The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (50 page)

Giambi had tremendous respect and affection for Jeter, who had publicly backed him at his lowest point. Yet even though he was a steroid cheat, a party boy, and a guy who had benched himself for a World Series game, Giambi fancied himself capable of filling a leadership void.

“I can really help this team,” Giambi had told one teammate. “There are things that need to be said, and I can’t say them. This is Derek’s team. I can’t be the guy to go out there and say it. In Oakland, I could kind of run that ship and get on guys and send a message, but I feel like I have to hold back here.”

Jeter always felt as if he did more leading and guiding and captaining than even his teammates knew. When it came to individual admonishment or advice, the captain almost always preferred to deliver it in a quiet corner, his rebukes of Bernie Williams and Jay Witasick in the 2001 World Series notwithstanding. Jeter would take aside the young, impressionable likes of Robinson Cano and Melky Cabrera and sternly remind them to hustle at all times.

Asked how often he pulled players aside who needed direction or a kick in the butt, Jeter said, “A lot more than you think. . . . I don’t think you have to do it through the media. I don’t think you have to do it when you have a camera in your face, so that people say, ‘Oh, look what he did.’ Why would you do that? I never understood it, so I’ll never be that way. . . . If I had a problem with someone or had a problem with what someone said, I’ll tell him. I don’t think it has to be a bigger story than necessary by going through the media.”

If Torre did not want to confront a player, or if he felt that player would better respond to a peer, the manager often asked Jeter to deliver his message. “I’ve seen Joe go up to Jeet many times and say, ‘You wanna handle it?’” Bowa said. “And Jeet would always say, ‘I’ll take care of it,’ and he would.”

As a team leader, Jeter had a strong record of making low-profile newcomers feel at home. Nick Green, a utility infielder who played all of forty-six games for the 2006 team, said Jeter treated him “like a friend you’ve known forever that you’ve never met.”

Aaron Small, the obscure pitcher who somehow went 10-0 with the 2005 team, recalled Jeter introducing himself to him in spring training, eating lunch with him, treating him as if he were David Cone. A few weeks after he had met Small, Jeter insisted the two come up with the kind of personal secret handshake the captain had with other teammates.

No, Jeter did not have to speak to lead. He performed one of his jump throws from the hole during Small’s first Yankee Stadium start, and the journeyman pitcher stood there on the mound, mouth agape. “Just like a kid watching it on TV,” Small said.

Ron Villone, the much-traveled relief pitcher, spoke of how Jeter would come to the mound and express his appreciation for the number of innings he had thrown. “Derek would give me an energy boost, a mental boost on the mound,” Villone said. “I watched him for years do that with other pitchers, and that confidence in his voice really helped me.”

Mientkiewicz remembered Jeter sitting him down on arrival in Tampa and telling the first baseman he was available to answer any questions about New York, the Yanks, the media, whatever. Jeter then went about needling Mientkiewicz every day, with Posada’s help, calling him Pete Rose (“I have no idea why,” Mientkiewicz said) and making him feel comfortable. “He’d already accepted me into that clubhouse,” the first baseman said.

Mientkiewicz recalled Jeter showing necessary leadership “by playing when he could barely walk” and by validating the new recruit’s presence even when that recruit overstepped his bounds.

“In one meeting when we were losing I basically called everybody out, and I was hitting .205 or something,” Mientkiewicz said. “I said, ‘You know what, guys, you always had a swagger that made me want to kill you. Jeet, I’ve got a picture of me trying to break up a double play in 2003, and my foot is above your belt and I’m trying to kill you. You guys had swagger. Where is it? You’re not stapling my name to the first team that doesn’t make the playoffs in Joe Torre’s tenure.’

“And Jeter came up to me after and said, ‘Coming from you that got the attention of a lot of people.’ I was a newcomer, a small piece of a big machine, and Jeter took it to heart.”

Off a poor feed from Robinson Cano to start a potential double play against Boston, Jeter would bounce a throw to Mientkiewicz, who was kneed in the head by the hitter, Mike Lowell, as he tried to scoop the ball. The first baseman ended up face first in the dirt and landed in the hospital with a mild concussion and a fractured wrist.

“And Derek was the first guy on my phone to say how sick he felt,” Mientkiewicz said. “He felt awful, and I told him it was just part of the game. But just hearing his voice meant something to me.”

The stories of Jeter taking in new Yankees and young Yankees far outnumbered the one relayed by Ricky Ledee, who told people Alex Rodriguez was more helpful to him in Texas than Jeter had been in the Bronx. For the captain, it always came back to Alex, somehow, some way.

Following their blowout meeting in Toronto, the Yankees lost their next two games to the Blue Jays and then woke up to the very last thing any of them needed—Alex Rodriguez pictured on the front page of the
New York Post
with an attractive woman not his wife.

“stray-rod” screamed the headline, and A-Rod was left to explain to his spouse, Cynthia, why he was in the company of a woman later identified as stripper Joslyn Noel Morse. Inside the Yankee clubhouse, word of a player caught fooling around on the road was met with a Captain Renault–like reaction: teammates were shocked,
shocked
, to find that adultery was going on in here.

Either way, Rodriguez was brought to his knees. His quest for a season of pure baseball, and pure baseball only, had been shot to hell. One member of the Yankees’ traveling party even tried to convince A-Rod that someone in Jeter’s camp had tipped off the
Post
photographer.

It was a positively absurd suggestion, as Jeter would be the last athlete to have endorsed such a devious plot. But this potentially divisive claim underscored the notion that the A-Rod–Jeter armistice was a fragile one.

Did Jeter and Rodriguez engage in open hostilities? Shouting matches? Shoving matches? No, even if one false report had them squaring off in Ali and Frazier form.

Truth was, even if Jeter and Rodriguez almost never entered or exited the clubhouse side by side, they did occasionally lunch together on the road. In the past A-Rod had wanted more than that, of course, because he was an emotionally needy star who craved positive reinforcement and Jeter’s full approval. But the captain would extend himself only so far for the third baseman.

“Jeet never said one negative word about Alex to me, ever,” Bowa said. “I don’t think they’re ever going to dine together or go on vacations together, but I don’t think they hate each other.”

Mientkiewicz echoed Bowa’s sentiments and said age created distance between Jeter and Rodriguez. “Grown men don’t have sleepovers and order pizza and rent movies from Blockbuster,” Mientkiewicz said. “Alex never said anything negative about Derek, and with Alex having such a phenomenal year, Jeet would just sit there and shake his head and say, ‘That’s just not normal. What we’re watching right now is just not normal.’”

Nothing was ever normal about A-Rod. Hours after the
Post
ran its Stray-Rod story, Rodriguez was running out Posada’s two-out pop-up in the ninth with the Yanks holding a two-run lead. As Toronto’s Howie Clark settled under the ball and prepared to end the inning, A-Rod yelled “Ha” as he passed Clark, who backed away from the play under the assumption that his shortstop, John McDonald, had just called him off.

The ball fell, the Yanks added a run to their lead, and McDonald and an entire roster of Blue Jays wanted to choke the life out of A-Rod. Blue Jays manager John Gibbons told Rodriguez his was a bush-league play and summoned the spirit of Curt Schilling and the 2004 Red Sox when he said, “That’s not Yankee baseball.”

The chief representative of Yankee baseball was asked for his reaction. “I don’t know; you will have to ask [Rodriguez],” Jeter said. “I wasn’t out there.”

Torre initially backed his third baseman, saying catchers trying to run down pop-ups near enemy dugouts hear “I got it” all the time. But after realizing A-Rod was getting trashed all around baseball—and the Stray-Rod story and photo sure did not help Rodriguez in this case—Torre decided Toronto had a point.

“It was probably something he shouldn’t have done,” the manager said a couple of nights later. “It was probably inappropriate to do it at the time he did it.”

Suddenly Rodriguez had another reason to feel isolated. A year after Jeter would not shield him from the fans, Torre would not shield him from the Blue Jays.

George Steinbrenner and front-office officials were upset that their manager did not do more to protect Rodriguez. “Alex made a good, smart baseball play,” one team official said. “It was gamesmanship that paid off and helped us win. The old-timers would say they did that stuff all the time, and good for Alex, he got away with it.

“But Torre got to a point where his image was more important than the Yankees. He backtracked because public opinion said Joe Torre’s a good man, and that’s cheating, and how could he feel that way. He left Alex out in the wind to get pummeled, and he never would’ve done that to Derek.”

No, Torre never would have done that to Derek. Of course, Derek never would have put Torre in a position to defend his captain for yelling “Ha” at an opposing infielder.

Nevertheless, if the manager had a flaw or three in his approach, he remained a master at guiding a team through a 162-game season. The great basketball coach Chuck Daly used to say a head coach’s job is to navigate the turbulence of an endless regular season and find a way to land the plane.

No coach or manager knew how to land the plane like Joe Torre.

“There’s only one manager in baseball who would’ve let us make the playoffs that year, and it was Joe,” Mientkiewicz said. “And there was only one captain who would’ve let us make the playoffs that year, and it was Derek. That’s because neither one ever panics.

“We had some real knock-down, drag-out meetings, but Jeter never worried and always believed. He always said, ‘We’re one pitch or one play away from reeling off eighteen of twenty, and if you believe it, it’s going to happen.’”

The night Rodriguez yelled “Ha” in Toronto marked a turning point; including that victory, the Yanks would finish the season 73-39, would nearly erase Boston’s entire fourteen-and-a-half-game divisional lead, and would seize the wild card to give Torre a dozen postseason appearances in a dozen years on the job.

Along the way, A-Rod would crack his 500th homer, and Jeter would pass Joe DiMaggio on the career hit list with number 2,215. Jeter would also complete a remarkable stretch that started the previous August in which he hit safely in 59 out of 61 games, becoming the only major leaguer since 1900 not named DiMaggio to have no more than two hitless games over a span of 56 or more, according to Trent McCotter of the Society for American Baseball Research.

But Jeter never measured himself by his numbers, no matter how impressive they were. One number defined him—four—his collection of World Series championships, and the shortstop would have gladly given back his captaincy if it meant upgrading that defining number to five.

The Yankees were down 2–0 in their best-of-five Division Series with the Cleveland Indians, George Steinbrenner had threatened to fire Joe Torre if he did not win three straight sudden-death games from his hometown Indians, and Derek Jeter responded to the pressure the way any self-respecting captain would.

With a prank.

This was two days after a plague of Lake Erie midges descended on Jacobs Field in the eighth inning of Game 2, leaving the Yankees’ bullpen phenom, Joba Chamberlain, looking like a helpless grade-school camper who had walked into a beehive.

Jeter and Alex Rodriguez and Doug Mientkiewicz were among the Yankees who were swatting at the bugs with their hands, gloves, and caps, but Chamberlain was the lead victim in this Hitchcock horror. The Yankee trainer, Gene Monahan, went out to spray him with repellent, but Monahan might as well have covered Joba in honey.

The bugs attached themselves to Chamberlain’s eyes, face, and neck. Joba’s vision and focus were impaired long enough for the setup man to set up his team’s demise, unleashing his second wild pitch in ten pitches, allowing the tying run to score, and ultimately allowing the Indians a chance to win in the eleventh.

Torre should have tried to stop the game; even Roger Clemens, his forty-five-year-old Game 3 starter, would say as much. But the Yankees managed all of three hits in that 2–1, eleven-inning loss, and Rodriguez went 0 for 4 with three strikeouts, extending his postseason hitless streak to eighteen at-bats and ending up 4 for his last 50 in the playoffs without a single RBI.

So it was not just the midges. It only seemed that way.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Jeter said. “It was like someone let them go.”

The next day, a workout day in the Bronx before Game 3, the day before the Yankees faced the possibility of a third straight first-round exit, Mientkiewicz found humor in his team’s desperation, referencing the captain’s personal brand of cologne.

“The joke around the guys is that we all had Derek Jeter’s ‘Driven’ on,” Mientkiewicz said. “That’s why all the bugs were attacking us.”

Jeter woke up to the quotes the following day, game day, and decided Mientkiewicz would regret that remark. Rome was burning, Steinbrenner was blustering, and Jeter was busy proving that no situation was too alarming to make him forget he was a man playing a boy’s game.

In the clubhouse before Game 3, Jeter made a point of completely ignoring Mientkiewicz, who returned to his locker after batting practice to find a letter resting on his chair, a letter supposedly from Macy’s.

The letter read something like this:

Dear Mr. Mientkiewicz. Thanks to your comments to the media, we’ve had to pull 12.2 million bottles of Derek Jeter’s Driven off the shelves. You’ve cost my company and Mr. Jeter millions of dollars. I hope this turns out well for you.