The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (48 page)

Asked if Torre could have done something specific to avoid the postseason failures that started piling up like soiled laundry on a locker room floor, Sheffield said, “I think believing in what you have, more than anything. It’s easy to do when you have Jeter and Mariano and Posada on the main stage and you’re just focusing on those guys and thinking they’ve done it before and they’re going to do it again, as opposed to embracing the guys that just came in and believing in them also.

“We have track records also. We know how to win. . . . You want to make the guys who just got here feel like part of the family, too, and I don’t think that was established enough.”

Sheffield was traded to Detroit a month after the Tigers eliminated the Yankees, and though his accessibility made him popular with many reporters who covered him, the slugger’s outspoken nature and history of semi-plausible claims left him labeled as a loose cannon.

But on the issue of Torre and how the manager had different strokes for different folks, one team official confirmed Sheffield was shooting straight.

“Players would come in with All-Star or Hall of Fame credentials,” the official said, “and they were always on the outside looking in.”

Of course, nobody embodied that truth more than A-Rod.

“There was just always a tension, and you could just see it,” the official said, “and then in small ways Torre would promote it, too, because he would never call out Jeter on anything but he’d have no problem doing it to Alex. With Jeter, he’d never bat him eighth, but he’d do it to Alex.

“So Joe would treat Derek one way and Alex another, and you’ve got to treat all of your best players the same. Your twenty-fifth man, you can treat any way you want. But that’s why the clubhouse went offline, because there were rules for some, and rules for others.”

One name player who left the Yankees, and left them unhappily, put it this way: “I wasn’t in the club. I wasn’t in Joe’s club.”

The Yankees were a fractured lot, and their lack of cohesion showed up in the postseason, when younger, cheaper, leaner, and meaner opponents whipped them with an underdog’s carefree, nothing-to-lose approach. Despite their overwhelming firepower, the Yanks ended up hoist by their own petard.

The captain was sick of it, too.

“In the off-season he wouldn’t knock individual guys,” Martinez said of Jeter, his fellow Tampa resident, “but he felt the team wasn’t there to win a World Series. He thought they were more there to have fun and collect a paycheck and go home, and that really drove him crazy.

“When the season was over, he’d come to Tampa and he wasn’t the same. He was always a little bit flustered. He wouldn’t go out. He’d go out to eat, but he wouldn’t go out to have fun. He was always thinking about trying to make the team better, who we should get, that type of attitude.”

Jeter could talk to his friend Martinez because Tino represented what he wanted to recapture. Those Yankees were team players, gamers, legends of the fall.

“When we played together,” Martinez said, “David Cone would pitch with a broken arm. We all had aches and pains in the postseason, but we never wanted a built-in excuse for not playing well, and we didn’t want to give the other team an advantage.

“I hated it when [Paul] O’Neill didn’t play because he was hurt, he hated it when I didn’t play, we both hated it when Bernie [Williams] didn’t play, so we all played hurt together.”

No Yankee ever played hurt more than Jeter, and the captain felt he was surrounded by players who did not have the same toughness he had, the same toughness his old teammates had, physically or mentally.

“Derek would just say, ‘It’s not the same. It’s not the same as it was when we played when everybody wanted to win,’” Martinez said. “I would tell him, ‘You’ve just got to keep playing hard every day like you do. You can’t control the whole team. You can’t control guys’ attitudes and wanting to win or not. You’re not going to convince them to want to win.’

“I’d tell Derek, ‘You’ve got to get to guys who you think are driven to win and pull with those guys and see if you can corral the other guys and get them to come with you.’ But the playoffs would come, and all of a sudden guys you relied on had fake injuries, or all of a sudden they had injuries and they couldn’t play.”

Martinez was not naming names; it wasn’t the Yankee way. But Jeter clearly was enraged when Martinez’s successor, Giambi, begged out of the lineup before Game 5 of the 2003 World Series.

“I think they lost that feel of guys wanting to be really out there when the pressure’s on and failing and dealing with the media,” Martinez said. “I think after we left certain guys came in with more of a let’s-have-fun-off-the-field mentality. If we win or lose today it’s no big deal because we’ll have fun tonight wherever we go.

“It’s that type of mentality that drove [Jeter] crazy. Guys were laughing after losses. It’s not that we were a morgue in there when we lose a game in June or July, but you don’t want guys laughing or joking around like it’s no big deal.”

Jeter’s scouting report alone did not inspire these conclusions. Martinez saw it for himself when he returned to the Yanks in 2005, after spending two seasons with St. Louis and one in Tampa Bay.

“Everybody was on different pages, guys were out, and it was a mess,” Martinez said. “I knew I had a year to come back, maybe two, and I wanted to win the World Series again, get that whole experience, get another parade. But it just wasn’t the same feeling.”

Mike Stanton reached the same verdict when he also returned to the Yanks in 2005. The reliever had a great appreciation for Jeter, especially after he thought he had nearly ended the shortstop’s career years earlier.

Stanton was part of a Nike commercial shoot before a Subway Series against the Mets, an ad pitting the Yanks against the Mets in a stickball game. With Jeter on first, Stanton swung his broomstick and ripped a pitch from John Franco right into the shortstop’s lower stomach, inches north of his groin. As Jeter doubled over, gasping for air, Stanton thought to himself, “Oh, my gosh, there goes my Yankee career.”

Jeter survived. Stanton remained gainfully employed and ended up as a vital part of three championship teams under Torre. On his second go-around in the Bronx, Stanton believed the 2005 Yanks had title-worthy talent.

“You had an All-Star from another team at every position, not the homegrown guys,” he said, “but it was completely different.

“We had a great team on the field, but we just didn’t have the cohesiveness as we did in the past. I think we had the same commitment to winning, but not the same commitment to being a team. You had guys going in different directions, and when we were winning championships everybody put the team in front of ourselves. In 2005 it was more about playing for the three-run homer and making sure you got your ERA down or your batting average up.”

The 2006 season offered more of the same, and the most conspicuous source of tension in Yankeeland—the awkward public dance between Jeter and Rodriguez—was still a hurdle the entire franchise could not clear.

Their extreme differences went far beyond A-Rod’s habit of watching as much televised baseball as he could, and Jeter’s refusal to watch any game in which he was not playing. Rodriguez finally decided to do something about his relationship with the shortstop. Emasculated by Torre in the Detroit series, burdened by the probability that 2007 would be his final year as a Yankee, A-Rod chose to put Jeter on his heels.

As tired as Jeter was of all that October losing, Rodriguez was just as tired of seeking the captain’s approval in vain. The third baseman was tired of tiptoeing around Jeter, tired of swearing their friendship was intact, tired of carrying all that baggage to the plate.

So he dumped it right in Jeter’s lap. Rodriguez reported to spring training, took a seat in a Legends Field dugout, and while Jeter was taking his physical, A-Rod became the first known major league player to announce a divorce from a teammate.

“Let’s make a contract,” Rodriguez said to reporters. “You don’t ask me about Derek anymore, and I promise I’ll stop lying to all you guys.”

As much as they loved this story A-Rod was telling, the gathered reporters were not ready to make that trade.

“The reality is there’s been a change in the relationship over fourteen years and hopefully we can just put it behind us,” A-Rod continued. “You go from sleeping over at somebody’s house five days a week, and now you don’t sleep over. It’s just not that big of a deal.”

Oh, this was as big a deal as the opt-out in A-Rod’s contract, the clause he could exercise at season’s end to become a free agent. Rodriguez was done speaking from the scripts he had run past focus groups.

This cathartic exchange explained why Rodriguez walked into camp as if he were arriving for a weigh-in before a middleweight bout. He had shed about fifteen pounds, reduced his body fat from 18 percent to 10 percent, and lowered a two-ton issue from his shoulders.

“People start assuming that things are a lot worse than what they are, which they’re not,” Rodriguez said. “But they’re obviously not as great as they used to be. We were like blood brothers. . . . I think it’s important to cut the bull.”

A-Rod was as free as a bird. Yes, he lied about Torre, saying he blamed only himself for the embarrassment of batting eighth against Detroit. One Rodriguez friend maintained there was a better chance of Jeter forgiving A-Rod for his sins than there was of Rodriguez forgiving Torre for his.

But Rodriguez liberated himself on the more critical front, the Jeter front, and when the shortstop heard about A-Rod’s little stunt he did not do a handstand. “Why does he keep running his mouth off?” Jeter asked a team official. “Why doesn’t he just shut up?”

The day after Rodriguez’s confession, Jeter sat in the same dugout and, per the captain’s policy, refused to feed the media beast.

“I don’t have a rift with Alex; let’s get that straight,” Jeter told reporters. “Like Alex said yesterday, when we’re on the field we support each other, we’re pulling for each other, and that’s all that matters. What we do away from the field really has no bearing on us playing baseball.”

Jeter was asked to characterize his relationship with Rodriguez. “How would I characterize it?” he said. “I would characterize it as it doesn’t make a difference.”

The captain revealed he’d had a conversation with Rodriguez about his perceived lack of support, and that A-Rod did not believe what reporters and columnists were writing—that Jeter needed to do more to make his former best friend feel at home in the Bronx.

“From day one, I’ve said I support Alex,” the shortstop said. “The only thing I’m not going to do is tell the fans what to do.”

Even if he told them what to do when they were jeering Jason Giambi.

Jeter said that he and A-Rod laughed about the dropped pop-up against Baltimore, that media members were analyzing their relationship without knowing all the closed-door facts. Rodriguez swore his only desire was to win a championship with Jeter at his side, and to be there in 2009 for the opening of the new stadium across the street.

But with Rodriguez a potential free agent, with Torre in the last year of his contract, and with Jeter desperate to win after six years of postseason losing, something would have to give in 2007. The Yankees were not going to crash and burn in another Division Series and make it to 2008 with their core figures intact.

The conflict within the organization was not limited to the left side of the infield. Steinbrenner had almost fired Torre after the loss in Detroit, and ownership and management no longer viewed him as the manager with the Midas touch. One constant issue was Torre’s use, or overuse, of certain members of the bullpen, the most recent and obvious case represented by the dangling right arm belonging to Scott Proctor, who had pitched 1021/3 innings over 83 games in 2006.

Over the winter, Brian Cashman consulted with members of Torre’s coaching staff and arranged for an intervention. Cashman called in bench coach Don Mattingly, third-base coach Larry Bowa, first-base coach Tony Pena, and bullpen coach Joe Kerrigan. Most, if not all, shared the general manager’s opinion that Torre needed to adjust the way he used relief pitchers and do a better job of protecting valuable arms. Cashman did not bother inviting Ron Guidry, the pitching coach, because the GM saw Guidry as a blind follower of Torre’s who would never cut against the manager’s grain.

Once the meeting started and Torre figured out its agenda, he got so defensive that the coaches turned stone-cold silent, hanging Cashman out to dry. Suddenly a group intervention became a face-off between the GM and Torre.

It did not go well, and after the meeting ended, Kerrigan, Bowa, and Mattingly apologized to Cashman for, in effect, chickening out. But if Torre needed another reason to believe he could not lose in the first round of the playoffs for the third straight year, he had gotten one.

Torre would have to make do without Bernie Williams, who was not brought back, and again without Carl Pavano, who answered teammate criticism of his lack of commitment and availability (Mike Mussina put an on-the-record face and voice to that criticism) by making two starts, including one on Opening Day, before going down for the season with a ligament tear in his elbow that required Tommy John surgery.

A far more reliable Yankee, Andy Pettitte, was back on Torre’s side after three years in Houston, making the manager feel a bit more secure about his staff. That was the good news surrounding Pettitte’s return. The bad news?

Pettitte found that balls his Houston shortstop, Adam Everett, used to reach were getting by Derek Jeter for base hits. Pettitte would never consciously show up his friend and captain; the first and last time Pettitte did big-time Jeter, the two were minor leaguers in Greensboro and the left-hander was watching the teenage shortstop botch a series of ground balls.

But veteran Yankee observers noticed that Pettitte’s body language occasionally screamed, “How did that get through?” when grounders—especially those to Jeter’s left—were bouncing into the outfield. If Pettitte was silently asking that question, others were asking it out loud.