The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (53 page)

Just as the old ballpark had been magic to his grandmother, the ballpark renovated in the mid-seventies was magic to Jeter. “Playing at Yankee Stadium,” he said, “it’s sort of like performing on Broadway.

“It seems like every time you play at Yankee Stadium, the lights are a little bit stronger here. It seems like you’re just performing on stage. I’ve always dreamt of doing it. I didn’t know what to expect. It’s above and beyond anything I’ve ever dreamt of. You just don’t realize how special this place is.”

No matter how many hundreds of millions of dollars were being poured into the new place, “I still can’t picture being over there,” Jeter said.

It was hard for him to believe there would be no October goodbye for his beloved Stadium, no postseason baseball for the first time in his Yankee life.

“It’s like when you were a little kid and your parents don’t let you go outside and play,” Jeter said, “and you’ve got to sit at the window and watch because you got grounded.”

Only in the Stadium’s final hours, the captain was under one strict order from his parents: enjoy the ride. Charles and Dot Jeter told their son that he should step back, look around, soak it all in. They wanted to be sure Derek celebrated his record for hits at the eighty-five-year-old Stadium (he passed Lou Gehrig on September 16 with number 1,270), and celebrate it Derek did.

“Records are made to be broken,” he said, “but this one at least will never be broken.”

The Yankees put on a hell of a show for the September 21 night game, making it another Old-Timers’ Day. Yogi Berra was behind the plate. Don Larsen, David Cone, and David Wells—the only three Yankees to pitch perfect games—were on the mound. Phil Rizzuto’s widow, Cora, joined Jeter at short, and Mickey Mantle’s son, David, and Bernie Williams ended up in center, not far from Roger Maris’s son, Randy, who stood with Reggie Jackson and Paul O’Neill in right. Babe Ruth’s daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, would throw out the ceremonial first pitch hours after the fans were let in early and allowed onto the warning track and into Monument Park.

Jeter was the last Yankee in the clubhouse. “OK, Jeet, time to get out there,” Zillo told him.

The shortstop rose from his locker and jogged out the door and down the ramp. He reached up to touch the DiMaggio sign for the last time on this side of the street and received the final honor awarded in the Stadium, a Waterford Crystal bat for breaking Gehrig’s record.

Every significant Yankee figure had a place on the field or on the video board, everyone except the not-so-dearly-departed Joe Torre and the disgraced ace of the Mitchell Report, Roger Clemens. The Yankees proceeded to beat the Orioles, 7–3, with Andy Pettitte claiming the victory and Mariano Rivera securing the final three outs. Derek Jeter was pulled off the field with two down in the ninth, replaced by Wilson Betemit so he could bask in one last standing ovation.

The sound of affection was deafening. Jeter came out of the dugout for a curtain call, too, and soon enough he was back on the field, in a scrum, with a microphone in his hand. Police in riot gear surrounded the scene, and some officers were on horseback in the outfield grass.

Excuse me, excuse me,
Jeter said into the microphone, and the crowd turned still. “I was always scared to death talking in front of people,” Jeter would say of this moment. It was too late to turn back now.

The captain was standing near the base of the mound, with rows of teammates standing at attention behind him. Flashbulbs exploded throughout the hushed Stadium crowd. The encroaching photographers in front of Jeter snapped away and threw flickering light across the captain’s face.

His speech would last ninety-nine seconds, pauses and all, and it went like this:

For all of us up here, it’s a huge honor to put this uniform on every day and come out here and play. [Pause for cheers; Jeter tugs on the bill of his cap.] And every member of this organization, past and present, has been calling this place home for eighty-five years.

There’s a lot of tradition, a lot of history, and a lot of memories. Now the great thing about memories is you’re able to pass it along from generation to generation. And although things are going to change next year—we’re going to move across the street—there are a few things with the New York Yankees that never change. That’s pride, it’s tradition, and most of all, we have the greatest fans in the world.

And we are relying on you to take the memories from this Stadium, add them to the new memories that come at the new Yankee Stadium, and continue to pass them on from generation to generation. So on behalf of the entire organization we just want to take this moment to salute you, the greatest fans in the world.

With that, Jeter lifted his cap high off his head, pointed it toward the fans on the first-base side, then pointed it to all corners of the Stadium while his teammates did the same. The captain put an arm around Girardi, patted him on the back, and then led the Yankees on a slow victory lap that started on the third-base side and continued past a dozen cops on horseback.

As he walked toward the left-field corner, his teammates falling in behind him, Jeter extended his cap high toward the fans in the upper deck. The captain was reaching out over the barriers to touch the people.

His final night inside Yankee Stadium was also his finest.

Jason Riley checked his phone. It was Joe Girardi, calling out of the blue.

This was before the 2008 season, and Riley was the director of performance of the Athletes Compound, a training facility at Tampa’s Saddlebrook Resort. He was the man who was going to make Derek Jeter reach all those ground balls Brian Cashman told the captain he needed to reach.

Cashman kept Girardi away from that Upper East Side dinner with Jeter, kept him away from a potential confrontation with the most important Yankee in his clubhouse. But the new manager had to involve himself at some point, so he called the trainer Cashman and Jeter’s agent, Casey Close, agreed could do the job.

“Joe asked about the program and how it would be geared toward Derek,” Riley said. “He only cared about Derek’s defense and his mechanics; he didn’t care about anything else. Joe wanted him to play defense better, and I told him I had the program to make that happen.”

Cashman so wanted Jeter to go through the program, the Yankees told their shortstop they would pay for it. Riley did not come cheap, either.

Jeter first showed up at the trainer’s facility the week before Christmas 2007 and asked, “What do you have for me? . . . How is this going to work?” Riley walked him through his program of speed and agility drills and worked out the shortstop from early January through spring training, conducting early-morning sessions before Jeter had to report to camp.

The captain had brought along his longtime personal trainer and friend, Rafael Oquendo, for the first few weeks. “And then one week Rafy didn’t show up,” Riley said. “I said, ‘Where’s Rafy?’ and Derek said, ‘Rafy doesn’t need to come anymore.’”

Jeter had replaced Oquendo with Riley. “Just making adjustments,” the shortstop said. As always, Jeter moved to downplay the significance of those adjustments.

“I think any time you go through a season,” he said, “you’re going to have some issue that you have to address in the off-season. You have a leg problem one year, you do something to help out your leg. You have an arm problem, you do something to help out your arm.”

Only Jeter did not have a leg problem or an arm problem as much as he had a position problem. He wanted to remain at shortstop for as long as he possibly could, and if his range continued to diminish as dramatically as it had, he would end up in left field before he knew it.

Girardi had the requisite admiration for Jeter, his teammate on three championship teams. But Girardi did not have the same blind loyalty to Jeter that Torre had. If the new manager thought a different shortstop would better his chances of winning, earning some job security, and enjoying the kind of extended run Torre had enjoyed in the Bronx, a different shortstop would be in play.

“What we discussed with Casey [Close] and Joe,” Riley said, “was the need to improve the length of Derek’s career. If he’s going to get injured and slow down, there won’t be many years ahead of him where he can play at the level he wants to play. Maybe he can be a DH, but not a shortstop.

“We needed to improve Derek’s performance and length of career, and to accomplish that through injury prevention. We had to keep him on the field, and ultimately that could help him get a contract extension.”

Jeter did play better defense in 2008, and did improve his sabermetric scores (his Plus/Minus went from minus 34 to minus 12, and his Ultimate Zone Rating went from minus 17.9 to minus 0.3). But his body needed time to adjust to the new routine, and a quad injury limited the improvement in his range.

In the months leading up to the 2009 season, a healthier Jeter was throwing himself into the workouts as never before. Riley had worked with Ryan Howard, Ryan Zimmerman, and Joey Votto on the baseball side, and Maria Sharapova on the tennis side, but Jeter’s work ethic was off his charts.

“I’ve been in the industry for fifteen years,” Riley said, “and I’ve never come across anyone like Derek.”

At thirty-four, Jeter already knew he wanted to take his career into his forties. “Derek said it may not be eight to ten years at shortstop,” Riley said, “but that he wanted to play that long.”

So Riley focused on Jeter’s agility and first-step quickness to the ball. The shortstop needed to become more flexible and explosive in his side-to-side movements, and toward that end he would show up before 7:00 a.m. to get in his extra work.

Riley found what most Yankee coaches, players, fans, and beat writers already knew: Jeter had the most difficulty when moving toward second base. “That was something Girardi really stated,” Riley said. “Derek’s defensive mechanics to his left were something Girardi really wanted to improve.”

Like many right-handed players, Jeter had much better mobility and flexibility in his right ankle and hip than he did in his left ankle and hip. Riley had Jeter perform a wide array of drills to loosen up his left side.

The trainer wanted to reeducate Jeter’s brain to improve its communication with his nerves and muscles. Riley had his student do a series of resistance drills, running at full speed with a belt around his waist and covering five to seven yards with twenty to thirty steps, recoaching that first step over and over so Jeter could create more force in the direction he wanted to go.

Riley had the shortstop doing shuffle drills from cone to cone, dropping him into a low defensive stance—as if he were guarding a point guard on the perimeter—and using resistance to build a more powerful lateral move.

“I think he hated doing those drills at first,” Riley said, “because it’s almost like reeducating a little kid. An accomplished athlete is like, ‘I don’t want to do this because it makes me look stupid.’ And then suddenly, Derek was killing those drills.

“One day we’re doing crossover movements for base-stealing mechanics, and at the end of the workout he was close to getting it right, but not quite. I told him to shut it down for the day, but he said, ‘No, I can tell you’re not happy about it.’ We ended up doing another ten or fifteen sprints before I had to stop him for fear he’d injure himself.”

No, Jeter was not giving up his position, his identity, without a fight. But just in case a new trainer with a new fitness program produced the old 2007 results in 2009, Jeter had put his fallback plan in place.

“Derek mentioned something to me about DH at the end of his career,” Riley said. “If he realizes he’s a detriment to the team playing at a certain level, he would take that role as DH. He’ll do it to help the team out.”

Derek Jeter’s buddy R. D. Long posted a blog dated September 19, 2008, under the headline “A-Rod Represents the Collapse of an Empire.”

Of course, back in 2004, Long was the man who told Jeter he would not win a title with Rodriguez as a teammate, and that he should try to find a way to get rid of him. In the 2008 blog Long stated that Rodriguez’s presence had sent the great Yankee franchise downhill.

“If anyone thinks this amuses the Captain, Derek Jeter,” Long wrote, “you couldn’t be more wrong. Derek has the unenviable task of watching Alex chase the HR record by piling up meaningless HRs that tend to help only his stats, not the win column for New York. . . . These sentiments have been felt from the day Jeter presented him with that so unlucky #13 [at Rodriguez’s introductory news conference]. This has to represent one of the worst days of Jeter’s career.

“It’s hard to imagine Derek Jeter finishing his career with a bunch of meaningless baseball games while he approaches the 4,000-hit mark.”

It would grow harder to imagine Derek Jeter finishing his career with a megastar teammate who had confessed to being a chemically enhanced fraud.

In February of 2009, Alex Rodriguez was outed as a steroid user by
Sports Illustrated
’s Selena Roberts, outed as a name on the list of 104 players who turned up positive in survey testing. Rodriguez had no choice but to address the report. After a dreadful attempt to come clean in an interview with ESPN’s Peter Gammons, A-Rod agreed to take a mulligan in a February 17 press conference outside Tampa’s George M. Steinbrenner Field, formerly Legends Field.

Rodriguez’s personal life had taken some turbulent turns in 2008. His marriage ended in divorce after he reportedly had a love affair with none other than Madonna (“It was more of an infatuation,” one Rodriguez friend maintained). Now A-Rod’s professional life was unraveling at the same breakneck speed.

Fittingly, this circus was held under a tent, and it was attended by Joe Girardi and Brian Cashman, who sat with the man of dishonor, and by thirty of A-Rod’s teammates and coaches, who were gathered off to the right. Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, and Jorge Posada sat in the front row of that group with the grim-faced captain. Dressed in jeans and a hooded shirt, Jeter slumped in his chair and rested his clasped hands in his lap.