The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (22 page)

“Derek’s so much more colorful inside the locker room than he is out on the field,” said O’Neill, “and over the course of the year our team needed that.”

O’Neill needed it as much as anyone. Beaten down by Lou Piniella in Cincinnati, tortured by his own expectations, the right fielder was forever slamming down helmets, throwing bats, and cursing the fates. O’Neill could not see a 4-for-5 day at the plate as anything other than a lost opportunity to go 5 for 5.

Like Jeter, O’Neill was angered when removed from the lineup and given a day off. Unlike the shortstop, the right fielder often ripped his manager to a coach when it happened.

In the pre-Torre days, O’Neill would be standing next to Brian Butterfield in the outfield when Buck Showalter approached with the grim pregame news. “Here comes that stumpy little fuck to give me his bullshit on why I’m not playing,” O’Neill would tell Butterfield.

Showalter forgave him; he knew O’Neill’s inner flame burned hotter than most. The right fielder remained the same brooding, tightly wound creature under Torre, but Torre had help his predecessor did not have, help in the soothing form of Derek Jeter.

“I never played with anybody who was able to do a photo shoot in the morning and be locked in to play at seven o’clock like Derek could,” O’Neill said. “He amazed me.”

Surely, subtly, Jeter grabbed his team by the throat. But the Yankees did not revolve only around Jeter; they revolved around his bond with Torre, who saw his shortstop the way John Wooden always saw his point guard—as a coach on the floor.

“Jeet believed in Joe’s way,” said Mike Borzello, the Yankees’ bullpen catcher and Torre’s godson, “and everyone kind of felt, ‘If Jeet believes in it, we have to believe in it.’

“Jeet and Joe were both positive thinkers, they didn’t overreact to anything, and they didn’t show their emotions until the very end. It was a perfect marriage.”

If the Yankees needed a buffer between manager and clubhouse, Jeter assumed the role. It made sense. Jeter always saw himself as a unifier, as someone who could reach different people because of his biracial roots. Given that he always had white and black friends, and always had people believing he was Hispanic or Italian or Jewish or French, Jeter said, “I think I can relate to everyone.”

He related to the manager better than any fellow Yankee. Mike Buddie, once a Class A pitcher with Jeter in Greensboro, finally made it to the Bronx in ’98 and saw veterans such as Raines, Martinez, and Knoblauch go to Jeter with matters they did not want to take straight to Torre.

Buddie saw two undisputed leaders in the clubhouse—Cone for the pitchers, Jeter for the position players. “And Derek brings out a humanity in managers that makes everybody more comfortable with them,” Buddie said.

“Derek can be goofing around with Joe Torre, and instead of gasping and saying, ‘Oh, my God, that’s Joe Torre,’ you’re thinking, ‘I can’t believe Jeter just taped his shoes together.’ Derek keeps everybody loose and honest.”

Back in Greensboro, Buddie had been a college player out of Wake Forest four years older than Jeter, and he had been among the team leaders who made sure to include the teenager in almost everything they did.

By ’98, Derek Jeter was famous enough to make the cover of
GQ
. His fan mail could practically fill the entire clubhouse if he let it go for a month. And yet with Buddie trying to keep his mouth shut and stay out of a juggernaut’s way, Jeter returned his bygone favor and—without patronizing the spare-part pitcher—made Buddie feel as welcome in the clubhouse and at nightspots as Pettitte or Cone.

After the ’98 home opener, Buddie and his wife were celebrating his first appearance in Yankee Stadium and his first major league victory when Jeter’s parents approached. Charles and Dot told Buddie they were so proud of him and greeted his wife, Traci, by name.

“They hadn’t seen us in years, their son’s become Derek Jeter, and they even remembered my wife’s name,” Buddie said. “That explains why Derek’s so likable, the way he was raised.”

In August, Jeter became the first Yankee to collect 50 hits in a month since Joe DiMaggio’s 53 in July of 1941, the very month DiMaggio saw his 56-game hitting streak come to an end. On September 9, Jeter achieved something far more dear to his heart.

He clinched another division title in a 7–5 victory over the Red Sox that improved the Yankees’ record to 102-41 and their divisional lead to twenty and a half games. Jeter blasted 2 homers off Boston knuckleballer Tim Wakefield in the victory, giving him 19 for the season, 3 more than the previous high for a Yankee shortstop (Roy Smalley in 1982).

Amid the clubhouse celebration, with Heineken beer dripping from his divisional championship cap, Jeter was asked about his chances to win the American League MVP award. “It’s not really something that I think about,” he said.

“You can make a case for any person on this team to be MVP. It’s been that type of year. Tino Martinez is having a great year, Paul O’Neill is, Bernie Williams, David Cone as well. There are twenty-five guys. You can make a case for all of them. We’re playing on an MVP team.”

At a time when the country was swept away by superhuman individual feats, by the home-run derby staged by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa at the expense of Roger Maris’s single-season record, the Yankees were dominating the sport one base and one at-bat at a time. They were as perfect a team as Don Shula’s 1972 Dolphins.

Williams had missed thirty-one games because of a knee injury suffered in June, and the Yankees kept winning with Chad Curtis in center. Chili Davis missed more than four months with his ankle injury and returned to find his chief replacement, Strawberry, leading the team with 22 homers.

“We had a great team, great camaraderie, great everything,” O’Neill said. “If you go up and down our roster, nobody really had a bad year. We went into cities and it was like, ‘Are we going to sweep these guys or take two out of three?’ It got to the point where sweeping teams came naturally to us.”

So did the all-for-one, one-for-all mentality that defined the Yankees—at least until the night of September 18, when David Wells acted like a horse’s rump for the sake of old times. In the middle of a 15–5 rout of the Orioles at Camden Yards, Baltimore’s Danny Clyburn hit a high pop between shortstop and left. When Jeter and Curtis and Ricky Ledee failed to run it down, Wells gestured in disgust, slapped his hands on his hips, and stared down his teammates.

Jeter should have caught the ball; even Torre agreed with that. The shortstop quit running for it too soon and allowed it to fall. But Wells had no right to put on this childish show, and Jeter let him know it. “Don’t show me up in front of people,” he warned the pitcher in the dugout.

Jeter dressed and left the clubhouse without speaking to the news media; Wells would tell reporters that his conduct was “totally unprofessional on my part.” The following day, acting on a tip that Jeter had engaged in a heated confrontation with Wells over his humiliating body language, Buster Olney of the
New York Times
asked the shortstop for a comment on his source’s account.

Jeter turned angry and raised his voice. “Where did you get that bullshit?” he asked. Olney tried to calm the shortstop so his competition would not hear their exchange. “You’re just trying to start something,” Jeter barked.

Just as Knoblauch drifted toward the conversation, Jeter sensed the living, breathing presence of an alibi.

“Hey, Buster is trying to say shit happened between Boomer and me,” he said to Knoblauch, hoping his double-play partner would play along. Only the second baseman had never been mistaken for a nuclear physicist.

“Yeah, it was wild, wasn’t it?” Knoblauch said.

Olney wrote what he had to write and did not hold Jeter’s rare lie against him. For the shortstop, it wasn’t personal, just business. He did not believe the confirmation of in-house strife was good for the business of winning.

Jeter was quite stubborn about his articles of game-day faith. He believed in being accessible to reporters, in being accountable for poor play. He was distant and guarded but was not one to be rude. Jeter did not allocate his time and attention based on the size of a newspaper’s circulation, or on the coverage area of a TV station, a game played by so many star ballplayers and coaches. Jeter gave the same say-nothing answers to the
New York Times
and the
Poughkeepsie Journal
.

In a locker room culture where many multimillionaire athletes would just as soon meet a reporter’s question with repeated belching and flatulence, Jeter’s locker was a sanctuary of sorts. He was never going to embarrass anyone who approached his stall. He was available, benign, and cognizant of the fact that a quote from his mouth—even if it amounted to a run-on cliché—carried weight in anyone’s report.

But Jeter did not believe in making his private thoughts and emotions public. So with the playoffs fast approaching, he was not about to provide details on his summer breakup with the poster girl on his bedroom wall.

Mariah Carey—and the attention she craved—wore him out, simple as that. “It was the wrong time,” Carey would say of their romance. “Our two worlds were just too much for that moment.”

It had nothing to do with baseball, even if some whispered that Mariah-mania was behind Jeter’s early struggles at the plate. “I’m just a singer,” Carey would be quoted as saying, “not some magical genie who can make or break someone’s game.”

Jeter said his mother and sister represented a tough screening committee for his prospective girlfriends, and his sister, Sharlee, would say Carey passed the test. “I found Mariah to be a good person,” she said, “and I trust Derek’s judgment. But he’s my brother, and I want to keep him away from women who only care about his fame.”

Carey had enough fame for the both of them. Regardless, the breakup between the singer and the ballplayer was a predictable development to the veteran New Yorkers who had watched the graceful way Jeter carried himself around the city’s social landscape.

“Derek needs to write a book for the rest of us on how to do it,” Cone said. “I don’t know where he’s hiding or what he’s doing, but he stays out of the clubs, stays out of where the paparazzi hangs, and goes to the movie theater a lot, goes to dinner. If he has a drink it might be a light beer. He never puts himself in a position to be taken advantage of, not even for a little bit.

“If he’s gone to clubs here and there he’s gotten out early. He’s found ways to get into them by the back door and then left by midnight. You’d never catch him in a club at four in the morning. With Mariah, through my connections in clubs, she didn’t start her nights until after midnight, 1:00 a.m. No way Jeter was going for that.”

So Derek dumped her. In fact, the dumping was decisive enough to give birth to a new street verb—Jeter. To “Jeter” someone suddenly meant to break up with a girlfriend or boyfriend in an abrupt and don’t-even-think-about-getting-back-together way.

Mariah would be reportedly “Jetered” after the season, when the
Daily News
said she approached her ex at Sean “Puffy” Combs’s party at Cipriani on Wall Street and flirted away, only to have the shortstop turn his back on her.

But Jeter did not say a single bad word about Carey and her high-maintenance ways, even if he was baited by his old friend R. D. Long.

“I’d be telling him, ‘I told you, it’s just a matter of time before she pissed you off . . . ,’” Long said. “He’d say, ‘Oh, man, she’s all right, man. She’s OK.’ . . . That’s Derek. He wouldn’t bash her. He doesn’t bash anybody. I told him, ‘You’ve got to find a girl who’s grounded,’ and he wouldn’t criticize her.”

Jeter was not terribly enthused about the aggressive photographers who tracked them, or the opposing fans who chanted Mariah’s name, or the stadium operators who played Mariah’s songs when he stepped to the plate on the road. Jeter would confess he could not adjust to the relentless attention he received as Mariah Carey’s boyfriend. “It didn’t bother her the way it bothered me,” he would say.

In the book he would write with Jack Curry,
The Life You Imagine
, Jeter would also say the Carey relationship taught him it “would be very difficult for me to seriously date a high-profile person.” Over time Jeter would defy his own words by courting an endless procession of starlets and supermodels.

But baseball was his first love, and Jeter was playing it as a precious few could. He lost the batting title to Bernie Williams over the final two weeks of the season as he swung for the fences in his failed pursuit of his twentieth homer, yet Jeter’s .324 average was still a point better than Nomar Garciaparra’s and 14 points better than Alex Rodriguez’s.

He stole 30 bases, led the AL with 127 runs, and became the only Yankee shortstop not named Phil Rizzuto to collect at least 200 hits in a single season. Jeter had scored more runs in his first three full seasons (347) than any shortstop before him, and he would finish third in the league MVP voting.

On the other side of the ball, Jeter committed only 9 errors in 625 chances, a long, long way from his 56 errors in 506 chances in Greensboro five years earlier. His Yankees finished 114-48, the most victories in AL history. Their .704 winning percentage was the best in baseball since the 1954 Cleveland Indians won at a .721 clip (111-43).

The summer belonged to McGwire’s 70 homers and to Sosa’s 66, both sums mocking the standard of 61 set by Maris in ’61. Only the sport would not be about the sluggers and their comic-book muscles in October.

It would be about a team that did not dress a single 30-homer hitter, a team that could not afford to go out like those ’54 Indians, swept in the World Series by the New York Giants.

After the Yankees’ 114th and final regular-season victory, George Steinbrenner marched into his clubhouse and announced he had been reading
Cigars, Whiskey & Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant
.

“We’re about ready to go to war,” Steinbrenner said. “And I love war.”

His shortstop had a far less flamboyant way of declaring the same thing.

“It makes no difference what we did in the regular season,” Derek Jeter said.