The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (21 page)

So it was fully expected that Torre would face the kind of win-or-else mandate that came with one of those fat Steinbrenner paychecks. “When I was a football coach at Northwestern,” the Boss said, “we had no materials and couldn’t do a thing. When I was at Purdue we had Lenny Dawson, other horses, and we won.

“Now we’ve given Joe Torre the horses.”

Steinbrenner said that he did not want Torre to feel any pressure, that their relationship might be the best he ever had with a manager. But the Boss also maintained he had never worked harder to put together a roster, a clear message he expected that hard work to be honored.

Steinbrenner also went public with the unnecessary reminder that he had pulled the thrice-fired Torre from the scrap heap. “When we hired Joe,” the Boss said, “everyone said, ‘What the hell are you doing? This guy’s a loser.’”

If that comment did not dent Torre’s faith in himself, Steinbrenner’s guarantee that his manager would remain gainfully employed for the entire season—regardless of the Yanks’ record—did not comfort him, either.

Torre understood Steinbrenner’s terms of engagement. After getting eliminated in the first round of the playoffs, Torre knew only a second title in three years would ensure his return for the 1999 season.

“At least when you get fired here,” the manager said, “you had a chance to win. When I got fired in St. Louis, I was told I needed to do more of this and that. Of course, it came down to the fact we didn’t have the team. That bothered me. Here, you’re going to get a better-than-honest chance because George isn’t playing for second place.”

Torre looked around his clubhouse and liked what he saw. By and large, the malcontents were going, going, gone, including Gooden, who trashed Torre on exit. Chili Davis was a likable addition and a powerful force from both sides of the plate. Knoblauch added an element of speed to a franchise often lacking it.

Torre was concerned about his starting pitching, even though he rejoiced over the subtraction of Rogers. David Cone, David Wells, and Andy Pettitte gave him a formidable top three, but Ramiro Mendoza was not a proven starter and the acclaimed Japanese pitcher acquired in a trade with San Diego, Hideki Irabu, was a proven pain in the ass.

Irabu did nothing to ease Torre’s concerns about him or the Yankees’ $12.8 million investment in him when the pitcher confronted a Japanese cameraman for the crime of shooting video of him, stomped on the man’s foot, and seized and destroyed his tape.

“You can take that up with the gossip writers,” an annoyed Torre told reporters.

Only the gossip writers had not come to Tampa to write about the overweight, overheated, and overrated Hideki Irabu.

They had come to write about Derek Jeter and Mariah Carey.

The first reports of their romance had surfaced the year before, around the time Carey split from her much older husband, Tommy Mottola, the Sony Music Entertainment president who discovered her. Jeter denied those initial reports, saying, “Man, I’m supposed to be dating everybody. First it was Tyra Banks. Now it’s Mariah Carey.”

Now that Carey was sitting in the Legends Field stands, fresh off her quickie Caribbean divorce of Mottola, there was no denying it anymore.

Jeter had done it again. As a child he had predicted he would grow up to become the shortstop of the New York Yankees, and talent and luck conspired to make it happen. As a teenager he had predicted he would marry Mariah Carey, and his fame and fortune and looks put him in play to become the songbird’s second spouse.

Like Jeter, Carey was the child of an African-American father and Irish-American mother. But her parents went through a bitter divorce when she was three. Mariah was raised by her mother in Huntington, New York, where she said she “grew up with nothing.” She encountered the same racism Jeter faced in his Kalamazoo youth, and she said she felt like an outcast in high school.

“So when I saw how great [Jeter’s] family was,” Carey would say, “it gave me hope. I realized that I was blaming all the problems of my life on growing up biracial. Derek’s family functioned great as a unit, and I’d never seen that before. I looked at Derek, and it changed my perception.”

They were very much a spring training item, and back in Kalamazoo, Jeter’s old friends and teammates could not get over the news. “It was unbelievable,” said Chad Casserly, one summer league teammate who had heard Jeter predict he would wed Carey. “Everything Derek said he’d do he followed through on.”

Only he had not married Mariah just yet. Jeter and Carey were seen in Tampa restaurants, seen leaving Legends Field arm in arm. They had so much in common—they were young, biracial, and blessed with gifts that captivated millions. The shortstop and the songbird were falling in love, and Jeter found it hard to believe.

He used to sing Mariah’s hits on minor league buses, and here she was showing up to watch Jeter perform on his stage. She would sign autographs between innings, spend a little time in the players’ family lounge, and join Jeter for a dinner with Tino and Marie Martinez.

Naturally, a curious public wanted to know if the relationship had staying power. “Baseball is baseball and my personal life is separate from that,” Jeter said. “I don’t talk about that stuff.”

Only it was not that simple. The
New York Post
was about to report that Jeter and Carey were getting married, and the
Post
’s new Yankee beat writer, George King, drew the assignment of asking the shortstop for a confirmation.

Jeter angrily denied the story. “I am not getting married,” he said. He also reportedly rebuked a teammate who was teasing him about Carey before a spring training game in Clearwater.

Mariah-mania was taking its toll; the shortstop did not want to talk about his fantasy girl with his teammates or the press. “I’m here to answer baseball questions,” Jeter said. “Nobody asks Tim Raines where he ate with his wife last night.”

Nobody cared where Mr. and Mrs. Raines went to dinner, other than Mr. and Mrs. Raines. But Derek and Mariah represented the most fascinating Yankee romance since DiMaggio and Monroe.

Jeter was no longer the semi-famous rookie walking through New Jersey’s Garden State Plaza, trying and failing to pick up an attractive brunette who did not recognize him and who told him she was not interested (to his credit, Jeter never told the woman he was a Yankee).

He had become a full-blown international celebrity, something he never desired. “That’s the reason why I never want to talk about it,” Jeter would say. “They say I’ve bought a ring. They have us getting married on an off day. It doesn’t matter what I say. People start making stuff up out of the blue and write whatever they want.

“I am not engaged. I am not getting married.”

Carey did what she could to help out her boyfriend. “There is no engagement,” she said. “There is no ring.”

Before Jeter pursued a ring of a different kind—his second championship ring—he had gotten a taste of transcendent celebrity, and he despised it. Carey? She was a blossoming diva who thrived on the fuss.

Steinbrenner was concerned his shortstop might take his eye off the ball while dating one of the few young performers in America who had a bigger and more passionate following than he did, and those fears were unfounded.

Jeter had bought a place in Tampa to put in extra conditioning work at the team’s facilities, and he was known to have a commitment to excellence matched only by Steinbrenner’s. His cage work and tee work were supplemented by years of fielding drills with a small Rawlings training glove he loathed, a glove Yankee instructor and minor league manager Trey Hillman forced him to use.

“He’d get all bent out of shape when I made him put it on,” Hillman said. “The whole point was to try to get him to flex at the knees a bit more because his frame is so tall. He never did flex as much as I wanted him to, but he made the adjustments he needed to make, anyway.”

Jeter started the 1998 season on a mission to right the individual and team wrongs of 1997, and to silence the growing chorus of voices suggesting he was the overhyped product of his market, uniform, and looks. Popular opinion had Jeter behind Alex Rodriguez and Boston’s breakout star, Nomar Garciaparra, on any credible ranking of AL shortstops.

The Yankees gave him a bigger 1998 salary than they had to, anyway. Like Mariano Rivera, a third-year player eligible for arbitration in year four, Jeter took the $750,000—a bump from his $550,000 salary in ’97—and went about his business.

Jeter had already hoped to be working on a multiyear contract. According to Ray Negron, a longtime Steinbrenner aide, Jeter approached him the previous spring in Tampa with this request:

“Can you talk to Mr. Steinbrenner about giving me a five-year contract?”

Negron did just that. Steinbrenner laughed and told Negron to have Jeter see him after a luncheon the following day. The shortstop and owner took a short walk with Negron.

“Derek, I could take advantage of you and sign you to a long-term contract,” Steinbrenner told Jeter. “But I’m not going to do that to you because you’re going to make a hell of a lot more money than you would in the contract I’d give you now. I’m not going to do that to you. You don’t realize how much is ahead and how much money you’re going to make.”

“I understand. I understand,” Jeter responded.

“Trust me,” the Boss said. “I’m going to do the right thing by you.”

No, Steinbrenner was not the same owner who wondered if the rookie Jeter could start for his team. Despite his concerns over Mariah-mania and the disappointments of the previous season, the Boss realized Jeter was a franchise cornerstone, a Yankee out of central casting.

So off went Jeter, Steinbrenner, and the rest of the New York Yankees on a journey unlike any in team history. Steinbrenner had signed a Cuban defector, Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, to fortify his slightly suspect pitching staff, and he had in Knoblauch, Jeter, Paul O’Neill, Williams, Martinez, and Davis a top six in the order that would unnerve any opposing team’s ace.

Yes, George Steinbrenner had given Joe Torre the horses. Lots and lots of horses.

But when they got out of the gate 1-4 on the West Coast, Steinbrenner forgot all about his declaration that his manager would be safe for the year, regardless of his record. Before the season started, the owner jokingly asked Torre if any team had gone 162-0.

Steinbrenner was not joking anymore. Naturally, the crushing Division Series defeat in Cleveland the previous fall had changed his relationship with Torre. So when the manager dropped the ’98 season opener in Anaheim, nobody was surprised when the Boss complained to
Newsday
’s Jon Heyman, “We’re behind the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in our division right now.”

Three more losses over the next four games, compounded by Rivera’s groin injury and Davis’s ankle injury, locked the Yankees inside another crisis. Torre did not need Steinbrenner to announce he was in trouble; he had been fired enough to know the feeling. He did not need to see the walls closing in on him to know that they were.

But then his Yankees scored six runs in their very next inning, beat the Mariners by a 13–7 count, and suddenly the team Steinbrenner thought should win 162 games started looking like one that would win 100.

The Yanks ripped off eight straight, fourteen of fifteen, and twenty-five of twenty-eight. Jeter was batting .319, still seeing Mariah, and still impressing the older veterans with his ability to make a brutally difficult game look like so much fun.

Jeter’s Yankees were majoring in fun. On May 17, before a Bronx crowd of 49,820, David Wells—a more imperfect man than Don Larsen could ever be—threw the second perfect game in franchise history, beating the Twins by a 4–0 count.

Jorge Posada, who was supplanting Joe Girardi at catcher, solidified his presence behind the plate; the disagreeable Wells shook him off only twice. Chuck Knoblauch, who was raising concerns about his alleged Gold Glove defense with his erratic arm, made the most conspicuous history-preserving play when he knocked down Ron Coomer’s short-hop liner with a backhand in the eighth and made a sound throw to first.

The 1998 Yankees had declared themselves: at every turn they would try to expand the boundaries of human achievement. Would the Yankees win more games in 162 attempts than the ’27 Yankees won in 154 (110)? Would they win more games than the 1906 Cubs, who held the record at 116-36?

Only this much was certain at the halfway point, with the Yanks at an all-time best 61-20: they thought their B lineup was as good as their A lineup. Strawberry and Raines came off the bench, as did Homer Bush, who electrified the home crowd with his speed and his .380 batting average as Knoblauch’s backup.

Among the new acquisition starters, Knoblauch was not what he had been in Minnesota, but he was good enough. Scott Brosius was a much stronger hitter in the Bronx than he had been in Oakland; he was a Clark Kent using the Yankee clubhouse as his phone booth. And the mystery man, El Duque, who claimed to have escaped Cuba on a leaky raft, combined with Wells, Cone, and Pettitte to give Torre four starters who would have been worthy aces on most staffs.

“But Derek was the centerpiece of the entire team,” Cone said. “We took on his persona, which was to show up and win the game no matter what happened the day before. We never changed who we were, no matter how many games in a row we won, and a lot of that was Derek’s personality.

“He was more of a leader than anyone knew. We had a relentless nature where nobody gave away an at-bat no matter what the score was, and that’s who Derek was.”

Jeter missed a dozen games in June with a strained abdominal muscle and still was named an All-Star for the first time, an honor that hardened his standing as a team leader at the age of twenty-four.

He was able to maintain a dignified presence while lightening the clubhouse load with his boyish energy. Jeter would tell Teammate A that Teammate B was ragging on him, almost always when Teammate B had done no such thing. Jeter freely traded playful insults with thirty-eight-year-old Raines, their routine open for all to hear, and veterans often credited the shortstop’s approach for relieving the pressure as the victories and expectations mounted.