The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (59 page)

Levine and Cashman cited twenty-six-year-old Florida shortstop Hanley Ramirez, who had superior numbers to Jeter’s and was making $11 million, or $4 million less than the Yankees were offering. They cited the Dodgers’ Rafael Furcal ($12 million) and the Phillies’ Jimmy Rollins ($8.5 million), among others.

Through grapevine intelligence, Levine was aware that Colorado was about to give twenty-six-year-old shortstop Troy Tulowitzki a seven-year extension that would leave him with $157.75 million over ten seasons, or an average of $15.775 million per. Despite the fact that Tulowitzki’s stats blew away his idol’s, the Yankees were quietly prepared to improve their offer to Jeter so that his average annual take would exceed the Colorado star’s.

But the captain pushed for a salary of more than $20 million, and Close was being asked to pull a rabbit out of a hat that didn’t exist. If the agent had always beaten the Yankees at the negotiating table, this time he was destined to lose.

With frustrations mounting inside the Jeter family and camp, with his client smoldering over a perceived campaign to make him look bad in the news media, Close decided to alter the game plan. He decided to go public despite warnings from Yankee officials that such a move could escalate hostilities and prove damaging to Jeter’s image.

So when Close told
Daily News
columnist Mike Lupica that the Yankees’ negotiating stance was “baffling,” that they “continue to argue their points in the press and refuse to acknowledge Derek’s total contribution to their franchise,” and that there was a reason “the Yankees themselves have stated Derek Jeter is their modern-day Babe Ruth,” Cashman, Levine, and Steinbrenner lost it.

Steinbrenner was the one who would decide the appropriate Yankee response. After concluding that Close had hurt the family business with his words, the Boss’s son ordered the Code Red and asked Cashman to carry it out.

With his phone as his only weapon, the general manager launched a media offensive with something of shock-and-awe tone. Cashman’s money quote on Jeter was landed by ESPNNewYork.com’s Wallace Matthews, and it went like this:

“We’ve encouraged him to test the market and see if there’s something he would prefer other than this. If he can, fine. That’s the way it works.”

Meanwhile, Hal Steinbrenner’s brother, Hank, weighed in by telling the Associated Press, “As much as we want to keep everybody, we’ve already made these guys very, very rich, and I don’t feel we owe anybody anything monetarily. Some of these players are wealthier than their bosses.”

Jeter was hotter than he’d ever been, hotter than he was over A-Rod’s remarks ten years back. The captain was particularly upset at Cashman’s dare to go test the market.

Suddenly Jeter was caught up in a tabloid feeding frenzy, the very thing he’d worked so hard to avoid his entire career. And from a safe distance, while he was sunning himself on a yacht by Cameron Diaz’s side, A-Rod was loving every minute of it. Rodriguez was signed through his forty-second birthday, and he’d make a whole lot more than $15 million a year. The A-Rod–Jeter relationship was in a much better place, but the third baseman didn’t mind finally seeing the shortstop caught up in an A-Rodian drama of his own.

In almost all of his interviews, Cashman pointed out that he still wanted to sign Jeter, and that he still believed Jeter represented the team’s best option at shortstop. But the GM would also point out, “There are things we have concerns with—his performance over the last few years, and his age. And that has to be factored into the negotiation.”

Jeter accepted Cashman’s criticism in 2007. He wasn’t accepting this.

The two sides had grown into enemy forces. Jeter and Close were looking at the Yankees the way the Red Sox were looking at them, and for a day or two the unthinkable was thinkable: maybe Jeter wouldn’t finish his career in the Bronx after all.

With Cashman assuming the role of bad cop, especially in Jeter’s eyes, Levine came up with a proposal that the GM and Hal Steinbrenner liked. Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, Levine pieced together an elaborate incentives plan that would allow Jeter to make additional millions in a fourth year of the contract if he played at a high level.

Levine was reviewing the details of his plan when Close reached out to Steinbrenner to arrange a second face-to-face meeting in Tampa. Understanding that the Yankees weren’t going to be giving his client another megadeal, a truth he had to explain to the Jeters, Close was hoping to bridge the turbulent waters separating the two sides and get the best deal he could.

On November 30, Jeter, Close, and Creative Artists Agency attorney Terry Prince met with Cashman, Levine, and Steinbrenner. This summit lasted more than four hours, but Jeter was there for only the first forty-five minutes.

The captain’s world had been turned upside down. His girlfriend, Kelly, had been named
Esquire
’s Sexiest Woman Alive (yes,
Esquire
owed Jeter one), and he had built himself a 31,000-square-foot waterfront mansion on Davis Islands in Tampa, where Jeter would have to make do with seven bedrooms and nine bathrooms.

Only his life didn’t feel like an Everyman’s fantasy at the start of this second meeting. Jeter opened by telling the Yankee delegation how upset he was that they made the negotiations public, and by telling Cashman how upset he was that the GM dared him to shop for a better offer.

When Jeter was done spewing, he tried to get up and leave before Cashman asked him to sit back down. The GM reminded Jeter that the Yankees’ offer was the highest offer. “You said all you wanted was what was fair,” Cashman told him. “How much higher do we have to be than the highest offer for it to be fair?”

Cashman also blamed Close for making the contract talks public, a position Jeter and his agent rejected. They went back and forth for a bit before Jeter decided that his presence might hinder the process. As the captain excused himself, he made it clear Close was now authorized to make a deal.

The sides made significant progress over the balance of the summit, and the agent and Levine then spent a couple of days on the phone tweaking the proposal. Knowing it would be a wise idea to keep his client and Cashman apart, Close asked Levine to go see Jeter in his Manhattan apartment on the afternoon of December 3.

They met in the skyscraping Trump World Tower home Jeter had put on the market for $20 million, this while Cashman met with his other future Hall of Famer, Mariano Rivera, to work on the closer’s free agent deal in Rivera’s suburban Westchester home.

The Rivera talks were as quiet as Rivera himself, even as the Red Sox were making an attempt to extricate him from the Bronx. Jeter was the one who had to scratch and claw for his money while millions of fascinated fans looked on.

Inside his Trump home, Jeter told Levine he wanted more money added to the incentives clauses in the proposal. At the time the offer included bonuses for winning awards such as league MVP, World Series or League Championship Series MVP, Silver Slugger, and Gold Glove.

Jeter spent a couple of hours arguing that those awards are very difficult to win, and that the contract numbers didn’t reflect the degree of difficulty. He made persuasive arguments. Levine absorbed the captain’s points, called Cashman and Steinbrenner while Jeter called Close, and the two sides ended up a yard or two away from pay dirt.

As it turned out, Jeter made himself about $4 to $5 million in extra money in that meeting with Levine. The Yankees agreed to raise the ceiling on the incentives plan to $9 million, and that night the parties set up a meeting for late the following afternoon to close the deal at the Regency in the city.

The same men who attended the second meeting in Tampa ended up in a Regency suite on Saturday, December 4: Jeter, Close, and Prince on one side; Cashman, Levine, and Steinbrenner on the other. They reached an agreement around 4:00 p.m. Everyone shook hands, hugged, and shared a laugh.

Derek Sanderson Jeter was still a Yankee.

Levine got fellow executives Lonn Trost and Jean Afterman on the phone to help dot the i’s and cross the t’s with Prince. The contract guaranteed Jeter $56 million over four years, with a player option after year three.

The captain would make $48 million in salary in the first three years and would receive another $3 million if he decided to buy his way out of the deal and into free agency, leaving him with $51 million and an average annual take of $17 million, better than Tulowitzki’s $15.775.

Jeter would have the option to stay for the fourth and final season for an $8 million salary plus potential bonus money earned over the life of the contract that topped out at $9 million, making it possible for him to earn as much as $65 million in the deal.

Jeter would earn $4 million for winning a league MVP award and $2 million for finishing second through sixth in the voting. He could score an additional $1.5 million for a Silver Slugger, $500,000 for a Gold Glove, and $500,000 each for a League Championship Series MVP and a World Series MVP. Jeter would be eligible for any unearned bonuses during the fourth and final year of the contract.

In order to save the Yankees on luxury tax payments applied to their massive payroll, Levine persuaded Jeter to defer $7 million of his salary over the first three years, without interest, something the captain didn’t want to do.

“I’m rooting for Derek Jeter; we all are,” Levine would say. “I hope he hits all of his incentives so we end up paying him $17 million in that fourth year. It will be the happiest $17 million we’ve ever spent.”

Before leaving the Regency, Jeter met separately with Cashman and Steinbrenner to begin repairing the relationship. They had a long and winding road ahead of them.

Some in baseball believed the Yankees were guilty of unnecessary roughness in their talks with Jeter. But just as many others, including some teammates of Jeter’s, thought the team had offered the captain more than it needed to.

The deal was set to be announced on Tuesday, December 7, at George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa. At last, Jeter would get that big press conference denied him in 2001. At last, he would get his day inside the tent.

The captain arrived in a blue pinstriped suit, and before he spoke, Cashman offered him a piece of advice.

“Tell the truth,” the GM told Jeter. “Let’s not have a fake press conference. Let them see how pissed off you are at me, let them know that. I’m a big boy. I can handle it.”

Shockingly, Jeter took Cashman’s advice. He stepped to the microphone, joked that he’d never had one of these press conferences before, and, with the YES Network cameras rolling, admitted he was pissed off by the way the negotiations went down.

“I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t angry at how some of this went,” Jeter said.

Angry.
Nobody could recall Jeter using that word to describe his emotions about anything. Ever.

Jeter revealed his rage over Cashman’s statement that he should go searching for a better offer from another team.

“I was pretty angry about it,” Jeter said, “and I let that be known. I was angry about it because I was the one who said I wasn’t going to [talk to other teams]. To hear the organization say, ‘Go shop it,’ and I just told you I wasn’t going to, yeah, to be honest with you, I was angry about it.”

Angry, angry, angry. It had taken fifteen years for the New York Yankees to make Derek Jeter angry.

“I never wanted to be a free agent,” he said.

And now everyone understood why. Jeter had been scarred in the process. He’d been bloodied just as clearly as he was bloodied on that dive into the stands against Boston in 2004, and it would take some time to heal the wounds.

That night, outside Jeter’s Davis Islands mansion, the captain’s father reportedly pushed and grabbed a freelance photographer trying to take photos of his son. A long day and a longer year had taken their toll, and the captain wanted everything to return to the way it used to be. He wanted to trade the pursuit of a contract for the pursuit of another parade, never mind the pursuit of his 3,000th hit.

Derek Jeter, pride of the Yankees, couldn’t wait for Opening Day.

The people who regularly cover Derek Jeter’s Yankees do so with a professionalism matched only by the greatest of Jeter’s teams. Their ranks include many friends and colleagues whose outsized talent and generosity helped shape this book.

Mike Vaccaro and Joel Sherman were invaluable resources and trusted wingmen, as were Jack Curry, Bob Klapisch, and Buster Olney. George King, Michael Kay, Ken Davidoff, Tyler Kepner, Dom Amore, John Harper, Sweeny Murti, and Suzyn Waldman were among those willing to share their experiences and wisdom, as were Wallace Matthews, Andrew Marchand, Tara Sullivan, Steve Politi, Brian Costello, Anthony McCarron, Dan Graziano, Roger Rubin, John Rowe, Jeremy Schaap, Ryan Ruocco, Dave Kaplan, Murray Bauer, and Michael Rosenberg. Friends and fellow authors Adrian Wojnarowski, Joe Posnanski, David Fischer, and Dan Wetzel were good enough to fill the roles of much-needed sounding boards, and the works of Harvey Araton, Ronald Blum, Erik Boland, Filip Bondy, Sam Borden, Pete Caldera, Marc Carig, Mark Feinsand, Jon Heyman, Bryan Hoch, Chad Jennings, Bill Madden, Ben Shpigel, and Tom Verducci were among those that served as important guides.

The late, great Vic Ziegel showed me how to tell a story, and the late, great Bill Shannon showed me how to act on game day.

I owe a debt of gratitude to all the past and present Yankee players, coaches, and executives who gave their time and perspective to this project, and to R. D. Long, Nick Delvecchio, and other minor league teammates of Jeter’s for their kindness and candor. The same goes for the high school, summer league, and basketball teammates and coaches out of Jeter’s Kalamazoo youth, and the many big league executives and scouts who filled in too many blanks to count.

I would also like to thank Derek Jeter himself for agreeing to field questions for this book at his locker, as he was under no obligation to do so.

Sean Forman’s baseball-reference.com, a required destination for all fans, proved to be a lifesaver in so many ways. FanGraphs.com, retrosheet.org, fieldingbible.com, thebaseballcube.com, baseballamerica.com’s executive database, baseball-almanac.com, and LexisNexis were also terrific research tools.