The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (7 page)

“Harold was still looking forward to going into the Hall of Fame,” Beryl said, “but after Houston didn’t draft Derek Jeter, he didn’t spend another day in baseball. Not one.”

Cleveland had the number-two pick, and its young scouting director, Mickey White, saw Derek Jeter play on an injured ankle on a soaked field. White liked what he saw, but not as much as the Indians scouts who had watched Jeter run on two healthy feet.

Bill Livesey was there with White on that same ungodly afternoon, but the Yankee scouting director was experienced enough to catch Jeter again three days later. White was in his second year on the job, and he confessed that his time management skills left something to be desired. He did not return to Kalamazoo.

White had heard Houston would take Jeter at number 1, anyway, and later came to believe—despite Dan O’Brien’s claims to the contrary—that the Astros picked Nevin because they thought he would be easier to sign than Jeter.

Either way, Cleveland had drafted Manny Ramirez the year before and Jim Thome in 1989 and was more interested in pitching. The Indians wanted the best arm in the country, and that arm belonged to Paul Shuey, a right-hander out of the University of North Carolina. Shuey had his mechanical flaws, but he had a Juan Marichal leg kick that made his 95-mile-per-hour heater that much harder to see.

When you talk about the draft, White said, “it’s like you’re in a Fidelity Mutual discussion and you’re trying to figure out what an investment is going to reap.” The Indians thought a power closer out of the Atlantic Coast Conference was a better investment than a high school shortstop.

Montreal had the third pick, and its scouting director, Kevin Malone, was struck by Jeter’s advanced professionalism and poise. The Expos had a history of drafting the best available athletes, and of absorbing the risk that goes with selecting the likes of high school stars Cliff Floyd, Rondell White, Marquis Grissom, and Larry Walker.

Only the Expos needed pitching—who didn’t?—and in Mississippi State’s B. J. Wallace they saw a dominant lefty who threw his fastball in the low to mid-90s and was projected to be a quality number-two big league starter.

Malone did not have a Yankee budget to play with, either. He worried about the possible impact Brien Taylor’s $1.55 million bonus in ’91 would have on Derek Jeter’s asking price in ’92.

Wallace was a safe and comfortable alternative. Montreal’s scouts figured the lefty was only two years away from the majors, tops, so they gambled on the pitcher.

The Expos went against their norm. “Derek Jeter would’ve been our guy; he was our type of draft pick normally,” Malone said. “Derek had all the tools and knew how to use them, and he was the best athlete there. But that was the one year we drafted for a need instead.”

Baltimore was up next at number 4, and this was the one top spot in the draft where Jeter did not fit. The Orioles had their iconic Iron Man at short, Cal Ripken Jr., and they preferred college players to the teenage prom kings. They decided to go with Jeffrey Hammonds.

Baltimore had Jeter rated as the top high school player in the draft, “but I can’t say he was on our radar screen,” said Gary Nickels, an Orioles scout.

Nickels remembered his one trip to Michigan to see Jeter for two reasons: it was the last scouting trip he ever made with his father, who was dying of emphysema; and Derek’s disposition suggested he would be a natural leader of a winning team.

“Jeter had an air of confidence about him,” Nickels said. “A command of the situation.”

That confidence and command had scouts for the Cincinnati Reds in a tizzy. They wanted to use the fifth pick to draft Derek Jeter in the worst way, and they did not know if their scouting director would let them do it.

Julian Mock was preparing to make or break the 1992 draft for his employer, the Reds, and for the team he once worshiped, the Yankees. His three-mile jog complete, his body fresh, and his mind clear, Mock would not open his heart for a single Riverfront Stadium soul.

As the first four picks came off the board that June 1 day, the tension in the Reds’ conference room was thicker than the binders carrying the team’s scouting reports.

Derek Jeter, the next Barry Larkin, was going to be available at number 5, and so was Chad Mottola, the next Dale Murphy.

At six-foot-three, 215 pounds, Mottola could have been featured on the “after” side of a muscle-building ad that pictured Jeter on the “before” side. The Central Florida outfielder was the only player other than Jeter and Phil Nevin whom the Astros seriously considered for the number-one pick.

The Yankees invited Mottola to work out for them as they considered their options for number 6, an invitation that was declined. Mottola told the Yankees he had played sixty games at Central Florida, and that he did not think a workout was necessary since he thought he would be chosen among the first five picks.

“I think the Yankees got offended,” Mottola said.

He did not have an agent; he used his father as an adviser. Before the draft unfolded, a Reds scout negotiated a bonus figure with the Mottolas—$400,000—and waited for Mock to make the final call.

Mock had two respected scouts who thought Jeter was the far better choice, even if he would cost Cincinnati double what Mottola would. A part-timer who lived outside Kalamazoo, Fred Hayes had watched Jeter play some three dozen times, and he loved the kid’s talent as much as the Astros’ Hal Newhouser and the Yanks’ Dick Groch did. Hayes told Gene Bennett, a full-time Cincinnati scout, that Jeter could play for the Reds as a high school sophomore, and he was only half kidding.

Hayes and Bennett first saw Derek in a Muskegon, Michigan, tryout camp. The camp had one hundred kids, Bennett said, “but Derek was the only one who made us say, ‘Who is that guy?’”

Bennett and Hayes eventually sent the other ninety-nine boys home and kept Jeter around for some extra work. Over time they brought him to workouts at Riverfront Stadium, met his parents, and did everything they could to temper their enthusiasm for Jeter in the company of enemy scouts.

It did not matter that the Reds had selected a high school shortstop, Calvin “Pokey” Reese, in the first round of the ’91 draft. “Jeter was a no-brainer for us at number 5,” said Bennett, who had a remarkable track record for the Reds, signing everyone from Don Gullett to Paul O’Neill to Chris Sabo to Larkin.

Hayes had handed Jeter a Reds cap when he joined Bennett and Mock on a predraft visit to the Jeter home, and Hayes and Bennett left believing that Derek would be wearing that cap across his big league career.

“We were sure we were going to get him,” Bennett said. “It was a done deal. He had blazing speed, he was smart, he hit rockets into the Riverfront seats when we had him in as a high school junior. Every single thing Jeter did was special.”

With his team holding the first pick, a pick no team could sabotage, Newhouser did not mind sharing one little secret with Bennett. “No kid is worth a million dollars,” the Houston scout told the Cincinnati scout. “But if one kid is, it’s Derek Jeter.”

Bennett did not need convincing, as he saw Jeter as Larkin’s equal. To those who were concerned about drafting a shortstop when the Reds already had a young All-Star there, Bennett argued that Jeter could play center field and then move to short when Larkin broke down.

Mock wasn’t so sure. Without Larkin, he told himself, Jeter would have been the guy hands down. But Larkin was there, and Mottola had already given a verbal to a price out of a small-market team’s dream, $400,000, a steal at number 5.

Mock had seen Jeter once, and Bennett had pleaded with him to go back a second time and see the shortstop on a healthier ankle. The scouting director never returned to Kalamazoo, other than to meet with Jeter’s parents.

So as Mock gathered with nine or ten other Reds officials in a conference room, gathered around a speakerphone that symbolized the outdated way baseball’s elders conducted the draft (they practically used carrier pigeons to report the results), the guardians of his favorite boyhood team were holding their breath.

In Tampa, Yankees executives were huddled around their own speakerphone inside the Harbor View Room at George Steinbrenner’s Radisson Bay Harbor Hotel. Those executives were feeling good after Bill Livesey, scouting director, made a morning phone call to his peer in Houston, Dan O’Brien, to ask what the Astros were planning to do at number 1.

O’Brien and Livesey shared a mutual respect, so the Houston scouting director told Livesey the truth: he was taking Phil Nevin. Livesey confessed he was hoping Jeter fell to number 6, and before their brief exchange ended, they both agreed the shortstop would develop into an outstanding pro.

Suddenly the outstanding pro-to-be was one pick away, and a wave of great anticipation roared through the Yankee room like a freight train in the night.

As soon as the Orioles made Hammonds official, a voice from the commissioner’s office announced on the speakerphone that the Cincinnati Reds would select next. The Yankees had some twenty officials in their draft room, including regional scouting supervisors, a national cross-checker, Livesey, and Brian Sabean, the vice president for player development and scouting.

Days of mass coffee consumption and passionate debates had taken their toll. Nerves were frayed as the Yankees waited for the sound of Julian Mock’s voice. Club officials were staring blankly at the boards in the front of the room that ranked the prospects by position, from top to bottom.

“We beat up those boards for three or four days,” Livesey said. They kept changing the rankings, erasing names, restoring names, leaving at night, and then returning the next morning to do it all over again.

On draft day, Jeter’s name was atop the list of shortstops, and everyone in the room agreed the Yankees should have and would have taken him had they owned the number-one pick. Livesey ran the strong preference for Jeter by Steinbrenner, which was an odd turn of events.

Commissioner Fay Vincent had banned Steinbrenner for life from the day-to-day operations of the club for paying a gambler, Howie Spira, $40,000 to dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, who happened to be Jeter’s idol. Yet everyone knew the Boss was in full control of a shadow government.

“It’s not like George disappeared by any means,” said David Sussman, the Yankees’ general counsel and chief operating officer. Steinbrenner readily offered his opinions on significant player transactions at quarterly partnership meetings (Vincent had allowed this). “George made it known in those meetings that he still owned the team,” Sussman said.

Steinbrenner also made it known he was not especially fond of paying superstar wages to kids who had not proved a thing. The Boss came down hard on subordinates over the decision to pay Brien Taylor his record-shattering bonus.

But when Livesey ran Jeter up Steinbrenner’s flagpole, assuring his employer the shortstop would be in the majors within four years, the Boss approved.

The Reds were about to make their move, and the Yankees’ hour of reckoning had arrived. “It was a beehive of activity,” Livesey said. “We had a lot of manpower in the room. People on our files, people working the boards, people erasing names, people making calls.”

The Yankees had not been to the playoffs since 1981, and they were in dire need of a break neither Jeter nor his adviser thought they were going to get. Jeter was so sure he was going in the top five, so sure the Reds would take him if the Astros did not, so sure he had no chance of playing for his boyhood team, “I didn’t even know the Yankees picked sixth,” he said. “I thought I was going to Cincinnati and that I’d be stuck behind Larkin.”

Wearing a University of Michigan shirt, Jeter paced about his home as he waited with his family for the call. Out in Sacramento, Caruso gathered with a few aides in his office and stared at the phone. “We were preparing to negotiate a contract with the Reds,” he said.

Paul Morgan, the
Kalamazoo Gazette
sportswriter who had covered Derek’s high school career, was feverishly working his desktop at the newspaper’s offices, hitting his refresh button over and over to get the latest Associated Press bulletins on a draft that was not televised.

Morgan called the Jeters after a couple of picks were made, and when the phone rang Derek jumped out of his chair. With four selections in the books and the Reds ready to go, the sportswriter called back and told the shortstop he would contact him the second the AP posted his name.

Jeter was overwhelmed by the very real possibility he would be selected at number 5. The franchises picking ahead of the Yankees knew of Jeter’s pinstriped preferences, yet that did not shape their decisions. Like the teams that went before them, the Reds merely wanted the best available player at the best possible price.

Finally Julian Mock acted on his mid-jog epiphany. He leaned into the speakerphone and announced the Cincinnati Reds were using the fifth overall choice to take Chad Mottola of the University of Central Florida.

A cheer immediately went up in the Yankee draft room in Tampa, one loud enough to echo across the Bronx. Fists were pumped and backs were slapped. Somehow, some way, Derek Jeter had made it unscathed to the sixth pick.

Morgan called Derek with the news that the Reds had gone for Mottola, and that the Yankees were on deck. “Oh, God,” the kid said. A series of fateful choices—gross miscalculations, some observers believed—left the teenage Jeter holding a winning lottery ticket.

Livesey wasted little time after the voice from the commissioner’s office announced the Yankees were up next. The scouting director turned to Kevin Elfering, the assistant scouting coordinator and director of minor league operations, who was reviewing the large computer printout of prospects’ names before him.

“Jeter,” Livesey said.

Derek Sanderson Jeter.

Elfering found his name on the printout and noted his draft identification number—19921292. Elfering did not have a single thing to do with the scouting of Jeter, but he had the honor of making it official. “All I did,” Elfering said, “was say his name into the phone, Derek Jeter of Kalamazoo Central, and then he was ours.”