The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (42 page)

“It was weird,” Jeter said of Boston’s reaction to Nomar’s no-show on July 1, “because I didn’t think Nomar deserved to be treated the way he was. I thought that was bad.”

It was now official: Jeter had outlasted the most conspicuous challenges to his shortstop throne. Rey Ordonez, who was supposed to battle him for New York supremacy, had long been traded by the Mets and had already played his final big league game. Alex Rodriguez had surrendered the position to join a winner in the Bronx. And Nomar Garciaparra had been shipped out of the rivalry and out of the American League, out of sight and out of mind.

If the lasting image of Nomar would be his Yankee Stadium sit-in, the lasting Red Sox sounds of that night would belong to other prominent figures. As his players headed into the clubhouse, Francona made a big show of congratulating them for their efforts, offering handshakes and pats on the back.

This was not your standard major league scene, not on the losing side of a ballpark. Once the door to their room opened for the news media, the Red Sox spoke optimistically of a second-half surge, of fighting their way back into the playoffs.

But with Jeter’s Yankees dominating the division, and with the Red Sox cooked before any Fourth of July barbecues, one particular quote from the losing side came off as absurd.

“We still believe we will win the World Series,” Johnny Damon said.

The Game 4 ball was in Mariano Rivera’s right hand, and the Yankees were going to sweep Boston in the American League Championship Series. More than that, they were going to crush the Red Sox with their new weapon of mass destruction—Alex Rodriguez.

Painful as it was to lose Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS on the indelible homer hit by Aaron Boone, that Red Sox team could retreat into winter knowing they were one swing and/or one Grady Little brain freeze away from advancing to the World Series. In addition, the 2003 Red Sox could find solace in the firing of Little and in the hiring of Curt Schilling.

The 2004 Boston team showed up as a free-spirited lot that grew fond of calling itself a band of Idiots. The Red Sox thought they would finally defeat the Yankees this time around, even if a fateful pickup basketball game in the off-season turned Boone into Rodriguez.

Boston had grown to detest A-Rod with every fiber of its being, in part because he did not close the deal to join the Red Sox, in part because he did close the deal to become a Yankee, and in part because he got into a fight with catcher Jason Varitek, a team leader in the Mark Messier mold, after Bronson Arroyo hit him with a pitch in July.

But at the time Rivera took the mound in the ninth inning of Game 4, ready to finish off a 4–3 victory after pitching a scoreless eighth, A-Rod was batting .388 in the series with eight runs scored, five runs driven in, and two homers, including a two-run blast on this night to open the scoring in the third inning. Rodriguez was making the uppercased Idiots look like lowercased idiots.

In fact, his performance in the postseason mocked any notion he was destined to become known as a big-game choker of Greg Norman proportions. He had batted .421 in the four-game Division Series triumph over the Twins, and as a Mariner he had batted .409 with 2 homers and 5 RBI in the 2000 ALCS loss to the Yanks.

The numbers said A-Rod was a lethal postseason force. Starting with his first playoff appearance as a full-time player in ’97, and ending at the point where Rivera stood three outs away from returning the Yanks to the World Series, Rodriguez was batting .375 with 6 homers, 16 RBI, and 16 runs scored over four and a half series.

This was what general manager Brian Cashman had in mind when he made the trade with Texas: A-Rod and Derek Jeter overcoming their personal differences to win championships together, just like Ruth and Gehrig did, just like Thurman and Reggie did.

Jeter was thirty, A-Rod twenty-nine, so they had a number of prime years ahead of them, an alarming thought in Boston. Cashman’s combustible experiment was working. After Jeter launched himself into the stands against the Red Sox, Rodriguez said, “I told him recently, ‘You’re a greater player than I thought you were, and I thought you were a great player.’”

A-Rod and Jeter had done enough as a tandem to lead the Yankees to their third consecutive season of more than 100 victories and their seventh consecutive division crown. To the rest of baseball, it seemed another simple case of the Yankees steamrolling the competition with their checkbook.

Forbes
estimated the franchise that had sold for less than $10 million in 1973 was worth $832 million thirty-one years later—$300 million more than the second-most-valuable franchise, the Red Sox. The small-market teams did not care that the Yankees had paid out $60.6 million in revenue sharing and luxury tax fees in 2003.

They were screaming bloody murder over the absurd payroll disparity between George Steinbrenner’s and everyone else’s. The Yanks were laying out $184 million in wages, almost $60 million more than the second-highest payroll (Boston’s) and at least $150 million more than four other teams. In 1996, the year of their first title under Joe Torre, the Yanks’ payroll of $52 million and change was not even $4 million greater than the second-highest payroll (Baltimore’s).

But the money train did not make for an easy ride to the ALCS. The trouble started in March, when the
San Francisco Chronicle
reported Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield had received steroids from Barry Bonds’s trainer, Greg Anderson, who had been indicted by the federal grand jury investigating the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative, or BALCO, a sports nutrition and supplement lab in Burlingame, California run by a man named Victor Conte, who also was indicted.

Sheffield put up monster numbers, anyway, while Giambi suffered through the worst year of his career. First the Yankees eliminated access to his personal trainer, Bob Alejo, as part of the sport’s crackdown on nonessential personnel. Giambi was later diagnosed with a parasite, and then with a benign tumor, though neither the slugger nor the team would disclose the location of the tumor (later identified as the pituitary gland) for fear it would harden suspicion of steroid use despite Giambi’s denial (“This is absolutely not related to steroids at all . . . ,” he had said).

The cloud of suspicion hovered over the Bronx and all of baseball, as players were tested for performance-enhancing drugs—for the first time under the possibility of penalty—after 5 to 7 percent of them ignored advance warning and turned up positive during survey testing the year before.

The Yankees had other problems, too. Kevin Brown’s season was almost as grim as Giambi’s, as he, too, was diagnosed with a parasite (the team said it found no connection to Giambi’s condition) before he broke his left hand punching a clubhouse wall in frustration. Brown was supposed to help offset the losses of Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, and David Wells, but the same teammates who saw him as a brooding loner did not forgive his selfish act of playing tough guy with the wall.

But the Yankees made it through. In the end, Rodriguez compensated for his drop in batting average (to .286) with 36 homers and 106 RBI, and Jeter compensated for his drop in batting average (to .292) by piecing together his first Gold Glove season.

Jeter and A-Rod would be major contributors to the Yankees’ first victory of the postseason, a breathless 7–6, twelve-inning triumph over Minnesota after the Twins had taken the Division Series opener. Jeter opened the home team’s scoring with the first postseason homer into the center-field black by a Yankee since Reggie Jackson landed one there to punctuate his epic three-homer game against the Dodgers in the ’77 World Series.

Rodriguez also homered among his four hits against the Twins that night, and he lashed a tying, ground-rule double off closer Joe Nathan in the twelfth. Jeter would score the winning run on Hideki Matsui’s sacrifice fly, making a daring dash to the plate before sliding and leaping for joy as the ump called him safe.

The Yankees had the look and feel of champions even before Jeter produced three hits and three RBI in Game 3, even before Rodriguez doubled, stole third, and scored the series-winning run on a wild pitch in the eleventh inning of Game 4.

The ALCS started out as another study in Yankee dominance. A-Rod had done most of the damage in the first three games against Boston, especially in the 19–8 Game 3 romp that saw him score five runs and drive in three. It appeared the Yankees’ victory over Boston in the off-season hunt for Rodriguez would be the difference in the series, not Boston’s victory over the Yankees in the off-season hunt for Curt Schilling.

But a far less compelling acquisition changed the ALCS in a way nobody could have imagined, a way that defied more than eight decades of history. On the same day he traded Nomar Garciaparra, Theo Epstein dealt minor leaguer Henri Stanley to the Dodgers for outfielder Dave Roberts, who was not even making a million bucks.

Roberts was a .250 slap hitter with one distinct big league skill: he had speed. Roberts had 118 stolen bases in two and a half years in L.A.

So in the ninth inning of Game 4, with Rivera and the Yanks three outs away from the World Series, Roberts pinch-ran for Kevin Millar, who had led off with a walk. The former Dodger knew he had to get into scoring position as quickly as possible, as Rivera was far more likely to get three broken-bat outs with his cutter than he was to give the Red Sox two base hits.

Roberts ran on the first pitch to Bill Mueller, ran as if his middling career depended on it, and barely beat Jorge Posada’s throw and Jeter’s tag. Jeter did not react. His team did not react. This steal would be nothing more than a benign footnote to the inevitable Yankee conquest.

Until Mueller’s single sent Roberts racing home and sent the game into extra innings. Until David Ortiz belted a two-run homer off Paul Quantrill in the twelfth, leaving the Red Sox fans in a temporary state of grace. They were reveling in the fact that there would be no sweep.

On the losing side of Fenway Park, the Yankees did not look or sound overly concerned. “We know they’re not going to give up,” Jeter said. “But we’re exactly in the position we want to be in.”

Pedro Martinez was the Boston starter in Game 5, and Pedro had already admitted he was afraid of the Yankees after a loss in September, when Terry Francona took a surreal stroll down Grady Little lane and stayed with Martinez too long.

“What can I say? Just tip my hat and call the Yankees my daddy,” Pedro had said then. “I can’t find a way to beat them at this point. . . . I wish they would disappear and not come back.”

A full Yankee Stadium house had showered Martinez with “Who’s your Daddy?” chants in Boston’s Game 2 loss, and few believed the friendlier sounds and sights of Fenway would make a difference.

For spiritual Game 5 guidance, the Red Sox summoned Massachusetts-born Olympic hero Mike Eruzione, captain of the 1980 Miracle on Ice hockey team that upset the Soviets’ Big Red Machine. Eruzione delivered the game ball to the mound, and Lake Placid highlights were shown on the video board before this message was posted for the crowd:

“Ladies and gentlemen, it has happened before.”

The scene felt forced, especially when Jeter turned Martinez’s hundredth pitch into a two-out, three-run double in the sixth inning, giving the Yankees a 4–2 lead. Yes, this would play out as expected. The Red Sox had secured their little moral victory, and now they would allow the Yanks to win in five.

Martinez reloaded the bases and watched helplessly as Matsui ripped a liner to right, the dagger that almost surely would have finished off the Red Sox, at least until it somehow landed in the glove belonging to Trot Nixon, who made the catch from his knees.

Without notice, the Yankees’ momentum died right there. Their bullpen failed again in the eighth inning, when Tom Gordon surrendered a homer to Ortiz, a walk to Millar (Roberts pinch-ran for him, just as he had in Game 4), and a single to Nixon.

Joe Torre turned to Rivera, who could not hold the lead for the second consecutive night. He allowed Varitek to hit a fly ball far enough to score Roberts and turn Game 5 into the most tense Boston Marathon the commonwealth had ever seen.

It lasted five hours and forty-nine minutes in all, with each side threatening in extra innings before the drama ended at 11:00 p.m. Esteban Loaiza, the pitcher the Yankees had acquired on the same trade-deadline day the Red Sox dealt for Roberts, had quietly put down the Red Sox in the twelfth and thirteenth innings and was one out away from escaping the fourteenth.

But the Game 4 hero, Ortiz, was at the plate, trying to win it for the Game 7 goat in 2003, Tim Wakefield, who had been brilliant over three innings, allowing one hit and striking out four. With Johnny Damon representing the winning run at second base, Loaiza battled the Boston slugger across an epic at-bat. Ortiz fouled off pitch after pitch before he sent Loaiza’s tenth offering into center field, the ball dropping safely in front of Bernie Williams.

“One of the best at-bats I’ve ever seen,” Boston general manager Theo Epstein called it.

Damon came roaring around third, his shoulder-length hair flapping like a racehorse’s mane. “Damon coming to the plate,” Fox announcer Joe Buck said on the air. “He can keep on running to New York. Game 6 tomorrow night!”

The Red Sox had just survived back-to-back sudden-death games at Fenway that covered twenty-six innings and lasted ten hours and fifty-one minutes. Boston had won a Game 4 that featured eleven pitchers, and a Game 5 that featured fourteen.

“Nothing surprises me at this point,” Jeter said. “Something always seems to happen. . . . We put ourselves in a perfect position two days in a row; we just didn’t win the games.”

Now the Yankees were afraid. Very, very afraid. Suddenly they were locked inside a nightmare that even a Red Sox fan named Stephen King would not have wished upon them: Boston was halfway home to perhaps the greatest comeback in sports history.

The Red Sox arrived in New York feeling like they were the ones with a 3–2 series lead. They did not believe the Yankees could stop them, but they did worry that Schilling’s injured right ankle could.