The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (16 page)

“When I rested him a few months ago,” Torre said, “Derek told me, ‘How am I going to catch Cal Ripken?’”

Catch Cal Ripken? Derek Jeter did not know it at the time, but during his first October as the New York Yankees’ starting shortstop, he would not only have a chance to catch Ripken.

He would have a chance to pass him.

Derek Jeter was playing defense in his Yankee Stadium clubhouse, where inquiring minds wanted to know if the rookie had just choked. The Yankees had lost Game 1 of the Division Series to the Texas Rangers, and the shortstop was among the more conspicuous reasons why.

He had popped up with the bases loaded and had left six men on base in the 6–2 defeat. David Cone had been outpitched by John Burkett, but nobody questioned the accomplished veteran’s stomach for the big-game fight.

Jeter was a different story. No matter how composed he appeared during the darkest hours of the divisional race, when the Yankees threatened to give away a twelve-game lead, this was October.

Nothing in August and September can simulate true October angst.

“All I can do is forget about it,” Jeter said at his locker. “You can’t sit here and dwell on it. . . . You’ve got to let it go.”

Only Jeter wasn’t one to let criticism go easily. “People have always doubted me,” he said on the eve of the playoffs. “First, it was I couldn’t stay at shortstop. Then I was from a small town. In the minor leagues, people said I couldn’t hit, I couldn’t field, then I couldn’t hit at the major league level. There are probably still some who doubt me.”

Jeter swore he approached his first playoff game just as he had approached the 157 regular-season games that preceded it, and reporters had a hard time believing it. Asked if he was concerned his shortstop would struggle to keep his cool in the heat of the postseason, Joe Torre had his answer before he left Yankee Stadium for the night.

On his way to the players’ parking lot, done facing tough questions from the press, Jeter poked his head into Torre’s office.

“Make sure you get your sleep tonight,” he told his manager. “Tomorrow is the most important game of your life.”

Torre shook his head and laughed. The kid was going to be all right.

Before Game 2, Torre acknowledged he preferred to lean on his veterans when his seasons were on the brink. “To me, Jeter is different,” he would say. “I’ve been around a lot of young kids and a lot of rookies. He’s done a lot of growing up this year. He doesn’t see the postseason as something different.”

So Jeter honored his manager’s faith and delivered three hits in Game 2, including the decisive one in the twelfth inning. The Rangers held a 4–2 lead in the seventh and had the Yankees in a death grip—Torre’s team could not possibly go to the Ballpark in Arlington, Texas, down 0-2, not after losing five of six regular-season games there while getting outscored by a 44–15 count.

But a Jeter single helped cut the deficit in half, and ultimately a Cecil Fielder RBI single sent the game into extra innings. After the Rangers failed to score with the bases loaded in the top of the twelfth, Jeter led off with another hit, moved to second on Tim Raines’s walk, and then raced for third when Charlie Hayes put down a sacrifice bunt.

Dean Palmer, the Texas third baseman, fielded the ball and fired to first, but his rushed throw bounced in the dirt and skipped past the second baseman who was covering, Mark McLemore.

Jeter headed for home, scored the run that kept the Yankees in the series, and assured reporters once again he did not approach Game 2 any differently than he had Game 1, or Game 98 of the regular season in July.

“If I don’t get a hit, you guys say I’m pressing,” Jeter said. “And if I do get a hit, you guys say I’m not pressing. I felt the same way tonight as I did yesterday, but yesterday I didn’t get any hits and today I did.”

Jeter was back in his element, but that did not mean the Yankees were at ease as they traveled to a place a couple of headline writers described as Arlington Cemetery. The Ballpark threatened to be for the Yankees what Chicago Stadium and the United Center were for the Knicks—a place where New York seasons go to die.

Over a ten-year period, the Yankees were 13-42 in Arlington Stadium and the Ballpark. Billy Martin had one of his many bar fights in Arlington. Bobby Meacham once committed an error in Arlington that so enraged George Steinbrenner, the Boss sent him to Class AA because Class AAA did not represent enough of a demotion.

Years later, Torre decided to inject some confidence into his Texas-bound players by elevating the youngest among them. The manager had so much faith in Jeter entering Game 3, he moved him from the number-nine spot in the order to the leadoff position, where the shortstop had batted thirty-nine times during the regular season. A rookie whose tenth-inning error in a loss to the White Sox only seven weeks earlier had inspired the
New York Post
headline “shortslop” was now charged to lead the Yanks into their not-so-little house of horrors.

Once again, Jeter responded to the manager he had come to see as a second father. He did make a rookie mistake in the field, failing to cover second base on a fifth-inning steal that led to the Rangers’ go-ahead run. But with Texas holding a 2–1 lead in the ninth, Jeter led off with a single to left against Darren Oliver.

Following a single from Raines and a deep fly to right from Bernie Williams, Jeter was home with the tying run. Mariano Duncan drove in what would be the winning run, and the Yankees would play Game 4 with a shot to advance to the American League Championship Series.

Jeter managed a hit and an RBI groundout in that game, beating out a throw to first on what would have been a lethal inning-ending double play. But it was Williams’s two home runs—one from each side of the plate—and spectacular performances from Mariano Rivera, John Wetteland, and the entire bullpen that allowed the Yankees to overcome a 4–0 Texas lead and claim their first postseason series victory since 1981.

Williams was mobbed in the visitors’ clubhouse, sprayed with champagne and beer as his teammates chanted, “MVP . . . MVP.” He had outlasted fellow Puerto Rican slugger Juan Gonzalez, who had five homers in the series but failed in his most critical Game 4 at-bat, allowing David Weathers, of all people, to strike him out with sliders on 3-1 and 3-2 counts, two on and nobody out in the fourth.

Without warning, the placid Bernie had the look of the devil in this series. Williams had come a long, long way from the day he was a clueless teenager in Buck Showalter’s office threatening to return to Puerto Rico if the manager kept insisting he bat left-handed. Showalter responded by promising to call Williams’s father—he knew Bernie was afraid of his father—and that was that.

“I’m like a volcano,” Williams said after eliminating the Rangers. “You can’t always see it, but I’m emotional.”

The same held true for Jeter, the stoic fueled by the hidden flame within. He went from being a prime bum-of-the-month candidate after Game 1 to a budding Mr. October after Game 4.

Jeter batted .412 in the Division Series and now faced a best-of-seven showdown with the Orioles and their living legend at short. Right after the All-Star break, Jeter was the one who hit the shot heard ’round the American League East, breaking a 2–2 eighth-inning tie with a two-run homer off Mike Mussina that set up a four-game sweep at Camden Yards.

The Yankees left town with a ten-game divisional lead that so unnerved Baltimore’s manager, Davey Johnson, he finally emasculated the Iron Man, Cal Ripken Jr., and inserted Manny Alexander at short. Ripken brooded at third base, Alexander went hitless in seventeen of his eighteen at-bats over six games, and the experiment died a quick and painful death.

The old man was moved back to short, and if he was a fading star in the field, he still had a presence at the plate. Ripken was still Ripken, and Jeter was still uncomfortable taking up space in the same paragraph.

“I haven’t played a full year yet, so putting me there with Cal Ripken is ridiculous,” Jeter said. “It’s like he’s the teacher and everyone else is the student.”

Ripken remained a powerful force on a team that belted more home runs (257) than the ’61 Yankees or any other club in the history of the game. At thirty-six, Ripken had managed 26 homers and 102 RBI. He had hit .345 against the Yanks in the regular season, and .444 against the Indians in the Division Series.

The standings said none of that mattered. New York had beaten the Orioles ten times in thirteen attempts and had gone 6-0 in Camden Yards, reducing them to an unwashed wild card.

“Secretly,” Ripken said, “I’ve been hoping for another matchup against New York.”

His double-play partner was hoping for something else. Roberto Alomar spat in the face of an umpire, John Hirschbeck, during a confrontation on September 27, and he knew Yankee fans would remind him at every turn. But outside of Alomar and Bobby Bonilla, a holdover villain from the other side of the Triborough Bridge, the Orioles were happy to be alive in the Bronx.

“I think it was fated,” said Johnson, who had won it all with the ’86 Mets. “I think this was meant to be.”

Fate? Destiny? Playoff teams in all sports throw around those words as easily as they throw around used towels in a locker room. But in the first game of the last playoff series the great Ripken would play at shortstop, fate and destiny would collide near Yankee Stadium’s right-field wall.

Derek Jeter put the ball in the air. Nobody knew it at the time, but one of Jeter’s idols, Cal Ripken Jr. himself, helped put the twelve-year-old boy in the stands who would deflect that ball into history.

Eric Saland was a Yankee fan raised in Poughkeepsie, New York, a Mickey Mantle fan who went to eight or nine home games a year. So he was thrilled to be holding a ticket to Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series between the Yankees and Orioles, scheduled to be played in the Bronx on October 8.

Saland and his son, Matthew, were all set to join another Bergen County, New Jersey family, the Altmans, in Yankee Stadium’s right-field seats. Bob Altman did not buy the tickets for $175 a pop because he was a Yankee fan; he bought them because his son, Brian, had been a Cal Ripken Jr. fan since he was a second grader.

Brian was riveted by Ripken’s Iron Man streak of consecutive games played, and he started collecting the shortstop’s baseball card. But it was Ripken’s simple act of kindness that made Brian a fan for life and set in motion a series of events that, three years later, turned the ALCS upside down and left Jeter the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Brian was nine when his mother, Fern, had a sporting goods store make up an orange T-shirt with Ripken’s name and number, 8, printed in white lettering. Her son would wear it as part of a Halloween costume made complete by eyeblack and an Orioles cap. The following year, with the Orioles in town and the Altmans holding tickets, Brian dug up the T-shirt and threw it on for the ride into the Bronx.

Bob Altman was working for Mike Bloomberg at the time, and one of the company’s vendors had supplied him with seats near the Baltimore dugout. The Altmans arrived early enough to watch batting practice, along with dozens of fellow fans screaming in vain for Ripken’s attention.

“Turn around for a minute,” Bob ordered his son.

“Why?” Brian said.

“Just trust me.”

Brian turned his back toward the batting cage, and in a fleeting moment of quiet that separated one thwack of the bat from the next, his father shouted, “Hey, Cal, check out the jersey.”

Ripken actually looked over, smiled, and started heading straight for the Altmans. Brian’s jaw dropped to his toes as the Iron Man locked his steel-blue eyes on him, this anonymous boy in his orange Halloween shirt.

Other kids buzzed about Brian as Ripken moved toward the railing, but the ballplayer barely noticed. “I was really nervous,” Brian said. “This was my hero approaching.”

Brian was speechless and shaking. He did not know what to do, other than hold out the ball he was carrying in his hand. “I’ll sign your ball,” Ripken told him, “but first let me shake your hand.”

The boy and the ballplayer shook hands; Ripken signed the ball and jogged back to the batting cage while the other young fans begged in vain for him to return.

Right then and there, Brian Altman made a decision. He would not be embracing his family’s allegiance to the Mets anytime soon. He would remain an Orioles fan, at least until the day Cal Ripken Jr. retired.

Three years later, despite his brief demotion to third base, Ripken had no intention of retiring. He had every intention of beating the Yankees in the ALCS and returning to the World Series for the first time since the Orioles won the title in 1983. Brian Altman had every intention of watching him try.

So his father scored the five Game 1 tickets, kept three for the family, and gave two to Brian’s friend Matthew Saland and his father, Eric, who was looking forward to the night out as much as his son.

But just Eric Saland’s luck, the rains came and turned an 8:00 p.m. Game 1 on October 8 into a 4:00 p.m. Game 1 on October 9. Eric worked in the trucking industry, and he had commitments in Hackensack, New Jersey that day. Eric pleaded with his supervisor to let him go to the game, but the man would not budge. They needed to make sure their outbound freight made it out, the boss explained, and Eric was some kind of pissed off.

The Salands had to return one ticket to the Altmans, who suddenly had a big decision to make that night in their Harrington Park, New Jersey home. Who should fill that fifth and final seat in the right-field stands?

The Altmans quickly agreed on the perfect candidate, a good friend of Brian’s. Fern had met the boy’s mother at the George Street playground and pond in Harrington Park, back when their children were two years old. They started talking, hit it off, and the families grew close. So ten years later, the Altmans decided Brian’s twelve-year-old buddy deserved the first shot at the last Game 1 ticket. They placed the call to nearby Old Tappan.

They had Jeffrey Maier at hello.

The Altmans had already given Jeffrey his bar mitzvah gift the previous weekend, when the Maier party at the Pearl River Hilton was built around a World Series theme. They decided Jeffrey was a good enough kid, and a big enough Yankee fan, to deserve this second gift.