The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (12 page)

The word was out, and the Hall of Fame likes of Reggie Jackson were moved to watch Jeter in person. “But every time I went to see him,” Jackson said, “he was already gone to the next level. I couldn’t catch up to him.”

Big league teams kept calling Yankees general manager Gene “Stick” Michael to see if Jeter was available. “Stick had to say no so many times it was ridiculous,” said his assistant, Brian Cashman. “He was frustrated as hell. It was like, ‘NO, I’M NOT TRADING DEREK JETER.’”

Jeter appeared ninety feet away from the majors, maybe less, when he arrived back in Greensboro with Long in December of ’94, with baseball locked in the death grip of a strike that had killed off the World Series. The former Hornets were returning to attend Earl Clary’s annual Christmas bash, and Clary picked them up at the airport.

“Hey, Jeet,” Big Earl said, “you seen
SportsCenter
yet?”

“What do you mean?” Jeter responded.

“Well, the Yankees signed Tony Fernandez.”

“Oh, yeah, Stick called me today and told me. That’s OK. If I don’t play for the Yankees soon, I’ll call Steve Fisher. I’ll go play college basketball and I’ll quit baseball.”

Clary laughed over the thought of Jeter replacing Jalen Rose in Fisher’s Michigan backcourt and following up the Wolverines’ Fab Five act.

“Jeet might’ve been joking,” Clary said, “but he sure didn’t sound like he was joking.”

Baseball’s labor war ended and Jeter started the 1995 season dead serious about landing in the Bronx for keeps. R. D. Long? He had stolen 37 bases for Tampa in ’94 and was hoping to advance all the way to Class AAA Columbus the way his buddy had the year before.

Even as a thirty-eighth-round draft choice, Long was frustrated by his failed attempt to keep pace with Jeter. He had made tremendous strides in his game, earning a mention in
Baseball America
as a sleeper prospect to watch, but he was best known in Yankeedom as Jeter’s good bud.

In 1995, Long was telling teammates that Jeter would become the highest-paid player in baseball, and that he would win more than one championship for George Steinbrenner. Not everyone was so convinced Jeter would end up as a multimillionaire or as a multichampion.

As late as 1995, some veteran baseball observers still were not sure he would even make a successful major league shortstop. “I wrote him up as being a third baseman, not no goddamn shortstop,” said Ron Washington, the former big league shortstop who was a coach with the Mets’ Class AAA affiliate in Norfolk, Virginia, when he evaluated Jeter.

“He used to go to his knees and catch balls. . . . But at the plate, Derek still had that winning aura about him.”

That aura served Jeter well on the morning of May 28, 1995. With the Yankees’ Fernandez down with a pulled rib cage muscle and with Kevin Elster hitting .118, Jeter got his first chance to make a fool out of Washington and a prophet out of Long.

His Columbus manager, Bill Evers, his first manager in Greensboro, called Jeter in his hotel room around 6:00 a.m.

“Put some water on your face and I’ll be in your room in a minute,” Evers said.

A terrible thought consumed Jeter’s sleep-deprived brain. After reading all the trade rumors, after hearing the year before that he might get sent to the Marlins for Bryan Harvey, Jeter thought he had finally been dealt.

“I thought I was done,” he said.

Evers knocked on his player’s door, and Derek answered.

“Congratulations,” the manager said. “You’re going to the big leagues.”

Jeter was stunned. He thought it might be a cruel practical joke, but Evers assured him Yankees manager Buck Showalter needed him to report to Seattle immediately.

Derek called home. “I’m out of here,” he shouted to his father, Charles, the old middle infielder out of Fisk University who had been overlooked by the scouts.

“I’m going to the big leagues.”

Derek packed his .354 Columbus batting average and headed for the Kingdome; Charles rose at 3:00 a.m. in Kalamazoo the next morning and headed west himself, while Dot stayed back to watch Sharlee’s softball game.

Jeter found jersey number 2 waiting for him at his locker and was hit by the historical significance—the single-digit numbers were reserved for the Ruths and Gehrigs, the Mantles and DiMaggios.

Showalter threw him into the starting lineup, threw the twenty-year-old into the same infield as Don Mattingly and Wade Boggs. On May 29, 1995, Charles Jeter was among the 18,948 Kingdome fans watching as Derek went 0 for 5 and struck out in the eleventh inning with two outs and his friend Gerald Williams, representing the go-ahead run, on third. After the 8–7 loss, Derek and Charles could not find a restaurant that was still open and settled for McDonald’s. Father and son were living the dream over Big Macs and fries.

The following night, with Seattle’s Tim Belcher on the mound, Jeter struck out in his first at-bat before digging in for his second. This time Belcher threw a splitter that Jeter ripped through the left side of the infield.

Derek rounded first and felt an overwhelming sense of relief. An 0-for-6 start that felt like a biblical drought was finally over. When Jeter returned to the bag, Seattle first baseman Tino Martinez sized up the Yankee rookie and figured he looked about twelve years old.

Martinez was kind enough to add a gentle touch to the Little Leaguer’s big league moment.

“Congratulations,” he told Jeter.

“That’s the first of many to come.”

Joe Torre was sitting in what was supposed to be Buck Showalter’s chair, engaged in the most critical meeting of his new Yankee life. Torre had been fired by the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals, and his fourth time around was already being interrupted by a crisis of Defcon 1 angst.

George Steinbrenner worried that Derek Jeter was not ready to be a full-time Yankee at short.

The banned Boss had been reinstated by Commissioner Bud Selig in 1993, and he had long reinforced his own ideas on law and order. In the wake of his team’s epic five-game playoff loss to Seattle in October of ’95, the old shipbuilder had turned his ocean liner upside down, nudging the captain, Don Mattingly, into retirement, forcing out Showalter and his coaches, and replacing general manager Gene Michael with Bob Watson.

Steinbrenner fired his PR man, Rob Butcher, for having the nerve to go home for the Christmas holiday. Steinbrenner sacked Bill Livesey, the man who had drafted Jeter, and other minor league and development officials for allegedly failing to identify and develop enough winning prospects.

The Boss was no longer a diminished threat, sneaking around the edges of the commissioner’s ban. The liberated Steinbrenner had been a tsunami of negative energy since Game 5 in the Kingdome, a game he spent trashing Showalter and praising his former player, manager, and GM, Seattle’s Lou Piniella, in the visiting owner’s suite.

It did not matter that the Yankees had not reached the postseason since 1981, or that they had rallied late in the year to earn the first American League wild card awarded under a newfangled playoff format. It did not matter that this Yankees-Mariners series was helping to win back baseball fans who had sworn off the sport after the players’ strike wiped out the ’94 World Series.

Once an assistant football coach at Northwestern and Purdue, Steinbrenner preferred an up-the-gut, cloud-of-dust managing style best suited to a Big Ten Saturday in the fall. He was never comfortable with Showalter’s cerebral and detailed approach. At his core, Steinbrenner loved the passion and fire of the Billy Martins and Piniellas, no matter how often he fired them.

So during Game 5 in the Kingdome, Showalter was the easiest tackling dummy to hit.

“It was a combination of George second-guessing everything Buck was doing and elevating everything Lou was doing,” said David Sussman, the Yankees’ general counsel and COO who was seated next to Steinbrenner. “George’s consistent theme was ‘Our guy can’t hold a candle to Lou. Lou is a much more experienced manager than our guy. This kid Buck doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ It was very painful to listen to.”

Steinbrenner actually showed a little humanity following the brutal eleven-inning loss, planting himself in a folding chair opposite a devastated Mattingly and whispering to the same first baseman who believed his owner had used the tabloids to run him out of town.

When reporters made their way toward Mattingly’s locker, Steinbrenner got up, grabbed his captain around the neck with both hands, and squeezed. Mattingly was on the verge of tears—his one and only postseason appearance went down as a classic he could not win.

“It felt like a war out there,” Mattingly said.

Showalter had been sobbing in his office, knowing he had likely managed his last game as a Yankee, when the man who wanted to fire him was consoling players in the clubhouse.

“We lost this series,” Steinbrenner told the team, “but you guys played hard. We’re ready to go. We’re ready to start winning.”

Some Yankee veterans who knew the Boss to be a terrible sport were shocked at what they were hearing. “For Mr. Steinbrenner to say that, as much as he hated to lose,” Pat Kelly said, “that meant a lot to us.”

The flight home felt like it was fifteen hours long, with the dead-silent coaches and front-office officials projecting a sense of doom and gloom in the front of the plane. David Cone, who valiantly threw 147 pitches in the Game 5 defeat, was feeling an intense pain in his right arm at thirty thousand feet. He could not even lift that arm, and he was thinking he would not have been able to make another postseason start had the Yankees advanced.

But in the back of the plane, some Yankees were playing cards, listening to music, and exchanging banter as if they had just finished losing some garden-variety series to the Mariners in the middle of May.

“It kind of surprised me,” Sussman said. “I felt like it was inappropriate to be doing that.”

Dramatic changes were on deck, highlighted by the stormy departure of Showalter, who refused to sacrifice the coaches Steinbrenner wanted him to dump. A Steinbrenner aide, Arthur Richman, gave the Boss a list of possible replacements that included Sparky Anderson, Tony La Russa, Davey Johnson, and Joe Torre.

Even before the Yankees were eliminated by Seattle, Showalter’s coaches knew this list and this day were coming. Only minutes after the Yankees clinched the wild card at the end of their strike-shortened season in Toronto, Steinbrenner barreled into the coaches’ office and declared, “If you don’t go to the World Series, you’re all fuckin’ gone.”

“Yeah, like we didn’t already know that,” a fading voice responded from the back of the room.

So Steinbrenner had his list of four, and it would be quickly whittled to one. Anderson chose retirement, La Russa chose the Cardinals, and Johnson chose the Orioles.

That left the Boss to choose Torre, an agreeable fifty-five-year-old Brooklynite who arrived in the Bronx with a career record of 894-1,003 and this unwanted distinction: he had played and managed in more games without reaching the World Series than any big leaguer dead or alive. A former catcher, first baseman, and third baseman, Torre had been a nine-time All-Star and, in 1971, the National League’s MVP with the Cardinals.

But he had never reached the postseason as a player and had never won a single playoff game as a manager. It was such a tough sell to the public—Showalter had won 54 percent of his games; Torre, 47 percent—that Steinbrenner did not attend the November 2, 1995, news conference to introduce his man.

“Bob [Watson] and I are going to decide the baseball side of the situation,” Torre said that day. “Until I see otherwise, I have no reason to think otherwise.”

Steinbrenner thought otherwise the next morning, when he rose to a
New York Daily News
back page that read “
C
L
U
E
L
E
S
S
J
O
E
.” The Boss called the aide who had recommended Torre, Arthur Richman, and screamed louder than that headline.

“What the hell have you gotten me into?” the Boss barked. Within days, Jack Curry of the
New York Times
reported, Steinbrenner showed up at Showalter’s Pensacola, Florida, door and offered his not-so-dearly-departed manager a chance to replace Torre and bring back his entire coaching staff.

“I had two different contracts offered to me,” Showalter would say, “one before they hired Torre and one after they hired Torre. They were going to make [Torre] president of the club.”

Only Showalter would not be Steinbrenner’s new-age Billy Martin. He had a handshake agreement with Jerry Colangelo to manage a concept known as the Arizona Diamondbacks, and he did not think an immediate return to the Bronx would be fair to Torre. So Showalter settled in the desert and announced to one reporter that his 1994 Yankees would have won the World Series if not for the strike.

Showalter had no such excuse for 1995. The experience of watching the Game 5 loss to the Mariners on videotape? “It’s like watching
Brian’s Song
with the lights off,” Showalter said.

But now the burdens of managing George Steinbrenner’s Yankees belonged to Torre, and with the start of the ’96 season closing hard, the Boss and one of his most trusted advisers, Clyde King, were in Torre’s office asking if Derek Jeter should be benched.

Actually, Steinbrenner was doing the asking, and King was doing the recommending. This was after the veteran Tony Fernandez had fractured his right elbow diving for a spring training ball in a game at the Yankees’ shiny new facility in Tampa, Legends Field. A four-time All-Star at short, Fernandez was set to start at second base to make room for Jeter, and he was not happy about it. In fact, he had requested a trade.

That request had become moot. On the very day Fernandez got hurt, Jeter made two errors, including one on a throw to Fernandez two pitches before the second baseman got hurt. Jeter was struggling; he called his own spring training performance “terrible.”

Sight unseen, acting on the organization’s desire, Torre had reluctantly anointed Jeter his starter at short over the winter, at least until the rookie amended the statement to say the manager was merely giving him an opportunity to earn the starting job. “He said it better than I did,” Torre conceded.