The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (52 page)

One teammate who was friendly with Jeter recalled mocking the shortstop—in a joking way—in front of a small group of Yankees. Jeter glared at the teammate, turned away, and ignored him for two weeks.

“I didn’t understand it, because we’d kidded each other all the time,” the teammate said. “But then I realized: that was the first time I did it in front of teammates, and as the captain he didn’t appreciate having that done in front of others.”

Nor did Jeter appreciate less than glowing critiques from any corner of his athletic past. Told one of his former youth summer basketball coaches recalled he had likely been dunked on more than anyone in the state of Michigan—if only because Jeter hustled so much to get back on opposing fast breaks—the shortstop said, “I don’t know about getting dunked on. Power lay-ups, maybe.”

Jeter had a long memory, too. In 2001, teammate David Justice was talking with
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baseball columnist Ken Davidoff when the writer mentioned he was the sports editor of the University of Michigan school paper who had assigned a piece on Jeter to another writer when the shortstop enrolled there in the fall of ’92.

Justice yelled over to Jeter, “Hey, Jeet, this guy wrote about you at Michigan.” Expressionless, Jeter replied, “The story said I played football. I didn’t play football.”

Yes, Jeter had a low tolerance for real or imagined slights. He rarely deviated from his one-strike-and-you’re-out policy, as his old friend from his days as a minor leaguer in Greensboro, Earl Clary, could attest. Clary adored Jeter and opened up his home to him, but recalled their relationship changing over a chance meeting in a Baltimore restaurant.

Clary was entertaining a customer when they stumbled upon Jeter sitting with some Yankees at a table. The customer grabbed two bags of souvenirs and rushed over to the shortstop to have him autograph each item.

“I’d never asked for anything from Jeter, but it was my fault; I should’ve told the jackass not to do that,” Clary said. “I can’t express what a great guy Jeter is, but he used to call me back right away and it was never the same after that night. He was cool to me after that night.”

Jeter could be cool and distant and suspicious. “If you knock on his door,” said the YES Network’s Michael Kay, “he’ll talk to you for four or five hours through the screen, but you’ll never get invited in.”

Jeter’s buddy R. D. Long was among the precious few who had been welcomed inside the screen door. But getting inside did not mean full trust was offered without careful inspection.

“Fame and fortune can make you very paranoid,” Long said, “to where I have the sense he’s unsure what my intentions are as his friend sometimes, and that bothers me. . . . Derek’s always feeling, ‘Somebody may be taking advantage of me.’”

The founder of a nonprofit college prep program for student athletes in the Rochester, New York, area called Mind, Body & Soul, Long invited his former minor league teammate to his wedding in 2004. “Derek flew in on a Thursday night and flew out on a Sunday night and stayed the whole time for my wedding, all aspects of it, like a normal person,” Long said. “He bought eleven suits, $2,000 apiece, for my groomsmen and the fathers, from Michael Jordan’s tailor in Chicago.

“Instead of those suits, he could’ve written a $22,000 check to me for my program, but he’s not going to do that. He doesn’t know exactly where the money’s going. It comes with the territory.”

Long said he still loved Jeter the way he would a kid brother, still saw him as a man with almost no character flaws. But even as he looked at Jeter’s world from the inside out, Long understood the shortstop often lived behind impenetrable walls.

“Derek,” he said, “is the iciest non-icy person I’ve ever met.”

So when Brian Cashman sat down with Derek Jeter to tell him he needed to improve his lateral movement on defense if he wanted to remain at shortstop, the GM knew he would be standing outside of Jeter’s locked screen door at the start of their dinner, and quite possibly freezing outside of Jeter’s igloo at the end of it.

Cashman had little choice but to play the bad guy here. He could not ask Girardi to confront his former teammate in his first significant act as manager, even if Girardi had already confided in friends that Torre’s successor ultimately would be the man to tell Jeter he would have to change positions.

The GM could not risk destroying the manager-captain relationship before it ever had a chance. Besides, Cashman had held a few conversations with Torre about moving Jeter to center field as far back as 2005, when the Yankees were dissatisfied with the aging Bernie Williams and Tony Womack.

Torre told Cashman he would run the idea past Jeter, who was so reliable on pop flies the Yanks believed he could make a Robin Yount–like transition to center. When the GM later asked Torre what had come of his talk with Jeter, the manager said the captain wanted to stay put.

So as dinner began, Cashman reminded Jeter that Torre had spoken with him about a move to center. Only Jeter swore he’d had no such discussion with Torre. In fact, despite Torre’s claim to Cashman that he had spoken with the shortstop about improving his range, Jeter maintained his manager never once mentioned that his defense was an issue.

Cashman nearly fell face first into his soup. He could not believe what he was hearing. Was it possible Derek Jeter had become so big and so iconic that a fellow icon and four-time champ and future Hall of Famer and living New York institution such as Joe Torre was afraid to coach him?

Jeter said Larry Bowa did tell him to shade toward third base, as if to cover for Alex Rodriguez, but that no other coach suggested he needed to improve his own play. Cashman countered that A-Rod was playing at a Gold Glove level, and that if there was a weakness on the left side of the Yankee infield, it was not at third base.

The stunned shortstop and the stunned GM were at a stalemate. The relationship between employer and employee could have detonated on the spot.

Cashman knew there were coaches who did not want to risk their standing with a superstar player by criticizing him. Jeter, a three-time Gold Glover, knew the Yankees were now suggesting his defense was among the reasons the team had not won a title in recent seasons.

Man, it had been a long year, and it had nothing to do with the fact that New York tax officials were maintaining that Jeter owed them three years’ worth of unpaid taxes as a state resident. (The shortstop claimed he was a Florida resident who kept an apartment in the city, and the case was ultimately settled.) The sabermetric crowd was buzzing about this declining range factor and that declining zone rating, Gary Sheffield had hurt him in an HBO interview by saying the biracial Jeter “ain’t all the way black,” the Yankees had lost again in the first round, and Torre had left for L.A.

This dinner could have turned into the ugliest of food fights, yet Cashman could not turn back. He had been taught by Gene Michael to speak his mind, with feeling, just as he did as an assistant GM in the spring of 1996, when he voted to keep the rookie Jeter in the starting lineup.

Right here, right now, Cashman would show his own extreme talent as an executive. He would show why he helped the Yankees win multiple championships.

He would make a critical stand nobody else in the organization had the nerve to make. It was up to the captain to decide how this game would end.

And on this night, with the Yankees telling him for the first time his best was not good enough, Derek Jeter rose above his human frailty, above his allergic reaction to criticism, and put his beating champion’s heart right on the table.

“You mean to tell me we were trying to win a championship every year,” Jeter told Cashman, “and there was a way for me to get better to help us do that, and nobody told me?

“I’m only going to play for so many years, and if you’re telling me there are things I can do to make us better and put us in a better position to win, why wouldn’t someone tell me this? . . . I want to do everything I can to get better. It makes me wonder how good we could’ve been and how many more championships we might’ve won if I’d dealt with this.”

It was the perfect response. It was the winning response.

It was Jeter revealing the essence of his greatness.

The captain was not angry at Torre; he could not get angry with the manager who had meant so much to him. “I was with him since I was twenty-one years old and I pretty much grew up with him,” Jeter said.

But the shortstop was incredulous that the manager and those on his staff never mentioned that he needed to work on his defense. As it turned out, Jeter was more coachable than his bosses had given him credit for.

“I don’t think you should have a problem with trying to get better,” Jeter would say of his dinner meeting with Cashman. Asked if he was completely on board with the GM’s suggestion that he needed to improve defensively, Jeter said, “Why wouldn’t I be? It’s important to get better and to be willing to listen.”

Yes, the ultimate team player was going to take one for the team. The Yankees had a new fitness trainer in mind, one recommended by Jeter’s agent, Casey Close. The Yanks thought the trainer might make a thirty-three-year-old ballplayer a more explosive lateral force, and the shortstop agreed to give it a shot.

The general manager and the captain shook hands. In the middle of a Manhattan restaurant, even if Derek Jeter did not realize it, the prince of the city was reborn.

“Excuse me, excuse me,” Derek Jeter pleaded with the last crowd ever to set foot inside Yankee Stadium. The captain lowered his chin as he held a microphone in his right hand while tugging on the bill of his cap with his left.

Jeter was standing on the field, surrounded by teammates, cameramen, and photographers. A few soundmen on the perimeter reached over the mob with their boom mikes as some 54,610 people stood and waited for the shortstop to speak.

Excuse me, excuse me.
Jeter sounded like a schoolboy poking his head into a conference room full of teachers, looking for directions to the bathroom. The only son of Charles and Dorothy Jeter was closing down the most famous ballpark on earth, trying to settle a night crowd in the city that never sleeps, and still he was careful to mind his manners.

Jeter did not want to make this address, if only because public speaking ranked somewhere between a playoff loss to the Red Sox and not making the playoffs at all on his list of things to avoid like the plague.

Jason Zillo, the Yankee director of media relations, had been bringing it up for about two weeks. “Do I have to do it?” Jeter asked with a knowing smile. “Absolutely not,” Zillo answered.

“You should, though. You’re the captain and the face of the franchise.”

They talked about it almost every day, if only to fill the conversational void left by this cold, hard truth: it was clear Jeter would not be playing in the postseason for the first time in his charmed career. Tampa Bay, of all teams, had emerged as a divisional powerhouse, and Boston had remained steady enough to claim the wild card.

The Yankees? They were defined all year by the tense and distant approach of their first-year manager, Joe Girardi, who seemed less comfortable following Joe Torre than Gene Bartow did following John Wooden. In stark contrast to Torre, Girardi struggled in his daily dealings with the news media and had difficulty telling the truth—or an acceptable version of the truth—when giving injury updates.

Torre also exuded calm; even the unshakable Jeter said his relaxed manager relaxed him. But at times Girardi could be one big bulging vein, wearing out his players by treating every game as if it were week 15 of the NFL season.

Girardi did not have Torre’s people skills, either, did not have his talent for working a room. That was never more evident than on a road trip in early September, a trip the Yankees started twelve and a half games out of first place. Girardi told his players they were not hustling and walked up to a table in the middle of the visitors’ clubhouse in Detroit, a table most observers thought was about to get flipped. Instead of turning it over, Girardi ran around the table three or four times at a cartoonish speed.

When he finally stopped, a sweating, panting Girardi told a clubhouse full of stunned and silent Yankees, “That’s how you hustle.” One witness said the stunt was among the most embarrassing things he had seen a manager do. A second witness said, “Joe tried something, and it fell flat. It looked like he was losing it a bit.”

The Yankees played better in the final weeks of 2008, but theirs was a garbage-time run. If one positive development came out of this lost season, it was this: Yankee Stadium would have a definitive goodbye, rather than one clouded by the uncertainties of a postseason series.

In the days leading up to the September 21 farewell game against the Baltimore Orioles, Jeter told Zillo he would indeed speak to the crowd. “No one would’ve made Derek do it,” the PR man said. “But he had to do it. He had to hold the microphone that night and say something to the crowd.”

The Saturday before the big Sunday night, Jeter was nailed by a pitch on the left hand. He said he would play in the final Stadium game even if the hand was broken (it wasn’t), reasoning he could always try to work out a walk. “It’s kind of selfish to say it,” Jeter said, “but at least for one day I can try and be selfish.”

He entertained Reggie Jackson in his apartment Saturday night, and Mr. October and Mr. November shared their favorite ballpark memories. Sunday morning, Jeter lost himself in televised highlights of the greatest Stadium moments, many of his own making.

On his drive into the Bronx, Jeter was hit hard by the reality that this would be it, his last pilgrimage to a baseball landmark being sacrificed at the altar of greed. Jeter had played more than a thousand games at the Stadium. He adored the old place, and truth be told, he did not see the need for a new place across the street. He did not see why the House That Ruth Built had to be replaced by the House That Ruthless Men Built.

Jeter loved taking his bat to the weight room door and banging it hard for good luck, while scaring everyone inside half to death. Jeter loved the walk from the clubhouse through the tunnel to the dugout, loved reaching up to touch the sign carrying the Joe DiMaggio quote, “I want to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee.”