The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (58 page)

Steinbrenner’s death was the bigger story, of course, as he was a global figure who had become the most famous owner in the history of American team sports. Jeter was fond of Steinbrenner, the man who made him captain, and the feared employer who forever granted Jeter the exclusive privilege of dousing him with champagne in a winning October clubhouse.

Remarkably enough, the star owner and star shortstop had only one public run-in (when Steinbrenner suggested after the 2002 season that Jeter was partying too much), and even that tiff ended in a most amicable way—with the two of them dancing in a Visa ad.

So Jeter was the right Yankee to speak to the crowd before the first home game since Steinbrenner’s death, the first game the Yanks played after the All-Star Game in Anaheim. Without reading from notes, the captain delivered an eloquent tribute to Steinbrenner and Sheppard and called them “two shining stars in the Yankee universe.” It was another clutch performance by a shortstop who made a cottage industry out of them.

Only that morning, Jeter was angered by a column in the
Daily News
written by its longtime baseball voice, Bill Madden, who wondered how it was possible that not a single Yankee player, past or present, had bothered to show up for Sheppard’s funeral the day before.

As the captain and the player who insisted that Sheppard’s taped voice introduce him at the plate after the public address man retired, Jeter instantly became the face of the no-shows. Asked why he didn’t attend the funeral, Jeter maintained that there are different ways of honoring a man’s memory, a fair point for sure.

But when Jeter said, “To be honest with you, I didn’t know his funeral was yesterday,” many veteran Jeter watchers were stunned. For once, the shortstop had come to work unprepared. This marked the first time in Jeter’s distinguished career that he had given a dog-ate-my-homework explanation for anything.

The captain survived the slip-up. A few days later, a
SportsBusiness Daily
survey of sports business executives and media personalities showed that Jeter was far and away the most marketable player in baseball. Jeter received thirty-nine first-place votes in the survey, and the runner-up, Albert Pujols, received all of two.

The shortstop remained a Madison Avenue heavyweight because of his looks, his relative humility, his ability to dodge controversy, and his talent for treating the biggest October games as if they were pickup games in the park.

“The greatest thing about Jeter,” Alex Rodriguez said, “is he treats Game 7 of the World Series the same way as the first game of spring training, literally. I’ve never seen a player quite like that.

“He’s Mr. Simplicity. He keeps it as simple as possible. All players can learn something from Jeter, because he’s a master at it.”

In August, after going homerless in forty-six at-bats, Rodriguez had blasted the 600th home run of his career the night after Jeter advised him to relax and try for a single. The captain shared his experiences in running down Lou Gehrig for the club’s all-time hits record, and A-Rod seemed to take it to heart.

When Rodriguez crossed the plate, he was greeted by a beaming Jeter, who had scored ahead of him. The captain gave A-Rod a double high-five, and after the third baseman took his curtain call and retreated down the steps of the dugout, a smiling Jeter was waiting there for another hug.

Yes, their first championship together had improved an already improving relationship. “It’s been huge,” said general manager Brian Cashman. “The fact that they have a good relationship now, and it’s seamless, it’s just another distraction—like Alex supposedly can’t hit in the postseason—that we don’t have to hear about anymore. It’s just another pressure valve relieved.”

Only at season’s end, the A-Rod–Jeter discussion didn’t revolve around the return of their feel-good karma; it revolved around their age and loss of range, and whether the Yankees could win another title with them making like bronze statues on the left side of the infield.

Rodriguez was signed through the 2017 season and still had enough power at the plate to make for a credible designated hitter if needed. Jeter had no such power and for the first time was a Yankee without a contract.

But despite the questions raised by his 2010 performance, Jeter did arrive at the negotiating table with some friendly facts on his side. He committed the fewest errors of his career (6), managed a league-best .989 fielding percentage, and won his fifth Gold Glove award (an honor mocked in many baseball corners), making him only the sixth shortstop to win at least five and the oldest American Leaguer to win one since a thirty-six-year-old Luis Aparicio claimed his ninth in 1970.

Jeter stood 106 games short of Mickey Mantle’s franchise record of games played (2,401) and, of course, needed 74 hits to become the first Yankee to reach 3,000. No, the executives on the other side of the table—Cashman, Levine, and Hal Steinbrenner—couldn’t ignore the history Jeter represented.

The captain was chiseling himself into the franchise’s own Mount Rushmore, a truth captured a year earlier by one of the best young pitchers in the game, Florida’s Josh Johnson, who pumped his fist after blowing a 96-mile-per-hour fastball by the Yankees’ leadoff man. “Striking out Derek Jeter,” Johnson said. “I’ll remember that for the rest of my life.”

Yes, Jeter’s legend was a powerful force. Chris Webber, the former NBA All-Star, didn’t remember the teenage Jeter from the time his AAU basketball team defeated the Kalamazoo Blues. But as a grownup, Webber said, “I’ve told that story in every bar I’ve ever walked into, that I once played basketball against Derek Jeter. And then in the parking lot afterward, I usually add that I struck him out once playing baseball.”

For good reason: Jeter was the biggest star in the biggest city. He made New York an American League town, seizing it from the Mets, and he took the town from the Knicks, too.

Madison Square Garden was the place to be in the early to mid-nineties, and then two things happened that made a seat behind the Yankee Stadium plate more desirable than a courtside seat at the Garden.

Pat Riley left.

Derek Jeter arrived.

This is what Jeter and his agent, Casey Close, wanted to sell to the Yankees in their contract talks. The captain had been an invaluable asset to the brand, to the new Stadium, and to the YES Network, and he had never embarrassed the franchise the way Alex Rodriguez had.

Jeter was everything the Yankees wanted their mythology to be. He was the right man to make the final speech at the old Stadium across the street, the right man to pack up that DiMaggio sign he forever reached up and touched in the tunnel and carry it home with the memories.

Clyde King, the Steinbrenner aide who wanted Jeter demoted before the start of his rookie season in 1996, would come to see Jeter as perhaps the greatest all-around shortstop of all time. “I played with Pee Wee Reese, and Jeter is better,” King would say. “I had a ton of respect for Ernie Banks, but Jeter is better than him, too, because he can do it all.”

Jerry Manuel, who had managed the White Sox and Mets, said he would take Jeter over Rodriguez, Nomar Garciaparra, Miguel Tejada, Omar Vizquel, and every other modern-day shortstop in his prime. “No question I would start my club with Jeter over all of those guys,” Manuel said. “He gives so much to the game, and not to individual stats, that when the game’s on the line it gives back to him.”

So legions of Yankees fans were proud that their sons and daughters chose to wear number 2, the most identifiable marker of an untarnished star. “If you wanted a son and didn’t have one,” said Leonard Biro, the father of Jeter’s lifelong friend Doug, “Derek would be the person to be your son. His character is very high. . . . He’s definitely a great example, unlike most of the others getting all that money.”

Money. Derek Jeter was regarded as the ultimate money player, and yet one who never played for money.

Only in the winter of his discontent, the winter after his 2010 season, Jeter was suddenly being defined in strictly financial terms.

As in, How much should the Yankees pay an aging singles hitter who had a slugger’s impact on the franchise’s legacy and bottom line?

Cashman, Levine, and Steinbrenner first met with Jeter and his longtime representative from Creative Artists Agency, Casey Close, on November 8 in Tampa. The meeting lasted several hours, and it opened with the Yankees assuring Jeter they wanted him to return, and with Jeter assuring the Yankees he wanted to play only for them. A good start.

Steinbrenner did a lot of the early talking, telling Jeter how much he meant to his father, to his family, and to the franchise as a whole. Hal promised Jeter he planned on keeping him a Yankee for life.

The captain responded by telling Steinbrenner he wanted the same thing. A better start.

But then it was time to do business, a time that would end up fracturing the bond between iconic player and iconic team.

“I just want what’s fair,” Jeter told the Yankees executives.

Steinbrenner handed over the meeting to Cashman and Levine, a hardened money man who had been the chief labor negotiator for Major League Baseball and who had served as New York City’s labor commissioner and its Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Planning and Administration under Rudy Giuliani.

Levine had clashed with Joe Torre before Torre bolted for Los Angeles. He did not want to send Derek Jeter through the same door.

Nor did Cashman, the former intern who rose through the organizational ranks by winning Boss Steinbrenner’s perilous game of
Survivor
. Cashman wanted Jeter back, too, but the general manager was a fierce competitor whose modest physical stature belied his appetite for the fight. Cashman was Willie Pep in a golf shirt and slacks.

When the GM took over the meeting with a presentation on the state of Jeter’s game, he pulled no punches. In his gofer days, Cashman used to help Yankee Stadium security people pull unruly drunks out of the stands. As an executive he had gotten tough with the likes of Bernie Williams and Johnny Damon, and in his 2007 dinner with Jeter the GM proved he wasn’t afraid to get tough with the captain.

So with Jeter sitting right there in this first round of contract talks, Cashman raised the concerns the organization had about the captain’s bat speed and range in the field, and his declining slugging and on-base percentages in two of the previous three seasons. It was a detailed and pointed critique, and Jeter did a slow burn while listening to it.

The agent, Close, had his say in response, emphasizing his client’s tremendous impact on the franchise on the field and off, and the two sides parted without exchanging any hard numbers. If they didn’t agree on a contract in this first sit-down, they did agree to keep the negotiations private. The captain would have it no other way.

Soon enough Jeter and the Yankees made their first informal offers. Close said his client was entitled to six years at $25 million a pop, and Cashman said he thought Close’s client was worth three years at $13 million a pop. These were parameters more than they were hard estimates, but still, the Yankees and their shortstop opened up the preliminary bidding three years and $111 million apart.

Yes, Hal Steinbrenner had it right. Things could get messy.

The Yankees increased their offer to three years and a $15 million wage, and Close countered with four or five years and a $23 million wage, which Cashman and Levine took to mean four years and a $23 million wage. The $111 million gap had been reduced to a $47 million gap.

It was progress, painful progress, but the Yankees made it clear that Jeter would have to do almost all of the compromising from that point forward. Meanwhile, Jeter and Close were stewing over what they believed to be the team’s breach of their agreement to keep details of their talks out of the press.

Following Steinbrenner’s radio remarks that the negotiations could get “messy” and that he needed to be mindful he was running a business, and Cashman’s remarks that he didn’t believe in paying players for milestones, Close told AOL FanHouse’s Ed Price that Jeter agreed “with Hal’s and Brian’s recent comments that this contract is about business and winning championships. Clearly, baseball is a business, and Derek’s impact on the sport’s most valuable franchise cannot be overstated. Moreover, no athlete embodies the spirit of a champion more than Derek Jeter.”

The agent thought that would be the end of it, but his client was bothered by what he perceived to be additional organizational leaks in the news media designed to make him appear greedy, even delusional. Jeter wasn’t thrilled with Levine’s comments at the GM meetings, either, the ones making it clear that the Yankees were prepared to pay the shortstop only for his on-field skills.

Jeter’s father, Charles, was as unhappy as his son over the team’s offer of a pay cut (the shortstop made $21 million in the final year of his $189 million deal), and over the way the captain was being portrayed in many corners of the media. That left Close in a difficult spot.

The Yankees were willing to keep Jeter the game’s highest-paid middle infielder, they knew no competing team would offer Jeter a $15 million salary, and they knew Jeter wasn’t leaving for a competing team anyway. The agent had no market for his client’s services, no leverage, and no way to cloak the fact that Jeter was coming off his worst season.

Close kept coming back to everything the captain meant to the brand, the ballpark, and the network. The agent did raise Alex Rodriguez’s monstrous $305 million contract (including up to $30 million in bonus money if he ultimately breaks the career home-run record) early in the negotiations, but A-Rod’s deal wasn’t something Close kept harping on.

The agent did remind the Yankees that they had given a ton of money to players who hadn’t done a fraction of what Jeter had done for the franchise. None of it moved Cashman and Levine off their numbers.

They argued that Close used A-Rod’s $252 million deal with Texas to land Jeter’s $189 million, when both were shortstops, and that the Yankees had every right to use comparable players in negotiations this time around.