The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (8 page)

Just as the commissioner’s office was repeating what Elfering had said, Reds scout Gene Bennett walked into the room where Mock and other officials were gathered. Bennett could not believe his ears.

He heard a voice on the speakerphone say the Yankees had just taken Jeter, compelling the scout to blurt out, “Yeah, and the Cincinnati Reds take Babe Ruth.” Bennett figured someone was pulling his leg, at least until a coworker told him, “Be quiet, we’re on the hookup.”

A sick feeling came over him. Suddenly Bennett realized Mock had actually taken Mottola instead of Jeter, “and I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Without question it was the most disappointing thing that ever happened to me as a scout.”

A prototypical five-tool guy with size, Mottola was thrilled to be a first-round pick, never mind a top-five pick. He took the $400,000 deal with the Reds because he wanted to play baseball, because it sure seemed like a lot of money, and because nobody had projected him as a high draft choice entering his final year of college ball.

But the fourth pick, Hammonds of the Orioles, would sign for $975,000. Even the twenty-fifth selection in that draft, Todd Steverson, scored a bigger bonus than Mottola did—$450,000 from Toronto.

“A big reason the Reds took me was my signability,” Mottola would say. “When you’re that young you think, ‘Four hundred thousand to go in the first round? Great, where do I sign?’ You don’t realize people are trying to take advantage of you.”

The Reds scout who saw Jeter the most, Fred Hayes, was just as devastated as Bennett. Jim Bowden, Cincinnati’s thirty-one-year-old director of player development and a man on the verge of becoming the youngest general manager in baseball history, could not believe Mock had ignored Bennett’s claim that Jeter could develop into a better player than the O’Neills, Sabos, and Larkins he had signed in the past.

Mock was not moved by anyone’s counterarguments. He explained he did not know if Jeter would ever play shortstop for the Reds and figured Jeter might end up getting traded to another club.

“I thought of our needs,” Mock said, “and of the fact I thought we had a superstar in Mottola.”

Before he could do any of that explaining, Morgan was on the phone and speed-dialing the Jeters. The sportswriter knew if he did not get to Derek immediately after the Yankees selected him at number 6, he would never get through.

Morgan even beat the team and Dick Groch to the punch. This time Charles Jeter answered the phone.

“Charles, has he heard yet?” Morgan asked.

“No,” the father answered.

“He’s a Yankee.”

Charles let out a cry of unmitigated joy and immediately handed the phone to his son.

“Derek, you’re going to be a Yankee,” Morgan told him.

“I can’t believe it,” Derek shouted. “I just can’t believe it.”

Morgan heard bedlam breaking out in the background, and the sportswriter let Derek go, knowing the Yankees would be trying to call. Morgan hopped into his car and headed to the Jeter home.

Meanwhile, Sharlee Jeter wrapped her big brother in a hug before her father shook Derek’s hand.

“I’m so proud of you,” Charles shrieked. “New York Yankees. That’s your dream, man!”

It was as if Jeter had willed this to happen. All those years of wearing Yankee shirts and caps and pendants, all those promises to friends, teammates, and teachers that he would grow up to become the shortstop for the world’s most famous ball team—they created some cosmic force too potent for an antiquated draft system to repel.

The dreamer was living the impossible dream, yet one that still required a signature and the rejection of a free education at Michigan.

The Yankees’ Brian Sabean immediately began negotiations with Caruso, a labor relations consultant turned beginner agent who landed Jeter as a client after landing A. J. Hinch, the Oklahoma high school star.

Caruso would come to see Jeter as the second-best teenage prospect he had ever seen, right behind a Miami phenom named Alex Rodriguez. On a strong recommendation from Hinch’s father, Charles Jeter had invited Caruso to Kalamazoo and, over a few slices of pizza, agreed to let him represent his son.

“Then [Scott] Boras showed up at the airport and he was bugging Charles a couple of weeks later,” Caruso said. “Charles, to his credit, wouldn’t let Boras come over because he’d already made a deal with me.”

Caruso would go to bat for Jeter, a client he saw as “a skinny seventeen-year-old who barely said three words,” a client who lived in a home modest enough to greet a visitor with a broken handle on the screen door. That modest existence was about to change in a big six-figure way.

Sabean faxed Caruso an opening offer of $550,000. The agent assured the Yankee executive these negotiations would not be nearly as acrimonious as the Brien Taylor talks but also told him that bid would not get it done.

Caruso wanted to beat the $725,000 bonus Toronto had given the California high school star Shawn Green and his agent, Moorad, the year before. As the faxes and phone calls went back and forth, Jeter phoned the Michigan head coach, Bill Freehan, to seek his counsel. Freehan was in a delicate spot—he wanted Jeter on scholarship in the worst way, but as a former All-Star catcher with the Tigers he understood the lure of the big leagues.

“The kid wanted to go to Michigan,” said Freehan’s assistant, Ace Adams. “No one knows this, but Jeter did not want to sign [with the Yankees]. He wanted to go to Michigan with his girlfriend, and he wanted to play there.”

But the Yankees kept inflating their offer. Derek called the Michigan head coach and said, “Mr. Freehan, what should I do?”

“You’ve got to sign,” Freehan finally told him. “You’re crazy if you don’t.”

Adams was flabbergasted over his boss’s show of integrity and good faith. “I don’t think many college coaches would’ve ever said that,” Adams said, “but Bill was such a classy guy.”

Jeter listened to Freehan. On June 28, 1992, two days after his eighteenth birthday, Jeter signed an $800,000 deal with the Yankees that included a $700,000 bonus (Caruso’s 5 percent cut amounted to $35,000) and enough to cover the full ride to Michigan that Jeter was giving up. His deal at number 6 doubled Mottola’s at number 5 and beat those signed by the top three picks.

Freehan reached out to Adams, who was driving on the New York Thruway and returning from the Cape Cod League when his boss broke the news.

“Derek just signed with the Yankees,” Freehan said.

“Oh, shit,” replied Adams, whose long journey home had just gotten three times longer.

Derek Jeter, who graduated twenty-first in a Kalamazoo Central class of 265, would not be continuing his education at Michigan. Instead, Charles Jeter would take his son to the airport for a flight to Tampa and a spot on the Yankees’ rookie team in the Gulf Coast League.

When Charles took his last look at Derek before he boarded that plane, the father thought the son looked a lot younger than eighteen. After he returned to his car to begin the drive back to his Battle Creek office, Charles began to weep uncontrollably.

“As soon as the plane took off,” Derek would say, “I realized there was no turning back.”

His touchdown in Tampa marked the end of innocence. Derek was not an amateur prospect hobbling around in high-top cleats anymore. He was a corporate asset, a commodity, a highly compensated employee.

Charles did not know if his child was up to handling the transition. And in the first weeks of what was supposed to be a dreamy Yankee life, it became clear Derek Jeter was a boy ill prepared to become a man.

The first high school player selected in the 1992 major league draft had a problem, and a big one:

He wanted to go home to his mother.

Derek Jeter could not hit a professional curve ball or fastball and could not get past the sinking feeling that all his fellow rookies and coaches in Tampa were asking themselves this one question:

How the hell did the New York Yankees make him their number-one pick?

“It was the lowest level of baseball,” Jeter said, “and I was awful.”

Alone in a faraway hotel room in the summer of ’92, a child overwhelmed by grown-up stakes, Jeter could not get a grip on his runaway emotions. So he would call his parents, his sister, his girlfriend, and tell them that he had made a terrible mistake, that he should have taken the four-year scholarship to Michigan.

Sometimes the calls came at 2:00 a.m., long after Charles and Dot and Sharlee had gone to bed. The minute the phone rang they knew Derek had suffered through another dreadful day at the plate, and that he was busy trying to cry himself to sleep.

Night after night after night, Jeter sobbed for relief that would not come. “That was a nightmare,” his father said.

Derek had been a sorry sight on arrival in Tampa, a scarecrow come to life. His ankles were so skinny, his high-tops flapped about even when they were laced as tight as could be.

Jeter would not be allowed to wear high-top cleats in games or practices (Yankee policy prohibited them), another reason he was not comfortable. Derek had never been away from home, outside of his summertime trips to his grandparents’ place in New Jersey.

He was not in Tampa to play catch with Grandma Dot. He was not spending any long afternoons at the Tiedemann castle and splish-splashing around Greenwood Lake on the Yankees’ dime.

The team was laying out $800,000, and the shortstop who was just days removed from his eighteenth birthday was supposed to honor the investment.

“We’re expecting big things from you,” George Steinbrenner told him the day they first met.

“And Derek was scared to death,” said his agent, Steve Caruso.

Derek had his reasons. Finally done with his bonus negotiations, Jeter showed up late to the Class A rookie ball season and late to his first double-header.

“Everyone was looking at me,” Derek would say. “I’m the number-one pick.”

Jeter had felt the same stares bearing down on him while he ate in the dining room at Steinbrenner’s Radisson Bay Harbor Hotel, and they unnerved him. No, he was not even remotely ready to play up to the numbers in his contract.

The same Jeter who struck out once in twenty-three games during his senior season at Kalamazoo Central struck out five times and went 0 for 7 in his first double-header as a pro in Sarasota. Derek faced a knuckleballer in the first game; he had never faced a knuckleballer. Derek faced a pitcher throwing 90 miles per hour in the second game; he had never faced a pitcher who threw so hard.

Barely 160 pounds, Jeter was hopelessly overmatched by the velocity of the pitching and the speed of the game. He made critical errors at shortstop, went hitless in his first fourteen at-bats, and started ringing up monthly phone bills that would approach 400 bucks.

“When you’re in high school,” Derek said, “you can’t wait to get out of the house, be on your own and away from your parents telling you what to do. When you’re down here, you realize you just can’t go back.”

Jeter would step into the batter’s box and think about how many more hellish weeks he had to endure before he could go home. His games were played before a dozen fans, two dozen on a good day. Those games started under a blazing noontime sun so they would be over before the early-evening thunderstorms rolled in.

For once in his life, Jeter yearned for the sleet and snow of a Kalamazoo spring. Gulf Coast League scores and standings were not printed in the paper. Jeter was stuck in a forgotten time and place, and he wanted his parents to save him. He wanted his girlfriend, Marisa Novara, to visit him. He wanted Bill Freehan, the Michigan coach, to reassure him.

“Hang in there,” Freehan told Jeter. “It’s part of the process.”

Derek could not help himself. The mind-numbing sameness of the routine—take early batting practice in the morning, grab something to eat, fail miserably in the game, stay for extra work in the evening, cry your eyes out at night—was wearing him to the nub.

Suddenly the very word banned by his grandfather and mother—
can’t
—was the only word that rolled easily off his tongue. “The first few games,” Jeter said, “I was just swinging at everything. I didn’t have any idea where the ball was going.”

Charles and Dot Jeter headed down to Tampa; Caruso had put a clause in Derek’s contract calling for the Yankees to fly in the shortstop’s parents at the team’s expense. Novara also made a trip.

They told Derek the same things in person they had told him on the phone—everything would work out just fine. Charles reminded his son that an eighteen-year-old Chipper Jones hit .229 in rookie ball before hitting .326 the following season.

At that point in time, Derek would have made any Faustian deal to hit .229, never mind .326. He was melting in the oppressive heat, wasting away to nothing, wishing every solitary hour of every solitary day he was a college Wolverine instead of a professional Yankee.

Jeter’s first official hit in the Yankees’ employ was a bloop over the first baseman’s head in the first game of a double-header. “Everyone was laughing with me,” he said, “and that was a big load off my shoulders.”

Derek went ahead and ripped off two singles in the second game, but his was a temporary refuge. When he showed up for work at the four-field minor league complex, Jeter never let on that he had been crying through the night in his room at Steinbrenner’s hotel. His coaches and teammates did not realize it, and the banned Boss—forever lurking in the shadows—sure did not realize it.

“I had no idea he was that concerned about his ability to play professional baseball,” said his manager, Gary Denbo.

How would he know? Every morning when Denbo arrived at the team’s Hines Avenue complex, next door to the home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Jeter and another eighteen-year-old prospect, Ricky Ledee, picked in the sixteenth round of the 1990 draft, were waiting for him in the picnic area, eager to be the first players in the batting cage.

They would also do extra conditioning after games, when most players had already fled the heat for the comfort of their air-conditioned cars and rooms. And through it all, Jeter wore a mask of clear-eyed determination.