The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (54 page)

Rodriguez started by reading from a crumpled piece of paper, and he choked up and needed to pause for thirty-seven seconds when he reached the part of the script where he was to thank his teammates for their show of support.

The year before, Andy Pettitte had confessed to using human growth hormone to expedite his recovery from injury. But even if Pettitte was not telling the whole truth, people wanted to believe him. He was a neighborly, low-maintenance Yankee and a four-time champ.

Nobody wanted to believe A-Rod, and on that front the third baseman did not disappoint. Rodriguez’s story was impossible to believe.

He said a cousin he would not identify injected him with a substance called “boli” that they obtained in the Dominican Republic. As Rodriguez was reported to have tested positive for the steroid Primobolan and testosterone, it was believed “boli” represented a street name for Primobolan.

But A-Rod claimed he was not sure what he took, or if it had any positive impact on his play, in general, and on his home-run total, in particular. The man with 553 homers and three MVP awards said he took this mystery potion over three years as a Texas Ranger without knowing if his mystery cousin knew how to administer it.

“It was really amateur hour,” Rodriguez said.

A-Rod claimed the “boli” was always injected, never taken orally, and yet when Rodriguez admitted he realized he was doing something wrong, he used an oral visual (“I knew we weren’t taking Tic Tacs”) to make his point.

The news conference was broken up after thirty-two minutes, before Rodriguez could further embarrass himself. The slugger worth $305 million, including his tainted $30 million homer bonus, left the tent a shattered man.

“If this is Humpty Dumpty,” Cashman said, “we’ve got to put him back together again and get him back up on the wall.”

The general manager acknowledged that the news conference did not end anything, that Rodriguez would have to deal with the fallout for the balance of his career. A-Rod was not alone.

Jeter would have to deal with it, too, and he wanted to wait a day before addressing Rodriguez’s not-so-venial sins. For a while, anyway, A-Rod had to go this one alone. The captain was smart enough to wait the twenty-four hours.

When he spoke with reporters on February 18, the captain also was smart enough to stay clear of the tent. Jeter was a baseball player, and a clean one. He would conduct his briefing in the dugout.

Jeter did not come to George M. Steinbrenner Field on this day to throw a figurative arm around A-Rod. Separation—or a greater degree of separation—was on the captain’s agenda.

“One thing that’s irritating and really upsets me a lot,” Jeter told the gathered reporters, “is when you hear people say it was the Steroid Era and that everybody is doing it, and that’s not true. Everybody wasn’t doing it.”

Jeter had his theme for the day, and he wasn’t veering off message. The third baseman was a cheater (“I think he cheated himself,” Jeter said), and the shortstop was not.

“I never took performance enhancers,” Jeter said, “and I never took steroids. . . . I understand a lot of big names are coming out. But that’s not everybody. . . . That’s the thing that’s most upsetting to me.”

The captain said he was disappointed in Rodriguez, and in the parade of former teammates who showed up in the Mitchell Report. “It really has given the game a bad name,” he said.

Only Jeter was not as disappointed in the steroid cheats as he was in the notion that all players were presumed guilty by association, a fact that raised a tough question for the captain to answer:

Why didn’t you use your considerable clout and unmatched public platform to pressure the Players Association into accepting a tougher drug-testing plan?

Jeter had long been the living symbol of the clean ballplayer, the one superstar who would have been voted by the fans and his peers as the least likely major leaguer to end up on the wrong side of a steroid bust. Whenever asked, the shortstop explained that his father was a drug and alcohol abuse counselor who taught his children to stay clear of illegal substances.

“Me and my sister were always educated on that,” Jeter said, “pretty much all the time growing up.”

Asked if he was ever tempted, even a little bit, to dabble in performance-enhancing drugs to keep up with the Joneses (and the McGwires and the Bondses), Jeter said, “No.”

“Why?” came the follow-up.

“It’s a little different when your dad is a drug and alcohol abuse counselor, you know what I’m saying?” he answered. “I’m not saying I’m any better than anybody else. I’ve just been educated on that, and there are side effects, too. Eventually, I think you’re making a deal with the devil.”

So Jeter refused to make a Faustian deal for the sake of another ten to fifteen homers a year. He believed in working on his body and game the old-fashioned way, and besides, he was never obsessed with individual numbers. Jeter realized early in his career he would never be a big home-run hitter, so why risk destroying his good name and legacy to inflate a stat that would not define him anyway?

But Jeter also remained silent when the union resisted drug testing at every performance-enhancing turn, in effect doing more to protect its dirty members than its clean ones.

“You never know what somebody’s doing,” Jeter would argue. “You can’t sit here and speculate and guess, because I think it’s unfair to them. So it wasn’t like I sat down and said, ‘I think this guy’s doing this or that guy’s doing that.’ I’ve always given people the benefit of the doubt.”

Only the Mitchell Report and the BALCO case made it painfully clear the Yankee clubhouse was a place where the benefit of the doubt went to die. Asked if it would have been hard for a Yankee to spend season after season in that clubhouse without suspecting steroid use among some teammates, Mike Mussina said, “I would have to say yes.”

Given Jeter’s intelligence and awareness, he had to have strong suspicions teammates were not just doing their pushups and taking their Flintstone vitamins to remain at an elite competitive level. Jeter also had to know the entire sport was rotting at its core, its integrity compromised in murky underground labs.

Baseball had long been reduced to a battle of pharmacology, with one simple rule of engagement: it’s your back-room chemist against mine. Confronted by this reality, Jeter declined to take a public stand even though his voice would have resonated like no other in the game.

This was a four-time champion, an iconic Yankee, a Madison Avenue heavyweight, and an athlete with enough mass appeal to host
Saturday Night Live
. Yes, before the feds went after BALCO, before Congress started swinging its heavy lumber, and before the players flunked their survey testing, Jeter would have had a better chance of moving an immovable union than Bud Selig had.

But the shortstop was not any more eager to go after the cheats than he was to tell Yankee fans to stop booing A-Rod. “Who am I to assume somebody’s doing something?” Jeter would maintain. “How would you know?

“I mean, how am I supposed to know? Do you think if somebody’s doing something they’re going to come tell me? I was never at a meeting, like a big group or a Players Association meeting. . . . I don’t ever make assumptions on what somebody’s doing or not doing.”

Jeter no longer had to worry about assumption when it came to Alex Rodriguez. A-Rod admitted he had crossed over to the dark side, and it looked like the third baseman and shortstop were a million miles apart.

Jeter had to be thinking his buddy R. D. Long had been right after all: he would never win a World Series title with Rodriguez as a teammate.

Only Long had a little surprise for the captain in February of 2009, one Jeter welcomed. Long said he believed A-Rod’s steroids admission would deflate the slugger’s aura and allow Jeter’s to have a greater positive impact on the club.

“So for the first time since A-Rod arrived,” Long said, “I changed the way I was looking at it.

“I told Derek, ‘You’ve got another ring coming, buddy.’”

As the 2009 season unfolded, the Yankees were defined by the new Stadium, the new recruits, the new Joe Girardi, the new Alex Rodriguez, and the old Derek Jeter.

The Stadium was a $1.5 billion monstrosity, the Steinbrenners’ answer to the Mall of America. A cavernous clubhouse was only the gateway to a labyrinth of fitness rooms, rehab rooms, meal rooms, and other restricted hideaways to allow the players to flee the advancing New York news media.

Tickets were wildly overpriced, running up to $2,500 a pop, giving the new place too much of a wine-and-cheese personality and not enough of the beer-and-pretzel intensity that made the old Stadium a forbidding house to the visiting side. Pop-ups kept riding some mystery jet stream over the outfield wall in right and right center, turning the new Stadium into a homer-happy Little League field and mocking the fact that its dimensions were identical to those of its predecessor.

Soon enough the ticket prices were reduced, the home-run rates were tempered, and the public’s focus was returned to the Yankees’ improved product on the field. Brian Cashman had spent $423.5 million of the Steinbrenners’ money on three free agents—CC Sabathia, A. J. Burnett, and Mark Teixeira—and traded for free-spirited right fielder Nick Swisher, moves the GM made to ensure the Yanks never again missed the postseason under his watch.

As a legitimate ace, Sabathia was the key to the off-season plan. He had concerns about the Yankees that extended beyond the fact that they played 3,000 miles away from his California home.

“CC’s main concern was our clubhouse, and how people got along,” Cashman said. “We had a reputation for not being together. We had a reputation of fighting each other, and that was a big concern there.

“I told him the truth. ‘Yeah, we are broken. One reason we’re committing [$161 million] to you is you’re a team builder. We need somebody to bring us all together.’”

Sabathia knew all about the Jeter–A-Rod divide, so Cashman had to throw more than money at the extra-large lefty with the gregarious personality and easy smile. He took a top-secret flight to Sabathia’s home and told him he could be the grand marshal of the Thanksgiving Day parade, told him about the eclectic nature of the tristate area, told him he could own the town in a New York minute.

“I had to be John Calipari,” Cashman said. He had to get this blue-chip recruit to sign the Yankees’ letter of intent.

“CC’s like Santa Claus,” the GM said. “He lights up an entire room.”

Cashman thought his broken team needed that positive life force. And as much as Sabathia’s generosity of spirit, and Swisher’s nonstop goofiness, and Burnett’s pie-in-the-face celebrations altered the dynamics of the clubhouse, the dramatic changes made by the incumbent manager and third baseman were no less important.

Girardi was pressed by Cashman and the PR man, Jason Zillo, to lighten up. The GM handed Girardi a magazine profile on Giants coach Tom Coughlin, who had softened the jagged edges of his personality on the way to his epic Super Bowl upset over Bill Belichick’s unbeaten Patriots. “You need to read this,” said Cashman, a former roommate of Coughlin’s son.

Girardi read it, thought about it, then thought about it some more. On the eve of training camp, he invited Zillo into his office, closed the door, and showed the PR man a yellow legal pad full of notes to himself, notes on how he wanted to change. They spoke for ninety minutes before the meeting broke up and Zillo called Cashman.

“There’s been a breakthrough,” the PR man reported.

Girardi canceled a spring training practice for a billiards tournament, just as Coughlin had canceled a training camp practice for a bowling outing. The manager eased the disconnect with his players and was not as quick to deceive the press. His bosses believed his user-friendly style was showing up in the box score.

They felt the same way about Alex Rodriguez’s decision to reinvent himself one more time. A-Rod was not just humiliated by his own steroid confessions; he was a physical wreck going into his March surgery to repair a torn labrum in his right hip. He feared his career might be over, or at least permanently impaired.

“I’d hit rock bottom,” A-Rod would say.

Around the same time
Details
magazine published a piece on Rodriguez that included a photo showing A-Rod in a muscle shirt, kissing his own reflection in the mirror. So after Rodriguez rehabbed from surgery, and before he rejoined the team in early May, A-Rod would be dragged to a Tampa diner, Mom’s Place, by two people close to him—Zillo and longtime friend Gui Socarras.

Rodriguez had surrounded himself with an ever-growing circle of advisers and crisis counselors, including Madonna’s manager, Guy Oseary, John McCain’s strategist, Ben Porritt, PR man Richard Rubenstein, and, of course, Scott Boras. But none of these suits had the nerve to piece together an intervention quite like this: Zillo and Socarras shouted down A-Rod over ninety minutes, ordering him to shed his self-serving skin for keeps.

“I’m glad I had two friends that were very honest with me,” Rodriguez said of the ambush.

Two days after this breakfast meeting, A-Rod hit the first postsurgical pitch he saw for a three-run homer in Baltimore. Of greater consequence, he maintained a relatively humble demeanor over the course of the season and, in his words, “divorced myself from any personal achievements.”

Rodriguez would say he had spent more time with his teammates off the field—at dinners and backyard barbecues—than he had in his first five Yankee years combined. Although A-Rod did not say so publicly, it was obvious Derek Jeter had embraced him as never before.

For one, Jeter had given up trying to understand why A-Rod could not be more like him. For two, Jeter realized an emasculated A-Rod was someone worth giving another shot.

The captain saw A-Rod was making a legitimate attempt to curb his high-maintenance ways. More often than in the past, Jeter was seen engaging Rodriguez in small talk in the clubhouse, in the dugout, around the batting cage. They acted less like business partners with competing agendas and more like teammates with a common goal.