman Chuck Knoblauch years earlier, Jeter remarked that “it’s about time the fans got behind him.”

Rodriguez was on his own, and Brian Cashman was fed up with it. So after the August 17 pop-up fell to the ground in the 12–2 loss to Baltimore, after Jeter gave A-Rod a look that could maim, if not kill, and after A-Rod was roasted by the fans for popping out in his final at-bat, the general manager decided to take the issue head-on.

But first Joe Torre would address Jeter and Rodriguez in the clubhouse. If Torre, an accomplished former player, was not crazy about singling out Yankees in front of the team, he did it when he had to.

He had first shown a willingness to criticize a Yankee before a full and captive clubhouse audience in 1996, when he ripped Paul O’Neill for not hustling after a fly ball. “You’re better than that,” Torre barked, “and I expect more out of you. I don’t want to see that again.” O’Neill did not say a word in response.

Ten years later, Jeter and A-Rod were bigger stars than O’Neill, bigger than their combined salaries of $45 million. Torre had no choice but to confront them anyway, with the rest of the team looking on.

The clubhouse doors were shut to the media, and the manager stood before the hushed Yankees, fixing his glare on the two heavyweights among them. “I don’t know what happened out there,” Torre told the left side of his infield, “but that fuckin’ ball’s got to be caught. I don’t care who catches it, but somebody had better catch it.”

Now that Torre had confronted Jeter and Rodriguez, Cashman decided it was time to confront Torre. The manager was partial to Jeter, the team-centric winner who made Torre a four-time champion. Jeter never would have been pictured in the
New York Post
sunbathing shirtless in Central Park before a game the way A-Rod had been the previous month (before going hitless and committing three errors in a game for the first time in his career).

Rodriguez had not won for Torre, and he brought to the clubhouse a level of narcissism not seen in the Bronx since the days of Reggie Jackson. A-Rod was worth two diva dramas a week, at least, and so naturally Torre did not connect with him the way he did with his shortstop.

But Cashman saw in Rodriguez a nine-figure corporate asset that had to be protected. For that reason, the GM wanted Jeter to appeal to the fans to support A-Rod just as he had appealed to them to support Giambi.

To date Jeter had declined. The botched pop-up upped the ante, inspiring Cashman to make his move. He asked his manager to order Jeter to end his cold war with A-Rod for the betterment of the team.

Torre did not believe it was necessary. “I’m not going to bring that up with them,” he replied. “If you want something done on that, you handle it.”

So Cashman handled it, face-to-face with a captain who hated criticism almost as much as he hated losing.

“Listen, this has to stop,” the GM told Jeter. “Everybody in the press box, every team official, everyone watching, they saw you look at the ball on the ground and look at him with disgust like you were saying, ‘That’s your mess, you clean it up.’”

Jeter responded by summoning the Cuba Gooding Jr. character in
Jerry Maguire
.

“Show me the video,” he told Cashman. “Show me the video.”

The GM told Jeter to look for himself and reiterated that the captain’s body language had screamed to the world he had no use for A-Rod. Jeter maintained again that Cashman and the rest of creation had it wrong.

“If that’s not what you meant, fine,” the GM said. “But perception is reality, and that’s what people perceive it to be. . . . You’ve got to do a better job with Alex as far as embracing him.”

Cashman asked Jeter to do a “self-test” on the Rodriguez issue, to go home and question himself about whether he was doing enough as a captain and teammate for A-Rod, and the conversation ended. Meanwhile, the Yankees were heading off to play five games over four days in Fenway Park while holding only a one-and-a-half-game divisional lead, and all the news media wanted to talk about was a Little League mistake made by two men who had combined to win the last four American League Gold Glove awards at short.

“When it was hit, I was calling it,” Jeter explained. “I guess he didn’t hear me.”

“Just a goofy play, that’s all,” Rodriguez said. “He called it. I called it. We didn’t hear each other.”

The official scorer, Howie Karpin, originally assigned the error to Rodriguez, which would have given the third baseman—plagued earlier by throwing problems—a league-leading 22. On further review, Karpin decided the shortstop had impeded Rodriguez’s ability to catch the ball and reassigned the error to Jeter, whose total increased to 10.

Told he had been stuck with the bill on the pop-up, Jeter said, “That wasn’t my error, buddy.” Assured he had been assessed the error, the captain said, “I was? Really? I didn’t touch it. Wow. . . . I don’t care.”

Only Jeter did care. In his eighth year as a scorer, Karpin had never been approached by the shortstop to question one of his rulings. But Karpin went down to the clubhouse in case Jeter wanted to talk, and the captain did indeed call him over.

Karpin explained that after reviewing the play, he decided Jeter’s slight contact with the third baseman from behind caused the ball to drop. “Derek was cordial,” Karpin said, “but the ruling definitely seemed to bother him.”

Before he left for Fenway and five games his team would win, Jeter spotted Karpin in the Stadium hallway and approached a second time in an attempt to persuade him to hand the bill back to A-Rod.

“I think you may want to look at it again,” the shortstop said.

“I think
you
may want to look at it again,” Karpin responded. They went back and forth for a few minutes, neither party raising his voice, and then Jeter boarded the bus.

No, Jeter and A-Rod were not another Kobe and Shaq, superpowers who openly feuded and criticized each other in the press. They were too smart to engage in a shouting match or fight in front of teammates, who would undoubtedly leak word of any such confrontation.

But the tension between them was real enough for Cashman to approach Jeter several times about the need for the shortstop to build a bridge to third base. Jeter maintained he had spoken with A-Rod on more than one occasion and was trying to improve the relationship, and when Cashman asked Rodriguez if this was indeed the case, the third baseman confirmed the captain’s account.

Jeter never lied about team business. If he said he did something, he did it, and Cashman respected him for that.

Only there was a problem: those conversations between Jeter and Rodriguez did not thaw out the sheet of ice that separated their lockers, which, fittingly enough, were across the room from each other, Jeter’s on the left and A-Rod’s on the right.

One friend of Jeter’s who agreed with Cashman’s take tried to persuade the shortstop to make more of an effort to bring A-Rod in from the cold. “Now you’re sounding like everyone else,” Jeter told the friend. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? I try, and sometimes I’ve just got to walk away and come back and try again, but you know I’ve tried. And every time I try, he’ll do something that pushes me away.”

Don Mattingly, hitting coach and former captain, told Yankee officials he tried giving Jeter the same advice. Mattingly could not stand teammate Wade Boggs, once his chief rival in Boston.

“But I faked it with Boggs,” Mattingly said he had told Jeter. “And you have to fake it with Alex.”

It was a tough sell. One Yankee official said he was afraid to approach Jeter on the subject of his relationship with A-Rod “because it would’ve been the last conversation I ever had with Derek. I would’ve been dead to him. It would’ve been like approaching Joe DiMaggio to talk to him about Marilyn Monroe.”

Truth was, Jeter did not hate A-Rod. He just hated being A-Rod’s teammate.

More than five years later, Jeter was not hung up on the
Esquire
comments as much as he was hung up on Alex’s me-first antics. Jeter’s idea of the perfect teammate was Rivera, Pettitte, or Posada from the glory days, or Hideki Matsui from the current group.

Matsui was quiet, dignified, chiseled from stone, ready to play every day. If he had been raised in Iowa instead of Ishikawa, Matsui would have been Jack Armstrong, everyone’s all-American boy.

The Japanese slugger appreciated Jeter’s kindness when he first arrived in the States (“It was huge to me,” Matsui said), and Jeter appreciated the same toughness and selflessness in Matsui he saw in the dynasty keepers.

Matsui broke his wrist trying to make a catch in May and then apologized to his fellow Yankees for being unavailable to help them.

“I had never seen that before,” Jeter would say. “He’s been one of my favorite teammates I’ve ever played with.”

Rodriguez was the anti-Matsui, an insecure wreck who constantly craved positive reinforcement, and who cared much too much about what was written and said about him in the newspapers, on the air, in a media culture spawning a new invasive platform every hour, on the hour.

Jeter was hardly the only Yankee who noticed. One teammate of both who did not count himself as a member of Jeter’s camp or A-Rod’s camp—if A-Rod even had a camp—offered this agenda-free scouting report on Rodriguez’s standing in Yankeeland:

Alex isn’t a bad guy, but he’s just very phony.

I was taken aback by how insecure a person he is. He’s very cognizant of how other people were reacting to him. He would walk into the clubhouse, and he knew immediately who was where. You could tell he’d be asking himself, “Are they acknowledging me? Are they looking at me?” In batting practice he’d tell people, “Hey, I’m going to put on a show for you today,” and when he did, he’d say, “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

It amazed me how he’d walk from the parking lot to the clubhouse and see the same people every day and not give them the time of day. I made that walk with him, and I was disgusted by the time I got to the clubhouse. Alex gave those people nothing, walked right by them as if they weren’t even there, and I was embarrassed by it. You’ve got to try pretty hard to be that mean.

Derek Jeter was rarely, if ever, rude or dismissive to the minions in his midst, which raised a question about A-Rod: If the third baseman was so obsessed with the shortstop, why didn’t he do a better job of following his lead?

And yes, one team official said, Rodriguez was indeed obsessed with the captain. “Alex,” the official said, “would constantly ask, ‘Is Jeter doing this? . . . Is Jeter doing that? . . . Did you talk to Jeter last night? . . . Is Jeter involved in this charity thing?’ It never stopped.”

Rodriguez should have walked around wearing his own “WWJD” bracelet (“What Would Jeter Do?”). People told Rodriguez to stop comparing himself to the captain, if only because A-Rod had no chance of ever measuring up. Rodriguez was not born with Jeter’s spectacular talent for doing the right thing at the right time. All the time.

A-Rod would walk past kids in the dugout before a game, oblivious to the fact that they were there for a reason (often because they were battling a serious illness). Jeter did not need to be told. If he saw a kid in the dugout, near the bat rack, he almost always stopped to chat, tousled the kid’s hair, and made the kid’s month. “Do you have a girlfriend?” he would ask the boys. “Do you have a boyfriend?” he would ask the girls.

Jeter was once filing out of an event at the Yogi Berra Museum & Learning Center in New Jersey when an official spotted a boy of about seven or eight walking in front of the shortstop, blissfully unaware of who was behind him. Jeter planted his hands on the boy’s shoulders and shook him playfully before starting a conversation with him.

“Most athletes in that situation,” the official said, “would’ve been telling themselves, ‘Oh, God, please let this kid walk another ten feet without turning around.’”

Rodriguez was one of those athletes.

A-Rod did not get it, off the field or on. While Jeter was a master of shrinking the biggest moments, Rodriguez often made them too big to handle, and the Division Series loss to the Angels the previous fall had offered ample evidence of that.

Jeter batted .333 with two home runs and five RBI in the series, and in the sudden-death fifth game, on the road, he had three hits, including a homer in the seventh inning and a single to lead off the ninth with the Yanks down 5–3.

Rodriguez finished the series with two hits in fifteen at-bats, finished hitless in Game 5, and all but killed the Yanks’ last chance by following Jeter’s ninth-inning single with a ground ball double play before, of course, likening himself to a dog.

A-Rod wanted badly to become a made man in a pinstriped suit, to win like the former three-peat champ at third, Scott Brosius, a World Series MVP whose talent could fit inside one of A-Rod’s shoes. If he could not win a title, Rodriguez would at least settle for the kind of signature October moment seized by his predecessor, Aaron Boone.