The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter (49 page)

The sabermetric crowd was ganging up on Jeter, the three-time Gold Glove winner who was number 1 in the hearts of Yankee fans, number 2 in their game programs, and number 30 or so in the sabermetric rankings of everyday shortstops.

Bill James, one of the godfathers of the movement, a widely respected author and statistician hired by the Red Sox as a senior adviser after the 2002 season, wrote a piece for
The Fielding Bible
comparing Jeter to Everett based on data provided him by John Dewan and his fellow sabermetricians at Baseball Info Solutions.

“One of their conclusions,” James wrote, “was that Derek Jeter was probably the least effective defensive player in the major leagues, at any position.”

James watched video of the best twenty plays and worst twenty plays made by Jeter and Everett in 2005, film that showed the Yankee shortstop playing shallow and rarely setting his feet, and the Astro shortstop playing deep and almost always setting his feet. James also studied charts and summaries of every 2005 play Jeter and Everett did and did not make.

He concluded that Everett failed to make 41 plays that “given the vector, velocity and type of play, the expectation that the shortstop would make the play was greater than or equal to 50%,” while Jeter failed to make 93 such plays. James also concluded Everett did make 59 plays one would not expect a shortstop to make (expectation of less than 50 percent), while Jeter made only 19 such plays.

James allowed that Jeter was a superior offensive player to Everett, and one who was responsible for creating 105 runs in 2005 against Everett’s 61. But the author of the annual
Baseball Abstract
books argued in
The Fielding Bible
, “It makes intuitive sense that Derek Jeter is the worst defensive shortstop of all time. . . . The worst defensive shortstop in baseball history would
have
to be someone like Jeter who is unusually good at other aspects of the game.”

Mathematical equations and statistical analyses had long been suggesting Jeter was a below-average fielder despite his soft hands and his unmatched ability to come in on slow grounders and to run down pop flies over his head. In 2003, a Monmouth University mathematics professor named Michael Hoban wrote a book,
Fielder’s Choice: Baseball’s Best Shortstops
, that ranked Jeter as the worst in the game at his position because of the dramatic decline in his range. In 1997, Hoban wrote, Jeter’s range was 39 points above the league average; by 2002, his range “had fallen to a disastrous 75 points below the league average.”

Dewan’s plus-minus rating, based on a computerized study of every chance and designed to identify the number of plays a fielder made above or below the average defender, left Jeter with a wretched minus 34 in 2005.

Shane Jensen, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, led a group of researchers who studied every ball put in play from 2002 through 2005. Jensen concluded that Jeter was costing the Yankees 13.81 runs per season, and that Alex Rodriguez was saving the Rangers 10.40 runs per season before leaving for New York. Jensen would say his statistics suggest “the Yankees have one of the best defensive shortstops playing out of position in deference to one of the worst defensive shortstops.”

Of course, the sabermetricians could not account for the fact that Jeter played hurt as often as any other position player in the game. Despite the flip play against Oakland, despite the relay throw to get Timo Perez at the plate in the Subway Series, despite those Jordan-esque jumps from deep in the hole, their exhaustive studies showed what they showed—Jeter helped the Yankees with his bat, but not with his glove.

“Jeter gets more outrageous and patently false praise than any other player,” James would say.

But the sabermetricians rarely, if ever, argued that Jeter was not a good to great player. Asked if he would want Jeter on his team, knowing what he knew about the shortstop’s abilities, good and bad, James did not let his printouts or his Red Sox paychecks get in the way of his response.

“Oh, absolutely,” he would say. “Jeter is a tremendous player, for reasons that I shouldn’t have to explain.”

Jeter did not feel the need to explain them, either, not when confronted with sabermetric data suggesting he was a liability on one side of the ball. The captain took great pride in his defense. He wrapped his entire baseball identity around the only position he ever wanted to play.

Jeter also spent entire winters protecting his claim to that position. He worked out with his trainer, Rafael Oquendo, and logged more hours at the Yankees’ minor league facility in Tampa than any veteran player.

So at his locker, Jeter offered no warm welcomes to reporters who wanted to ask about a possible position change in the future. On a day A-Rod was getting rested, goes a story Mattingly told, the coach once asked Jeter—half-jokingly—if he would consider playing third base.

“Ain’t happening,” Jeter answered.

He came in as a shortstop, and he wanted to go out as a shortstop, even if he knew that was not a realistic proposition. Cal Ripken Jr. had to move to third base full-time in 1997, at thirty-six, and Jeter was approaching his thirty-third birthday.

One day during spring training, Jeter had baseball mortality on his mind when he came across Gene Michael, the Yankees’ longtime executive and scout.

“How much longer do you think I can play shortstop?” Jeter asked Michael.

“One year,” Michael joked.

“One year? Nah, I’m serious. What do you think?”

“How long do you want to keep doing this?”

“I want to play another ten years.”

“Ten years? Not at shortstop.”

“I can DH later. . . . Or I’ll just move over to first base. I’ll have a good on-base percentage and I can hit with a little power there.”

“Well, don’t you have anything else you like to do besides play baseball?”

“No, I don’t. That’s what I love to do.”

Jeter added that he wanted to own a team someday but made it clear he planned on extending his playing career into his forties. The captain was not vacating his shortstop position one day before he absolutely had to, and he was not allowing his sabermetric critics to convince him that day should come sooner rather than later.

“You can’t mathematically figure out how everybody plays defense, otherwise you’re just playing Nintendo,” Jeter would say. “You’re playing on a computer. You can’t mathematically figure that out. That’s impossible to do, so I don’t care.”

Jeter said he did not pay attention to sabermetric rankings, and he was incredulous when asked why.

“A
computer
?” he said. “I don’t know anything about it. I haven’t learned about it, and I really don’t care to learn about it. . . . I think it’s literally impossible to do that, because everybody doesn’t play in the same position and doesn’t have the same pitcher. The ball’s not hit to the same spot, and you don’t have the same runner. . . . One day he’s got a leg problem, the next day he doesn’t.

“You just can’t do it. There are too many factors that go into it.”

Only it was not just the computer. Even the most ardent Jeter fans were seeing a slower and less supple version of the shortstop’s former self in the field.

One was his former teammate and coach Joe Girardi, National League Manager of the Year in Florida who was fired by Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria in a clash of stubborn personalities. Girardi had become an analyst for the YES Network, and he thought as much of Jeter’s tangible and intangible skills as any teammate the captain ever had.

Girardi saw Jeter as a baseball player who could beat you eight days a week. But as he watched his old teammate cheat to his left to compensate for lost range up the middle, watched him get to fewer ground balls than he used to, Girardi told a couple of friends something he took no delight in saying.

“I feel sorry for the next Yankee manager,” he said, “because he’s the one who’s going to have to tell Jeter he can’t play shortstop anymore.”

Joe Torre’s Yankees were on the verge of total collapse in Toronto in the final days of May, which meant Joe Torre was likely on the verge of being fired. His team was 21-29 and a staggering fourteen and a half games behind the Red Sox in the division. Torre’s pitching was terrible, and the free agent signed a few weeks earlier to save his staff, Roger Clemens, was closing hard on his forty-fifth birthday.

The season opened with a historic burst of power from Alex Rodriguez, who became the fastest man to collect thirteen and fourteen homers in a season by hitting them in his eighteenth game. The predictable story line went like this: A-Rod was a new man after telling the truth about his broken relationship with Derek Jeter, who conceded Rodriguez was playing a game with which he was not familiar.

“You enjoy it and you appreciate it,” Jeter said. “I can’t relate to it. You’ll never see me do it. . . . He’s as hot as I’ve ever seen a player.”

Jeter was not driving balls over the wall at any such rate, and he was not fielding his position the way he had the previous season. The shortstop committed six errors in the first eleven games; in 2006, he did not commit his sixth until the fiftieth game.

But near the end of May, Jeter was still hitting .350 with an on-base percentage of .425. He was not the problem. A-Rod was not the problem, either, even if his .371 batting average on May 1 had plunged below .300 four weeks later.

Rodriguez had 19 homers and 44 RBI, and he also was making a concerted effort to stay out of trouble, to field baseball questions only and to keep his interaction with the news media to a minimum. Larry Bowa, a blunt, tough-love type hired as Torre’s third-base coach before the 2006 season, asked Rodriguez why he kept making silly comments in the press, and wasn’t satisfied with the third baseman’s answer.

So Bowa and Mike Borzello came up with their own penal system. “Every time you make a stupid comment you’ve got to give us a hundred dollars,” Bowa told A-Rod, who did not fight the plan.

“We got about three or four hundred dollars from him,” Bowa said, “and then he realized, ‘Hey, I’d better stop making these stupid statements.’ And he stopped.”

Rodriguez was helped by the presence of Doug Mientkiewicz, his teammate and friend from Westminster Christian High in Miami. Brian Cashman had signed the first baseman—and the member of the 2004 championship Boston team who recorded the final historic out of the World Series sweep of St. Louis—knowing Mientkiewicz could serve as a buffer between A-Rod and Jeter and the rest.

Mientkiewicz wasn’t afraid to tell Rodriguez what he did not want to hear. “I’ve never called him A-Rod in my life; he’s always been little Alex to me,” Mientkiewicz said. “I never got wrapped up in the aura. As soon as he walked in the clubhouse door I’d scream at him, ‘Cheer up. It’s not about you. Every day you don’t come to the yard with a smile on your face I’m going to kick you in the nuts. You think the game is hard with your talent level? Try playing it with mine.’

“It made Alex smile. [Jorge] Posada told me, ‘We should’ve brought you over here a long time ago,’ because I helped everybody else see Alex in a different light. Alex let some of his guard down and let the guys see he’s human.”

Only a humanized A-Rod and a productive Jeter could not prevent the Yankees from coming unglued. Torre called a team meeting on May 28, before the first game of the Toronto series. Jeter had already been on record as far back as April trying to disarm those calling for Torre’s head, saying after a lost series to the Red Sox, “There shouldn’t be any questions. He’s in no way responsible. . . . You should never talk about his job. It’s unfair and it should stop.”

Of course, it did not stop. The Yankees were not helping their manager with their play or their preparation, and Torre thought it was time to drop the hammer. He ripped into his players for a general lack of effort and focus, and nearly all veteran witnesses agreed it was the angriest Torre had ever been.

“There were some fired-up people in that meeting,” Mike Mussina said. “Even Derek was fired up, more than the standard, ‘We’re not doing this, we’re not doing that.’ . . . It was about as serious a meeting as I was involved in in my years as a Yankee.”

It lasted some fifty minutes, and Jeter was not the only player who spoke; Andy Pettitte was among those who delivered their own impassioned pleas. But Jeter was the captain, so he had the E. F. Hutton effect on his teammates.

“Now is when you find out what kind of player you are,” Jeter barked in the meeting.

The captain did not get up in front of the group unless there was something to say. Sometimes he spoke when Torre called on him, and sometimes he thought the manager had already covered what needed to be said.

“Sometimes in those meetings,” one Yankee said, “you didn’t want to talk after Joe because Joe was so good at it. And sometimes players would say things and you’re like, ‘You’re the person Torre was talking about.’ From past years, Kenny Lofton comes to mind. And you’re sitting there saying, ‘Just shut up.’ Gary Sheffield, on the other hand, he was straight to the point and a lot of times said things we needed to hear.”

Following Torre was a tough act, no matter who you were. Jeter was very careful in picking his spots. He grew more willing to speak up after his appointment as captain in 2003, but he did not believe in wasting anyone’s time.

“If Derek said something,” Mussina said, “we knew he was frustrated or upset or bothered by what was going on. . . . He wouldn’t pick out anybody. It was
we
are not getting guys over.
We
are not working counts like we do when we’re successful.
We
are not playing good defense. Derek understood that he had to talk like the manager, that it had to be
we
and not
you
.”

Jeter’s leadership was a popular subject in and around the Yankee clubhouse. The debate over whether the captain should have shielded Rodriguez from the storm of fan abuse often fueled the discussion, but there were sidebar issues that had little or nothing to do with A-Rod.

No right-minded teammate or observer ever doubted Jeter’s lead-by-example work ethic, his willingness to play in pain, and his talent for playing big in the biggest games. But if there were a few Yankees who thought Jeter should have imposed his will on the team in more of an in-your-face way, whether by being more vocal and demonstrative or by telling a pitcher he needed to hit an opposing batter to retaliate for a downed Yank, Jason Giambi was in that group.