The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (45 page)

Jeter had reached out to the homer hero of 2003 after he tore up his knee, clearing the way for Rodriguez. “I think the way Derek put it to me, I wouldn’t repeat,” Boone said. “But it was appreciated by me. . . . I think he felt bad about the situation.”

Jeter was not a hard captain or teammate to please. He demanded hard work, accountability, and a willingness to place team ahead of self. Sometimes Jeter even embraced those whose commitment to the cause did not match his.

He buddied around with Jeff Weaver, a bust and a mope. Jeter came to like Giambi, who had lost a lot of respect in his clubhouse when he pulled himself out of Game 5 of the 2003 World Series. Jeter believed that Giambi partied too heavily, and that he did not take losing half as seriously as the first baseman he replaced, Tino Martinez, also Jeter’s friend.

But through his actions and words of support, Jeter gave the fun-loving Giambi his papal blessing. The defrocked slugger was liked by star teammates and low-level staffers alike, especially those staffers who benefited when Giambi demanded in a postseason shares meeting—against the wishes of established Yankee veterans—that they receive full shares instead of the reduced bonuses they had been getting.

Giambi showed leadership in that 2003 case, and there was no doubting his standing as the tattooed leader of the renegade Oakland A’s teams that challenged the Yanks. Only Giambi was not that dynamic force anymore. He was a fading player who had been exposed as a cheat, and so Jeter did not see him as a threat to his standing with the team and fan base.

Rodriguez? The magnitude of his talent, contract, stardom, and personality made him a natural threat. So Jeter was not beyond taking an occasional poke at him, as he did the time two female reporters who happened to be wearing pink shoes stopped at his locker.

Jeter mentioned the matching shoes, and when one of the reporters playfully asked him where his pink shoes were, Jeter said, “I don’t have any.” He then rolled his eyes toward A-Rod’s locker and joked, “He might.”

It was clear Jeter and Rodriguez needed a Kissinger-like mediator the way Reggie Jackson and Thurman Munson did. Back in the day, the simmering Jackson-Munson feud was settled—or tempered, anyway—when backup catcher Fran Healy and clubhouse attendant Ray Negron persuaded the two stars to meet inside a hotel restaurant in Detroit.

The gruff and grumpy Munson was an unmade bed; Jackson was a polished, self-celebrating star made for Hollywood. “When Reggie would put on a uniform,” Negron said, “he would say, ‘This is my cosmetic touch.’ Everything had to be right, including his socks, or he wasn’t ready to play the game. Thurman? He was just like, ‘Let’s go, motherfucker.’ He was a monster.”

On arrival in the Bronx, Jackson had his own
Esquire
moment—he was quoted (erroneously, he swears) in
Sport
magazine as saying, “I’m the straw that stirs the drink. Maybe I should say me and Munson, but he can only stir it bad.”

Munson was just as furious with Jackson’s remarks as Jeter would be with A-Rod’s nearly a quarter century later, but the two eventually got past it and won a couple of championships together before Munson died in a plane crash.

“Thurman is Jeter and Reggie is Alex, and I’ve told Jeter that,” said Negron, who became an adviser to George Steinbrenner. “Jeter is more to himself like Thurman was, and Alex is more outgoing like Reggie.”

Jackson was among those who tried to improve relations between Jeter and A-Rod. He spoke to Rodriguez and Jeter separately, telling A-Rod about his own isolation in Munson’s and Billy Martin’s clubhouse, and advising Jeter on his responsibilities as a team leader.

“I spoke to him as a captain, not as Derek Jeter,” Jackson said. “I told him what I thought was needed, and I think he took pieces of what I said that he agreed with and didn’t take the pieces he disagreed with.

“I certainly hope Derek and Alex can win together like I did with Thurman. Alex has a good heart, but sometimes he doesn’t express himself well, and he tries to express himself too much. If he would say less and let his bat do the talking, no one can talk like him with a bat. But when he tries to say the right things, it just doesn’t work.”

Joe Torre did not believe he needed to talk to the left side of his infield about forming a unified front, as he reasoned Jeter and Rodriguez knew each other before either had met Torre and would figure it out between themselves. But Torre was concerned enough about A-Rod’s tenuous place in the clubhouse to dispatch others to talk to him.

“Joe Torre asked me to talk to him all the time,” Gary Sheffield said. “In talking to [Rodriguez] it was more about giving of yourself, Alex, because if you want to win a championship you have to be in a team concept rather than as an individual.

“I didn’t go to him and say, ‘You’ve got to be about the team,’ and this and that. I just let him know that I was asked to come talk to him. This was nothing I thought was an issue; other people said it was an issue . . . I was just doing what my manager asked me to do.”

If nothing else, no Yankee was ever asked to talk to Rodriguez about his game-day preparation. A-Rod’s sweat-soaked routine was a blur of indoor batting practice, outdoor batting practice, infield practice, long toss, and medicine ball exercises. Only Roger Clemens’s pregame intensity matched A-Rod’s, and Rodriguez was not merely pitching one out of every five days.

His teammates were not blind to Rodriguez’s near-maniacal work ethic, which was one reason some believed Jeter should have done more to help him. As much as A-Rod could be his own worst enemy, he did bust his ass in his attempt to be the best ballplayer he could be, a truth those teammates felt should have counted for something with the captain.

But as far back as spring training 2005, Jeter had clearly established he would not be stepping in front of any freight trains heading Rodriguez’s way. One by one, the Red Sox were taking the lumber to A-Rod’s good name, or what was left of it, their venom inspired by an interview Rodriguez gave Bob Klapisch of the
Record
in New Jersey. In it A-Rod made this self-serving declaration about his commitment to fitness: “I know there are 650 or 700 other players who are sleeping this morning. Either that, or they’re taking their kids to school. But there’s no way they’re going to be running the stairs or doing what I’m doing.”

Trot Nixon took the first cuts of spring, saying of A-Rod, “Well, I’m not a deadbeat dad, you clown.” Nixon also said that when people asked him about the Yankees, “I tell them about Jeter and Bernie Williams and [Jorge] Posada. I don’t tell them about Rodriguez.”

On cue, Jeter was asked to respond to Nixon’s verbal assault on his teammate. “I’m not getting into a war of words with them,” the captain said. “That’s between Trot and Alex.”

Sensing an opening, realizing Jeter had not protected his third baseman when Nixon attacked, or when Schilling had attacked in the past, the Red Sox announced the opening of hunting season on A-Rod.

Everyone got a free shot. Bronson Arroyo, Jason Varitek, Keith Foulke, Kevin Millar, and former Yankee David Wells fired away without fear of retribution. They mocked A-Rod’s little Game 6 squibber, and his little slap at Arroyo’s glove. They mocked his ten bare fingers, too.

None of the Yankees who had supported a steroid user, Giambi, stepped up in Tampa to return fire on Boston’s Fort Myers base. Including Jeter.

Especially Jeter.

The Red Sox kept praising the Yankee captain at A-Rod’s expense, kept calling him a pure winner, a team player, as professional as anyone in the game. “Derek Jeter, he’s a Yankee, period,” Millar said. “Alex Rodriguez’s salary doesn’t dictate that he’s a Yankee. Just because he’s making $25 million doesn’t mean he’s a Yankee.”

Jeter did nothing about it.

“As long as I’ve been here,” he said, “we’ve never been a team that talks a lot. I don’t think it’s necessary. Really, I’m indifferent to it.”

When Wells, Boston’s latest recruit, threw his usual assortment of misplaced jabs the Yankees’ way, including one aimed at Rodriguez for acting like he was part of the dynasty years, Jeter merely responded that he did not have any problems with Wells, and that his former teammate had even sent him a Christmas card.

Again, Rodriguez was on his own. He could choose to defend himself or simply let this Boston tee-off party go on forever. And if it were up to Steinbrenner, Rodriguez would have told the offending Red Sox where they could stick their championship rings.

The Boss had met with A-Rod weeks earlier and ordered him to stop trying to fit in, to stop deferring to Jeter and everyone else and assume a leadership role. It was virtually the same conversation Steinbrenner had with Clemens when the Rocket could not get comfortable in his pinstriped skin during his first season in the Bronx.

But Rodriguez played dead as the Red Sox piled on, his only sign of life coming in the form of a slight of Arroyo, whom he referred to as “Brandon.” Finally, Boston’s self-styled band of Idiots let it go, leaving A-Rod to answer the question that had more lives than a cat, Freddy Krueger, or the 2004 Red Sox:

How’s your relationship with Jeter?

“Very good,” Rodriguez said.

“As good as ever?” he was asked.

A-Rod laughed. “I don’t know. I think it’s good.”

Rodriguez was proven wrong as the season unfolded. And for every teammate who thought the captain was obliged to cover Rodriguez’s back, whether he wanted to or not, there was a teammate or two who felt A-Rod was the only Yankee required to bail out A-Rod.

“A lot of guys just felt, ‘Hey, if you don’t want to get booed, go out there and play better,’” one teammate said. “We never really looked at it as something Derek should’ve done. When you sign up to play for this team, you know if you don’t play well you’re going to get booed. And Alex was the one in control of that.”

This was a point hammered home to Rodriguez by his friend Mike Borzello, the bullpen catcher and Torre godson who was not afraid to get in A-Rod’s face. “You don’t need anybody,” Borzello told him. “Your bat should be bailing you out of whatever mess you’re in with the fans. They don’t boo you after you hit a home run. They boo you when you stink.”

Yet when Alex Rodriguez did stink, the easy default position for media members, for fans, even for teammates, revolved around a single question: Did Jeter’s cold shoulder have something to do with it?

Everyone knew Jeter loathed the Brangelina-like scrutiny of his relationship with A-Rod, so it was a subject a precious few people were willing to raise with him. Cashman had no choice but to be among those precious few.

He was in charge of a payroll that had cleared the $200 million barrier, a mark once considered as unreachable as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. Cashman needed to protect Steinbrenner’s massive investment, even if it meant confronting Jeter after the dropped August pop-up, or pushing him on A-Rod in a couple of other conversations.

The GM would tell Jeter he had to “fake it” with A-Rod, repeating Mattingly’s line. “You can’t lead twenty-three guys out of twenty-four,” Cashman would say. “You’ve got to lead them all, the ones you like and the ones you don’t like.”

The captain was being asked to repair something he did not break. A-Rod was the teammate who led the league in saying and doing dumb things. A-Rod was the opponent who said Jeter’s presence in a lineup was “never your concern.”

Funny, but other Yankees had made similar comments about Jeter, only never laced with the jagged-edged jealousy that defined A-Rod’s. Many of them mirrored the thoughts of Aaron Boone, who said he had no idea Jeter was as good as Jeter was until he played with him.

Mike Mussina, who pitched against Jeter across five seasons in Baltimore, said he understood the point Rodriguez had clumsily tried to make.

“When you read the scouting report and you’re preparing to play the Yankees,” Mussina said, “Derek isn’t the one who stands out. Yeah, it says Derek Jeter in the lineup, but if you’re concerned about somebody driving in four runs or beating you late with a home run, he’s not the first name that comes to mind. . . . But he’s going to beat you with three singles to right, two of them with two outs and a guy in scoring position, or maybe he’s going to give you a tough at-bat against the closer and draw a walk.”

Jeff Nelson, a longtime teammate of Jeter’s who also played for three different American League clubs, said he had to convince fellow pitchers that the Yankee shortstop was a dangerous hitter.

“Everyone took it for granted,” Nelson said. “Not that they were relaxed about pitching against him, but they’d say, ‘Oh, well, this is not one of the guys that we’re worried about.’”

So in 2001, Rodriguez was not some lone voice of dissent when it came to Jeter’s place in the Yankee lineup. Only there was no absence of malice in A-Rod’s voice. He was the close friend, the sleepover pal, the guy who likened himself to Jeter’s brother. Rodriguez was supposed to be the last man in the world who would try to hurt Jeter’s leverage in contract negotiations in a radio interview, and who would try to hurt Jeter’s feelings in a magazine interview.

But there was no way to erase those errors from the score book. With the Yankee Stadium fans booing their third baseman, Rodriguez and Jeter would have to live with the fallout.

Derek Jeter was having a bigger year in 2006 than he’d had in 2005, when he hit the first grand slam of his career (in a June victory over the Cubs) after 5,770 at-bats and hit consecutive game-winning solo shots (in August victories over the Texas Rangers).

The ’05 season was an especially draining one, as the team watched Boston’s historic ring ceremony at Fenway Park, started 11-19, and struggled when new acquisitions Randy Johnson, Carl Pavano, and Jaret Wright failed to give Brian Cashman the dominant staff he craved.

Johnson was not quite the terminator he had been when he eliminated the Yanks in the ’95 and ’01 postseasons, and his introduction to New York—he got rougher with a TV cameraman on a Manhattan street than he would with the Angels in the Division Series—represented an ominous forecast of things to come.