The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (30 page)

The Yankees staged their own emotional homecoming in the Bronx on September 25, arriving at Yankee Stadium as humbled ambassadors of their broken city. Their longtime VP of ticket operations, Frank Swaine, had lost a son at the World Trade Center, and one of the team’s advance ticket sellers, Hank Grazioso, had lost one son on the 104th floor of Tower 1 and a second son on the 105th floor.

The world had changed for keeps. Police were keeping cars away from Stadium service roads, and everyone’s bags were being searched on the way in, Jeter’s and Torre’s included.

Torre had spent enough time with pregnant widows and children of lost heroes to know the season’s mission statement—win a fourth consecutive championship—had been replaced with a mission of mercy. The manager had already told his players, “We’re not here to save civilization. But our job is to relieve some tension and give everyone something to enjoy.”

Jeter had already done his part before the Yankees took the field. He had called ten-year-old Brielle Saracini in Yardley, Pennsylvania, a fan who had written him a letter, a girl who had told him her father, Victor, was the United Airlines pilot whose plane was crashed into the South Tower.

Brielle wanted to know why her favorite player stood up so straight when he hit; her favorite player wanted to know if Brielle and her sister, Kirsten, and mother, Ellen, would be his guests at the following night’s game against the Devil Rays.

So Brielle and Kirsten talked to Jeter and Williams and El Duque Hernandez during batting practice, and then they watched the game from the shortstop’s seats behind home plate. After Jeter delivered two hits and scored a run in the 5–1 victory, Brielle and Kirsten were ushered onto the field to tap fists with the winners.

Torre gave Brielle the lineup card. “We made her smile,” Jeter said. “At least for today.”

The Yankees won the American League East by thirteen and a half games, and as they entered the postseason they were constantly reminded they were representing a charred, bloodstained city. New York needed something to cheer about, something to serve as a temporary sanctuary from the pain.

A long and prosperous postseason run was in order. But in the seventh inning of the third game of the American League Division Series, when Shane Spencer cut loose his throw from the right-field corner of Network Associates Coliseum and watched it sail like a child’s lost balloon, the Yankees had the sick feeling their season was drifting away with it.

They were clinging desperately to a 1–0 lead over the Oakland A’s, who had taken the first two games of this best-of-five in the Bronx. With a payroll of $38 million, the A’s were about to sweep George Steinbrenner’s dynastic $112 million champs.

Sure, Jorge Posada’s homer had given the Yankees their first lead over these A’s in eighty regular-season and postseason innings, and sure, Mike Mussina was painting a masterpiece in his first playoff start as a Yank.

But Oakland’s precocious and gifted young lefty, Barry Zito, had held the visitors to two lousy hits. Terrence Long had just ripped Mussina’s hundredth pitch for a double down the first-base line that would surely score Jeremy Giambi from first, tie the game, and ultimately leave an eliminated Torre to negotiate a new contract with Steinbrenner on the worst possible terms.

The brother of Oakland superstar Jason Giambi, the Ozzie Canseco to Jason’s Jose, Jeremy Giambi had the two-out benefit of running on contact. But he was something of a lead foot and he had taken a lazy secondary lead off first.

Playing for the benched Paul O’Neill, Spencer gathered Long’s laser and fired toward second baseman Alfonso Soriano, who had run onto the outfield grass as the first cutoff man, and first baseman Tino Martinez, who had pulled himself up from the dirt—he had made a failed dive for Long’s shot—and stationed himself near the bag.

On release, Spencer thought he had made a good throw to the cutoff men in line with Posada at the plate. A second later, the right fielder whispered to himself, “Uh-oh.”

Derek Jeter was too busy to say “Uh-oh.” In the event Long tried for a triple, Jeter was positioned as a potential cutoff man on a throw to third, his head on a swivel. Jeter was watching the exaggerated arc of Spencer’s throw, watching Long’s stride on his way to second, and watching Oakland’s third-base coach, Ron Washington, to see if he was waving Giambi home.

Almost directly behind Washington, up in his executive suite, A’s architect Billy Beane surveyed the scene with great expectations. Beane had been a high school phenom drafted by the Mets in the first round, but he never amounted to more than a bit major league player. Now in the general manager’s seat of a small-market, smaller-budget team, Beane used the A’s as his vehicle of retribution against a sport that had denied him stardom.

Beane had three starting pitchers twenty-six or younger: Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder. Together they went a combined 56-25 in the regular season, and they had held the mighty Yanks to four runs in the first twenty-five innings of the Division Series. The A’s had a young left side of the infield in Miguel Tejada and Eric Chavez, who combined for 63 homers and 227 RBI. Meanwhile, the reigning league MVP, first baseman Jason Giambi, was carrying a .342 batting average and 38 homers and 120 RBI into free agency.

On a payroll south of $40 million, Beane had become the superstar in the front office that he could not be on the field, the maker of a 102-win team. He was the handsome, big-man-on-campus face of a movement that would forever change the way teams measured prospects, emphasizing on-base percentages over batting averages and replacing the “gut feel” of a road-weary scout with mathematical and statistical analysis of a player’s contributions—or lack thereof—to his team.

The writer, historian, and statistician Bill James would name this approach “sabermetrics” as a nod to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), and Beane’s use of this tool to compete with Steinbrenner’s budget—or lack thereof—would inspire the Michael Lewis bestseller
Moneyball
.

But as Jeter measured the developing seventh-inning situation on October 13, as the shortstop watched Spencer’s sailing throw and Washington’s waving arm and Giambi’s chugging feet, Billy Beane was not the cool ex-jock lording over a
Revenge of the Nerds
revolution.

Beane was just another guy who thought he was watching a tied ball game, even after Jeter decided to abort his cutoff position, dash across the grass separating the mound from second base, and chase down a throw he realized was too high for either Soriano or Martinez to catch.

“I ignored Jeter’s movement,” Beane said. “It was like, ‘Where is he going?’ I was so convinced that we had scored. You’re thinking, ‘There’s no way Jeter’s connecting these dots on this play to make it work.’”

Washington had the same feeling as he moved down the line, escorting Giambi home. Back when he had scouted Jeter in the minors, Washington was the one who decided Derek was “not no goddamn shortstop” and wrote him up as a future third baseman. If Oakland’s third-base coach had long accepted the fact that he was wrong, he was about to discover just how wrong he was.

By the time Jeter caught the ball on a bounce on the first-base line some twenty feet from the plate, running toward the Yankees’ dugout and away from Posada, Washington knew he had made the right choice. Jeter’s intangible brilliance was not going to overtake the tangibles of the play, not this time.

Momentum and time and gravity were all working against the Yankee shortstop. But somehow he called an audible on the fly. Jeter converted himself into a wishbone quarterback and delivered a pitch to the tailback that would have made J. C. Watts proud.

Jeter did not just make a backhanded flip to Posada; he had the presence of mind to flip the ball against the grain of his body, so the catcher would receive it on the third-base side of the plate. “That son of a bitch threw the ball back this way,” Washington would say, “because he knew it would tail back in. He threw it so all Posada had to do was catch and tag.”

Before the ball reached Posada, Ramon Hernandez, the on-deck batter, stopped begging and pleading with both arms for Giambi to slide. Hernandez’s arms went slack, almost in a disgusted way. He knew Giambi was coming in standing up.

“If he slides,” Posada said, “I don’t have a chance.”

Giambi did not slide. He was locked in on Posada, expecting the catcher to block the plate and force a collision. He should have focused on Hernandez instead.

“It would have been close either way,” Giambi said.

Posada slapped the tag on his right calf a millisecond before Giambi’s right foot landed on the plate, and the umpire was up to the moment. Kerwin Danley stepped into the scene with purpose, cocking his right hand and throwing a punch that would secure as memorable a play as a shortstop ever made, the infield’s answer to Willie Mays’s over-the-head catch on Vic Wertz’s drive in the 1954 World Series.

Wearing number 7 as a tribute to Mickey Mantle, his father’s favorite player, Giambi had just claimed an un-Mantle-like piece of October lore. Mussina was backing up the play, already resigned to a 1–1 score and a no-decision or worse on his record. The pitcher could not believe Posada held on to the ball or even his mitt after Giambi’s left knee swung through the tag. “Holy shit,” Mussina told himself. “He’s out?”

Jeter usually reserved his signature fist pump in the air for series-clinching outs in the postseason, but he could not resist this time. He clenched his famous right fist and screamed as Giambi looked over his shoulder at Danley’s call.

Jeter did not know it at the time, but this was a fitting moment for him to take a stand. In the coming years Jeremy Giambi would admit to taking steroids, and his brother, Jason, would testify about his own steroid use before a federal grand jury. They were both wearing the colors of a team built around sabermetrics, the analytical approach that would be used like a bayonet to puncture Jeter’s standing in the game.

The disparate forces of steroids and sabermetrics collided at the plate that day, and there was no mathematical formula to explain why Jeter—patron saint of the clean ballplayer, punching bag of the sabermetric set—walked away without a scratch.

Giambi, the corner cutter who did not slide. Beane, the new-age executive who had no sabermetric chart that could evaluate this play. Washington, the doubting Thomas who had sent Giambi home.

In one artful flip of his wrist, Jeter had made believers of them all.

Across the field, A’s manager Art Howe and his players were still trying to make sense of the play. Washington had smoke blowing out of his ears and nostrils, and not because Jeter had just poured a bucket of Gatorade on that old minor league scouting report.

“I walked into the dugout and everybody’s patting Giambi on the back for the effort,” Washington said. “And I point-blank told Giambi right there, ‘You’ve got to fuckin’ hit the dirt.’ That’s exactly what I said. He didn’t say anything.”

Up in his executive suite, Beane was locked in the same state of shock that gripped the hushed crowd of 55,861. His A’s had lost a Game 5 to the Yanks the previous fall, and now they had opened the Game 3 door to the same crushing fate. “This was in the heart of the Yankee aura,” Beane said. “It was a time when you were a club like Oakland, and you were playing the Yankees, at no point did you think they’re not going to come back and beat you.”

Mariano Rivera held the A’s scoreless over the final two innings, but when general manager Brian Cashman said, “It was like Superman flying out of the sky to save the season,” he was not talking about his indomitable closer.

Jeter sat at his locker, ice pack on his shoulder, and told everyone he was just doing his job. “I was supposed to be there,” he said, before batting away the premature obits printed in the hours before Game 3.

“Other people may have thought we were dead,” Jeter said. “But nobody in here thought we were dead.”

Jeter and Torre and Don Zimmer swore the Yankees practiced that very play in spring training, with the shortstop acting as a trailer or free safety. A couple of years earlier, during a defensive drill (“We had interns running the bases,” Zimmer said), a Yankee right fielder retrieved a ball from the corner, fired toward the plate, and overthrew both cutoff men.

The coaches had never seen that kind of overthrow before. “We looked at each other and said, ‘What are we going to do if that happens in the game?’” Zimmer said. “Well, there’s not going to be a play at second or third; what’s the shortstop doing? We found a spot for him. . . .”

But Scott Brosius put all that inside baseball talk in perspective. Of Jeter, Brosius said, “He doesn’t practice the old running-toward-the-dugout-and-flip-it-back-home play.”

J. P. Ricciardi, Oakland’s director of player personnel and a Boston Celtics fan out of Worcester, Massachusetts, likened the play to Larry Bird’s indelible steal of Isiah Thomas’s inbounds pass in the 1987 Eastern Conference finals.

Ricciardi’s boss, Billy Beane? He was not angry over Giambi’s failure to slide, and he was not exasperated over Danley’s failure to see the play as a tie-goes-to-the-runner proposition. Beane was simply awed by Jeter’s grace.

“It’s almost as if Derek designed it,” he said, “like, ‘Hey, I’ve got to go into the dugout anyway.’ It had to be perfect and fit right into his schedule. There were two outs, he flipped to Posada on his way to the dugout, and just sort of disappeared.

“Derek Jeter even has an elegant way of breaking your heart.”

It wasn’t quite so elegant on the night of Game 5, a Bronx night made possible by the Game 3 and Game 4 victories in Oakland, a night that started with Phil Rizzuto following up his ceremonial first pitch by pulling a second ball out of his pocket, trotting toward the first-base line, and then flipping the ball back to his designated catcher, Clay Bellinger, in perfect Jeter form.

The Yankee Stadium crowd loved it, and so did the eighty-four-year-old Rizzuto, who had not told a soul about his planned tribute, not even his bride of fifty-eight years, Cora.

“You’re stealing my thunder,” Jeter told the Scooter as they met in the dugout.