The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (36 page)

Fireworks exploded out of the fake rock formation in left center as photographers moved in to capture this stunning image of Jeter. After a few minutes the shortstop grabbed his cap and glove and headed for the tunnel and the quickest postseason exit of his big league life.

“It’s not a good feeling,” Jeter said. “I mean, you have one goal, and that’s to get to the World Series and win a championship. You shouldn’t accept losing.”

To a man the Yankees accepted the fact that Anaheim was the superior team. Torre said the Angels reminded him of his ’96 champs. The Angels scored 31 runs on 56 hits in the four games, and the Yanks could not get the ball to Mariano Rivera after Game 1.

“We’ve changed our personality a little bit,” Torre said.

For the worse.

There was a small-picture moment in Game 4 that made a big-picture statement about what had become of the dynastic Yanks. Tim Salmon hit a tapper to Wells in the fourth inning, and the left-hander turned and fired to first, his throw low and inside.

Giambi had a choice: go for the ball and a possible catch while getting pancaked by Salmon, or let Wells’s errant throw sail away while the runner headed to second base.

Tino Martinez? Every veteran Yankee knew what choice he would have made. But the hulking Giambi—who had a good series at the plate—chose to preserve his body and let the Angels have their way.

Anaheim did not score in the inning, but that was not the point. The old Yankees always went for the ball, regardless of the consequences, and Giambi’s Yankees did not.

“They wanted it more than us,” Jorge Posada said of the Angels. “It seemed like some of [our] guys were just acting like we lost a regular-season game. I can’t understand that.”

Neither could Jeter. He became the first man to collect 100 postseason hits, and he batted .500 for the series, but he was not asking anyone to spray him with champagne over that.

The Angels had never won a playoff series and had gone 2,527 games without appearing in one, and yet, “No team has ever played better against us than that team has,” Jeter said.

“They did everything better than we did . . . I don’t see anyone beating them.”

Jeter was right. The Angels would defeat the Giants in a seven-game World Series classic the Yankee shortstop could not bring himself to watch.

After the Game 7 loss to the Diamondbacks the previous fall, Steinbrenner barked, “I believe in what Ernest Hemingway said. The way to be a good loser is to practice at it. And I ain’t going to be practicing.”

Suddenly Steinbrenner and Jeter and the rest of the Yanks were practicing how to lose. They would get damn good at it, too.

George Steinbrenner was not going to absorb any humiliating defeat in silence. This was not the programming he had in mind when he launched his own TV station, the YES Network, in March. The more he thought about the money spent on the 2002 Yankees and the different ways the no-frills Angels had dismantled his team, the more Steinbrenner stewed.

The Boss needed a suitable forum, and he got one in a wide-ranging December interview scheduled to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his purchase of the Yankees on January 3, 1973. Given the opportunity to discuss his three decades of ownership with Wayne Coffey of the
Daily News
, Steinbrenner teed off on figures past and present, but especially present.

He pointed out that Joe Torre had been fired three times before he became a certain Hall of Famer with the Yankees, and that Torre had come so far “because of an organization, and he’s got to remember that.” Steinbrenner also fired a hard jab at Don Zimmer and the rest of Torre’s staff, saying he wanted the coaches “to understand that just being a friend of Joe Torre’s is not enough.”

Only the Boss did not become the Boss by taking on managers and coaches. The old Big Ten football man was never afraid to sack his star quarterbacks, a truth discovered the hard way by the likes of Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, and Don Mattingly.

So Steinbrenner blitzed Derek Jeter from the blind side.

Never mind that Jeter had batted .500 against the Angels, or that Jeter had 101 postseason hits at age twenty-eight. Steinbrenner cared only that his shortstop had not won him a title since the Boss guaranteed him $189 million of his hard-earned cash.

Jeter had gone from winning his fourth title and signing the monster contract to losing in the World Series and then losing in the first round. Jeter had gone from hitting .339 and signing the monster contract to hitting .311 and then .297. Naturally, Steinbrenner was not paying nine figures for this.

Asked if he saw Jeter as a strong candidate to become the team’s first captain since Mattingly, whom the Boss once ordered to get a haircut, Steinbrenner actually questioned the shortstop’s focus, declared that Jeter didn’t need to do as many commercials as he did, and worried aloud about his late-night habits.

“When I read in the paper that he’s out until 3 a.m. in New York City going to a birthday party, I won’t lie,” Steinbrenner told the
News.
“That doesn’t sit well with me. That was in violation of Joe’s curfew. That’s the focus I’m talking about.

“Jeter’s still a young man. He’ll be a very good candidate for the captaincy. But he’s got to show me and the other players that that’s not the right way. He’s got to make sure his undivided, unfettered attention is given to baseball. I just wish he’d eliminate some of the less important things and he’d be right back to where he was in the past.”

Jeter was stunned when he read Steinbrenner’s comments. The very essence of what he believed himself to be—an athlete devoted exclusively to winning—was being debunked by his own employer.

Steinbrenner’s criticism of Jeter’s endorsement load made little sense, as the shortstop and his agent, Casey Close, turned down more sponsorship deals than they ever accepted. Jeter spent most of his off-season a long way from Madison Avenue, in Tampa, so he could work out at the Yankees’ facilities. He was a lot more concerned about his bat speed than he was about his portfolio.

Close also wanted to avoid overexposure, and to pick corporate partners that best matched up with his client’s image. In fact, at least one prominent marketing expert criticized the strategy for failing to fully capitalize on Jeter’s earning power.

Sonny Vaccaro, who fired the first shot in the sneaker company revolution by signing Michael Jordan for Nike, said Close erred when he agreed to put Jeter under the Jordan brand umbrella and group him in a commercial with lesser lights such as the NBA’s Ray Allen, the NFL’s Randy Moss, and boxing’s Roy Jones.

“Derek Jeter was good-looking, articulate, free of scandal, a champion, and he played for one of the greatest brands in sports,” Vaccaro said. “Jeter was a premier guy and he allowed himself to become second fiddle, ancillary.”

But just as Jeter was not trying to break Alex Rodriguez’s salary record, Close was not trying to drive Jeter past Jordan and Tiger Woods on the endorsement front. Jeter’s goals were to protect his image and win as many championships as possible, and not in that order.

The Yankees had not won since 2000, a drought of biblical proportions in Steinbrenner’s world. Jeter believed that was the primary reason the Boss bashed him.

So he met with Steinbrenner and left the sit-down believing he had sufficiently explained to the Boss that the gossip pages often printed bogus information about his nocturnal travels, and that he had no interest in becoming another Broadway Joe.

But the shortstop grew angry again in February after his quote in the
Daily News
following Steinbrenner’s controversial remarks—“I’m not going to change. Not at all”—inspired the screaming back-page headline “party on.” Jeter believed the line was taken out of context, and that the headline gave fans the impression he was more interested in carousing than he was in making sure the Yankees did not suffer another first-round defeat.

Jeter had not been this angry about a tabloid headline since the
Post
’s “shortslop” in ’96, and he decided to punch back at all New York metropolitan-area outlets that covered him on a regular basis. A day after assuring the Yankees’ beat writers gathered at the team’s minor league complex that he would address the Steinbrenner controversy when he reported to camp, the Associated Press ran an interview with Jeter that covered all the bases in a way the shortstop never did.

“He’s the Boss, and he’s entitled to his opinion, right or wrong, but what he said has been turned into me being this big party animal,” Jeter told the AP’s Steve Wilstein in the interview arranged by Close. “He even made a reference to one birthday party. That’s been turned into that I’m like Dennis Rodman now.

“I don’t think that’s fair. I have no problems with people criticizing how I play. But it bothers me when people question my work ethic. That’s when you’re talking about my integrity. I take a lot of pride in how hard I work. I work extremely hard in the off-season. I work extremely hard during the season to win. My priorities are straight.”

Jeter said the
Daily News
“party on” headline sent fans a message that “couldn’t be farther from the truth” and repeated his claim to Steinbrenner that the gossip pages were putting him in clubs and bedrooms he had never visited.

“I’m not a hermit,” Jeter said. “It’s not like I’m locked up in my house. . . . They’ve got me dating everyone imaginable. A lot of it I wish I would have.”

The writers who regularly covered Jeter were upset he chose to give his side to the AP, and to a columnist he did not know. Jeter was not apologizing. He said Steinbrenner’s remarks had gone national—Jeter was pestered about them at the Super Bowl in San Diego—and so he decided to go national, too.

Upon arriving in camp on February 17, Jeter met with close to a hundred reporters in the Yankees’ dugout at Legends Field and acknowledged he was concerned his pristine reputation had been splattered with mud for the first time.

“Image is important, because that’s who I am,” Jeter said. “It’s not like I have this false image. I don’t want Yankee fans to think I don’t care if we win or lose, that I’m caught up in the New York nightlife.”

Of course, there was one sure-fire way to prove that to any fan inclined to doubt Jeter’s commitment for the first time—win. Win it all. To help Jeter toward that end, his most prominent critic, Steinbrenner, opened his vault again and signed Cuban pitcher and defector Jose Contreras to a four-year, $32 million deal and signed Japanese slugger Hideki Matsui to a three-year, $21 million deal.

The Yankees outlasted the Red Sox in the pursuit of Contreras, a development that inspired Boston’s new boy-wonder GM, Theo Epstein, to take out his frustrations on the furniture in his hotel room and compelled team president Larry Lucchino to tell the
New York Times
, “The evil empire extends its tentacles even into Latin America.”

And Japan. Matsui was not just a star with the Yomiuri Giants; he was, in the words of Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, “the Tom Cruise of his country,” a claim that Yankees assistant GM Jean Afterman, a major player in the Matsui recruitment, called an understatement.

“When Tom Cruise goes to a London premiere,” Afterman said, “he’s not carrying the hopes and dreams of a nation like Hideki. He’s carrying the hopes and dreams of Warner Brothers.”

As a Yankee, Matsui would help Jeter carry the hopes and dreams of George Steinbrenner, who would not start the season in a good mood, not after he fined David Wells $100,000 for writing in the released galleys of his upcoming autobiography, among other things, that he pitched his perfect game in 1998 while “half-drunk.”

The controversy irreparably harmed the close relationship Steinbrenner had with Wells, who would refuse to appear with the owner and the rest of his high-profile pitching staff on the cover of
Sports Illustrated
. The flap also began tearing at the relationship between Torre and management.

Steinbrenner gathered his manager and team executives in a Legends Field conference room, with team president Randy Levine on speakerphone. The Boss told Torre to demote Wells to the bullpen, and Torre argued that Steinbrenner should simply fine the pitcher. In the middle of the heated back-and-forth, Levine tried to interrupt before Torre snapped, “Randy, shut the fuck up,” making himself a new blood enemy in the highest corner of Steinbrenner’s cabinet.

In a subsequent meeting between Steinbrenner and Rick Cerrone, senior director of media relations (Levine and chief operating officer Lonn Trost were on speakerphone), the Boss made it clear he was livid that the New York sports talk radio team of Mike Francesa and Chris Russo were scheduled to do their popular
Mike and the Mad Dog
show live from the Yankees’ facility, and that the show would surely focus on the Wells book.

Steinbrenner called for a vote to decide whether the Yankees should cancel the on-site appearance, and Levine and Trost voted with Cerrone to keep the show scheduled. The PR man gave some players advance warning that Francesa and Russo would likely pepper them with questions about Wells’s galleys, which included jabs at Mike Mussina and Roger Clemens and assertions that steroid and amphetamine use was rampant in baseball.

Jeter was among the players Cerrone warned. “You just worry about Wells,” the shortstop said. “I’ll be fine.”

Even after the made-in-tabloid-heaven mano a mano he waged with Steinbrenner, Jeter was reestablishing the fact that he did not need any PR help. Jeter acted as his own senior publicist, almost always saying and doing the right things.

He could have used a big season, though, the kind of season he had in 1999. Jeter could have used the kind of season he had when the Yankees were ripping off titles, the kind, Reggie Jackson said, “where Jeter didn’t lead the league in anything except victories. People looked at him as the best player in baseball even though he didn’t have the best skills, which is a very hard thing to pull off.”

A lingering shoulder injury had helped drag Jeter’s numbers back to the pack, not that he would ever admit it. Jeter refused to be defined by his stat sheet, anyway. When a New York–based columnist told Jeter he was planning to write that the shortstop had not been playing up to his $189 million deal, Jeter defended himself this way: