The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (26 page)

Jeter was used to the abuse in Fenway, where fans chanted, “Nomar’s better” and wore vulgar T-shirts mocking the Yankee star. Jeter arrived at the ballpark the next day in a relaxed state, as always, summoning the name of Boston’s Game 4 starter, Bret Saberhagen, in telling as many teammates as possible, “Sabes says you’ve got nothing.”

But in the ninth inning of Game 4, after he singled to help ignite a six-run rally that doomed the Red Sox, Jeter was finally fazed by Fenway. He saw the old ballpark turn uglier than it had ever been.

Boston manager Jimy Williams got ejected for arguing that Garciaparra had beaten out his grounder to third, Nomar threw his helmet and kicked over a water cooler, and the fans flexed their beer muscles and hurled bottles, cans, cups, and coins while the Yankees were pulled from the field.

The game was delayed eight minutes, during which time a Fenway security guard stationed at the Yankees dugout shouted obscenities at the team he was supposed to be guarding.

“Man,” Jeter said, “people were animals out there. . . . It was like dodging grenades. That stuff hasn’t even happened in New York since I’ve been here.”

Jeter put the blood-lusting mob out of its misery the following night, blasting a towering two-run homer off Kent Mercker in the first inning that ensured the Red Sox would not be flying another championship banner next to their 1918 flag.

Garciaparra won the statistical battle in the series—a .400 batting average and 5 RBI to Jeter’s .350 and 3—but lost four of the five games and committed critical errors in the field. Jeter produced the more decisive hits and ended up feeling about as euphoric at Fenway as one of his favorite all-time shortstops, Dent, had felt twenty-one years earlier.

In the visitors’ clubhouse at Fenway, Jeter and Torre and Steinbrenner were striking their familiar champagne-soaked poses, heading back to the World Series for the third time in four years.

Someone asked Jeter about the NLCS matchup between the Mets and Atlanta, and whether he preferred a Subway Series or a sequel to the ’96 Series with the Braves.

“I don’t care, man,” Jeter said. “Let them beat each other up.”

The Yankees swept Atlanta to win their twenty-fifth championship, leaving them with victories in the last twelve World Series games in which they had played, including eight straight over the Braves. The triumph was emotional for a Yankee team that weathered Joe Torre’s cancer surgery and much too much death and dying.

Paul O’Neill’s father died before Game 4, and the right fielder wept as he embraced Torre amid the postgame celebration on the field. Luis Sojo missed the first two games of the Series after his father died in Venezuela, and Scott Brosius was still hurting from the death of his father in September. Once again, the ballpark was the Yankees’ place to escape.

Within a baseball context, the 1999 title meant more to Roger Clemens than to anyone else. He entered Game 4 with eleven postseason starts and all of two victories to show for them. The Rocket was coming off his disastrous American League Championship Series performance in Boston, and despite carrying to the mound the luxury of a 3–0 World Series lead, he was burdened by the notion he would be the Yankee pitcher to break the streak.

“I want the Roger Clemens I used to see,” George Steinbrenner had implored him. “I want the pitcher I traded for.”

So Clemens out-dueled John Smoltz, surrendered one run over seven and two-thirds innings, and finally poked a pin in his ballooning reputation as a postseason choker. “I finally know what it feels like to be a Yankee,” Clemens said after he had climbed on top of the home dugout to slap hands with the delirious fans.

Derek Jeter first knew that feeling three years earlier, when he had won it all as a rookie. This time around against Atlanta, Jeter turned Game 1 in the Yankees’ favor when his RBI single off Greg Maddux in the eighth made it 1–1 before the Yankees scored three more. In Game 2, Jeter singled and scored in the first inning, doubled and scored in the fourth, and showed why Atlanta manager Bobby Cox was moved to say, “Derek Jeter, to me, happens to be one of the top two or three ballplayers in the game.”

Jeter could not believe his own never-ending run of good fortune. “If this is a dream,” he said, “don’t wake me up. . . . I don’t know if anyone has a perfect life, but it’s close. It’s getting there.”

As fate would have it, the Yankee who challenged one of the top two or three ballplayers in the game would assume Jeter’s role of October hero in Game 3. Chad Curtis hit his second homer of the night, this one off Mike Remlinger in the tenth, to complete a dramatic comeback from a 5–0 deficit and make the ultimate Yankee victory a matter of when, not if.

Of course, Curtis could not bask in his moment without taking a controversial stand. When NBC’s Jim Gray attempted to interview him in the wake of his game-winning blast, Curtis declined. “As a team,” he told Gray, “we kind of decided, because of what happened with Pete [Rose], we’re not going to talk out here on the field.”

Gray had come under fire before Game 2 for interrupting baseball’s All-Century team festivities with an on-field interrogation of Rose, who had been banned for his alleged gambling on the game. Torre was furious at Curtis and denied the team had voted to snub Gray (the manager was unaware that such a vote had indeed taken place).

But when Curtis settled under Keith Lockhart’s fly ball and ended the World Series, he had already signed his walking papers. The night he confronted Jeter was the night he guaranteed he would not be wearing pinstripes for long.

Seven weeks after he helped the Yanks repeat as champions for the first time since 1978, Curtis was traded to Texas for Brandon Knight and Sam Marsonek.

“Chad just couldn’t stay around any longer because that act gets tired,” a team official said. “Once he became comfortable here, he became a preacher, and it ran its course. He didn’t get voted off the island simply because of Derek Jeter; there were too many other issues with Chad.”

One Yankee executive said Jeter was indeed among the chief reasons Curtis was dealt, and that the shortstop—who did discuss personnel matters with George Steinbrenner during occasional off-season visits—made it clear he wanted the outfielder gone.

Either way, Curtis believed Jeter’s feelings for him represented at least a contributing factor in his exit.

“Every decision has multiple reasons, and did that have one tiny part?” Curtis said. “I don’t think that was
the
reason, but I think it adds in.

“Derek’s the guy that, rightly so, this organization needs to empower to lead. And if I was some affront to that leadership, even if it’s just a little bit, then I needed to go.”

The following October, David Cone looked across the Shea Stadium field at his old friend John Franco before the start of Game 4 of the World Series between the Yankees and Mets. Cone was in the visiting dugout, flabbergasted over what he was seeing and hearing.

The Baha Men were on the field playing “Who Let the Dogs Out?,” the Mets’ new anthem, and Cone could not believe his former team would deface the Fall Classic with such a mind-numbing song.

Cone locked on Franco, sitting in the Mets’ dugout, and mouthed the words, “Are you fucking kidding me?” Franco shrugged his shoulders and opened his palms toward the sky in what-can-I-say form.

The Baha Men were blaring their
woo
,
woo
,
woo
s, and Cone turned to face his teammate Derek Jeter. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he told the shortstop.

The Mets had won Game 3 of the Series to cut the Yankees’ lead to 2–1, and they had two more games at Shea to play with. So the visiting side was looking for an edge, a reason to get amped up, and Cone thought the Yanks had found it in the on-field presence of the Baha Men and their dumb little song.

“It crystallized the difference between the Mets and Yankees,” Cone said, “because you’d never see that at Yankee Stadium. I remember our whole bench going, ‘This is bush,’ because we were looking for things to grab on to use as motivation.”

Cone also remembered a silent statement made by Jeter’s pale green eyes. The shortstop had more to lose in this 2000 Subway Series than anyone on the active roster, Brooklyn-born Joe Torre included.

Jeter was among the leading citizens of New York. He was taking this Series personally, because he knew he would have to live with an intracity defeat every day for the rest of his life.

Torre made him the leadoff hitter for the first time in the Series; the manager did not have the luxury of a designated hitter at Shea, and he could not keep Chuck Knoblauch in the lineup, not when his throws from second were maiming women and children in the stands.

So with Knoblauch out, and with second baseman Luis Sojo more suited for the two-hole, Jeter was asked to make an opening statement against the Mets. And as the Baha Men played at earsplitting decibels in the moments before the first pitch, Cone surveyed the Yankees’ best player and his bloodless gaze.

“Derek Jeter was ready for that game,” Cone said. “He was ready for that first at-bat.”

What a long, strange trip it had been to that Game 4 moment. Derek Jeter had made $10 million for the 2000 season, double his previous arbitration award, but only after he nearly reached agreement on a record seven-year, $118.5 million deal with the Yankees before George Steinbrenner got cold feet.

Steinbrenner decided he was against flipping baseball’s salary structure onto its ear, and for doing the one-year deal that canceled a return trip to the arbitration table. But the dynamic between employer and employee had changed dramatically from that spring day in ’97 when Jeter asked Steinbrenner for a five-year contract in the presence of team official Ray Negron, only to have the Boss advise him to hold out for a better deal in the coming years.

Steinbrenner bounced back with a five-year, $31 million offer in the summer of ’98, a bid rejected by Jeter. Suddenly the shortstop had Steinbrenner close to breaking the $100 million barrier, at least until the Boss put off the inevitable nine-figure contract for one more year.

Down in Tampa, Jeter gladly took the $10 million and shelved his long-term financial ambitions until the following winter. He pieced together another All-Star year in 2000 by hardening his body at the International Performance Institute in Bradenton, where Nomar Garciaparra worked out. Jeter had lost weight during the ’99 season, finishing the year at 185 pounds. He arrived at spring training 18 pounds heavier.

Pitcher Mike Buddie, Jeter’s teammate as far back as Greensboro, said the shortstop “went from being Kevin Garnett to Shaquille O’Neal.” Such physical transformations in baseball often encouraged whispers of steroid suspicion, but Jeter’s integrity was never called into question, a testament to his standing in the game.

He worked his legs for the first time, strengthened the middle of his body with core exercises, and added muscle definition to his upper torso. He wanted to become a more explosive offensive force. He wanted to hit 30 home runs.

Jeter’s goals would be compromised by a left abdominal strain in May, when he took too many batting practice swings in an attempt to bust out of a slump. Jeter missed a dozen games, returned to go 3 for 4 in a victory over the Red Sox, and got on with the season while his double-play partner unraveled.

For reasons unknown, Chuck Knoblauch could no longer make the most elementary of baseball throws—from second to first. He made three errant throws in the first six innings of a 12–3 loss to the White Sox on the night of June 15, stood as the loneliest man on the face of the earth—near second base—while his fellow infielders gathered at the mound during a pitching change, and finally asked Joe Torre to remove him from the game.

Knoblauch told Torre he was tired of hurting the team, and the manager sent the second baseman home so he would not have to face reporters postgame at his locker. Knoblauch had been struggling on his throws for the better part of two years, sometimes lobbing the ball, sometimes shoveling it underhanded, sometimes letting it rip without eyeing his target.

Knoblauch had suggested he might quit the game, or at least escape to the Cayman Islands or Martha’s Vineyard. This time around, after Torre had someone drive him away from Yankee Stadium in the middle of a game, Knoblauch did what most lost souls do—he called his mom.

Some Yankees were concerned Knoblauch might do something rash, something more serious than quitting the team. Jeter said he was among those who called Knoblauch to offer reassurance. “By the time I talked to him,” Jeter said, “he was doing OK. I knew he’d be all right. . . . We need him.”

Knoblauch returned to the Stadium the following day wearing a sunshiny disposition. He joked with teammates and told reporters his mother wanted to give him a hug. While backpedaling during pregame warm-ups, Jeter gave him a playful push forward.

But some Yankees noticed there had been a recent chill between Jeter and Knoblauch. The two had been close friends and, after Knoblauch’s divorce, running mates at night, but they didn’t talk or tease each other nearly as much in the clubhouse anymore. It appeared the Joe Montana–Jerry Rice partnership Alex Rodriguez had predicted two years earlier was fraying at the seams.

On his return to the lineup, Knoblauch did receive a loud ovation from the fans, and Jeter did say on his behalf, “They treated him well and deservedly so. I’ve said before that we’re not going to win without Chuck, and it’s about time the fans got behind him.”

Jeter had offered a mild rebuke of the very fans who adored him, and it would not be the last time he would do that in defense of a struggling teammate. Only Knoblauch’s demons would not be silenced without a fight. The following day, the second baseman unleashed a throw that sailed seven rows deep into the stands behind first base, where it hit Marie Olbermann, mother of Fox broadcaster Keith Olbermann, knocking a lens out of her glasses.

Nothing came easily for Knoblauch, who would end up on the disabled list with an elbow injury before George Steinbrenner ripped him for allegedly exaggerating the depth of his pain. Nothing came easily for Knoblauch’s two-time defending champ of a team, either.