The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter Read online

  The Captain

  Derek Jeter

  Ian O'Connor

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. The Kalamazoo Kid

  2. The Draft

  3. E-6

  4. Rookie of the Year

  5. Champion

  6. Perfection

  7. Dynasty

  8. The Flip

  Photo Insert

  9. New Guys

  10. Alex

  11. The Great Divide

  12. Moment of Truth

  13. Rebirth

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author’s Interviews and Sources

  Bibliography

  Copyright © 2011 by Ian O’Connor

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  O’Connor, Ian.

  The captain: the journey of Derek Jeter / Ian O’Connor.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-547-32793-8

  1. Jeter, Derek, date. 2. Baseball players—United States—Biography. 3. New York Yankees (Baseball team) I. Title.

  GV865.J48O37 2011

  796.357092—dc22

  [B]

  2010049772

  Book design by Brian Moore

  Printed in the United States of America

  doc 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Tracey, my life, my love, and my inspiration

  To Kyle, my best friend, and my all-time favorite middle infielder

  To Mr. David, the first coach who gave me the ball

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. The Kalamazoo Kid

  2. The Draft

  3. E-6

  4. Rookie of the Year

  5. Champion

  6. Perfection

  7. Dynasty

  8. The Flip

  9. New Guys

  10. Alex

  11. The Great Divide

  12. Moment of Truth

  13. Rebirth

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author’s Interviews and Sources

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  On Monday afternoon, July 6, 2009, more than 46,000 sun-splashed baseball fans inside the new Yankee Stadium witnessed something they never imagined they would see.

  Derek Jeter getting in an umpire’s face.

  The captain of the New York Yankees had just made a wretched baserunning choice—another shock to the extended holiday weekend crowd—when he tried and failed to steal third with no outs in the first inning. The throw from Toronto Blue Jays catcher Rod Barajas to Scott Rolen arrived early enough for Rolen to recite the Greek alphabet before applying the tag.

  Only Jeter being Jeter, he delivered the Toronto third baseman a lesson in resourcefulness right there in the infield dirt. The shortstop went in headfirst and used a Michael Phelps butterfly stroke to reach his arms around Rolen’s glove and touch the base untagged.

  Marty Foster, veteran ump, did what everyone expected him to do. He saw the ball beat Jeter by a country mile, saw Rolen drop his glove in front of the bag, and sent the foolish runner back to his dugout and his stunned manager, Joe Girardi.

  But for once, Jeter did not retreat to the dugout. He told Foster he had reached the base before he was tagged, and according to the shortstop, Foster responded, “The ball beat you. He doesn’t have to tag you.”

  The captain was incredulous. He doesn’t have to tag you?

  “I was unaware of that change in the rule,” Jeter would say.

  As the ultimate guy who played the game the right way, Jeter felt a rare rush of anger rising from his toes. He marched toward Foster in search of a more acceptable answer, and the Yankees’ third-base coach, Rob Thomson, had to get between them. Girardi raced out to ensure Jeter did not earn the first ejection of his life, dating back to Little League, and the manager ended up getting tossed himself.

  John Hirschbeck, crew chief, watched this scene unfold and said to himself what every living, breathing witness was thinking: “Wow, that’s unusual.” Jeter would rather get swept by the Boston Red Sox than show up an ump.

  But more unusual would be the postgame conversation inside the umpires’ room, where Hirschbeck held court with reporters while acting as a human shield for Foster, who showered and dressed behind a closed door. Thirteen years earlier, Hirschbeck had gotten up close and personal with ballplayer misconduct when Roberto Alomar spat in his face.

  Like cops, umpires often adhere to a blue wall of silence. They have little choice but to protect each other. With players and managers emboldened by lavish guaranteed contracts, and with instant replay making infallible judges and juries out of millions of viewers, umpires are under siege from all corners. They are imperfect men burdened by the high-def, high-stakes demand for perfection.

  And yet despite these truths, Hirschbeck faced the reporters gathered around him like campers around a fire and suggested he believed Jeter’s account.

  “In my twenty-seven years in the big leagues,” the crew chief said, “[Jeter] is probably the classiest person I’ve ever been around.”

  Never mind that a day later, Foster would assure Hirschbeck he never told Jeter he did not need to be tagged (a claim Jeter vehemently denied, maintaining, “He knows exactly what he said”). Never mind that Hirschbeck heard Foster’s version of what was said to the shortstop (“The ball beat you, and I had him tagging you”) and decided even the classiest of players might have misheard something in the heat of the moment.

  The crew chief’s first instinct was to believe Jeter’s version of the truth. “It would make his actions seem appropriate if that’s what he was told,” Hirschbeck said.

  Yes, that was Derek Jeter in a nutshell: even an umpire would deem his inappropriate actions appropriate.

  Months later, at a banquet announcing his son as Sports Illustrated’s 2009 Sportsman of the Year, Charles Jeter spoke for his wife, Dot, when he told the crowd, “One of the things that’s really special for us is the fact that sometimes when we’re traveling, people might come up to us and they often say, ‘You know, I’m not a Yankee fan. But you know something? Your son has class and plays hard and we really respect what he’s all about.’”

  In the end, this is why millions of young ballplayers around America ask their coaches to assign them jersey number 2. Jeter does not embarrass the umpires or his coaches or his teammates or himself. His common acts of decency have made him the most respected and beloved figure in the game.

  Funny, but Jeter never hit 25 home runs in a season. He never won a batting title. Never won a Most Valuable Player award.

  But Jeter did win championships and a place in any debate over the greatest all-around shortstop of all time. He also won the title of patron saint of clean players in an era defined by performance-enhancing drugs.

  When I told him in the spring of 2009 that I would be writing a book about his career, Jeter immediately replied, “My career’s not over.” I explained my goal—to author a defining work on his time with the Yankees as he was about to become the first member of the world’s most famous ball team to collect 3,000 hits.

  Jeter decided against making major contributions to this book
, in part because he did not want fans to think he was basking in his own glory while there were still grounders to run out and titles to win. He had other reasons, I’m sure, but Jeter did agree to take some questions from me at his locker during the 2009 season.

  For the record, this is my book, not his. It is a book shaped by more than two hundred interviews I conducted with Jeter’s teammates, friends, coaches, opponents, associates, employers, teachers, admirers, and detractors (his detractors were actually admirers willing to address what they perceived as Jeter’s human flaws) over an eighteen-month period.

  But in truth, this book was built on thousands of one-on-one and group interviews I participated in with Jeter and his Yankees as a newspaper and Internet columnist who has covered the shortstop since his rookie year.

  What was I searching for? The tangible explanation for Jeter’s intangible grace. The passion behind his pinstripes. The fire beneath his ice.

  In many ways, this book was born in my son’s closet, filled with frayed and faded jerseys graced by the number 2. I wanted to explore why Jeter became as popular and iconic in his time as Mantle, DiMaggio, Ruth, and Gehrig were in theirs.

  Jeter sure did not hit Ruthian homers, and he did not glide to the batted ball with DiMaggio’s elegant style. Joe D. could have played the game in a tuxedo and top hat, but not Jeter. The shortstop had to work at it.

  Yet Jeter survived an age of steroid-fueled frauds who dominated with their artificial moon shots, and of sabermetric snipers who used their forensics to shoot holes through his standing in the game.

  Somehow, some way, the New York Yankees’ shortstop remained the enduring face of his sport.

  So that is the point of my book, to provide a simple answer to this complicated question:

  How did number 2 get to be number 1?

  1. The Kalamazoo Kid

  Like all good stories about a prince, this one starts in a castle.

  Derek Sanderson Jeter spent his boyhood summers around the Tiedemann castle of Greenwood Lake, a home near the New York/New Jersey border maintained by the Tiedemann family of Jersey City and defined by its medieval-looking tower and rooftop battlements.

  In the 1950s, the Tiedemanns started rebuilding the burned-out castle with the help of their adopted son, William “Sonny” Connors, who did his talking with a hammer the same way Charles “Sonny” Liston did his talking with his fists.

  More than a quarter century later, Connors, a maintenance worker at a Catholic church, would preach the virtues of an honest day’s work to his grandson, who was enlisted as Connors’s unpaid assistant when he wasn’t playing with the Tiedemann grandchildren around the lake.

  Derek Jeter was forever carrying his baseball glove, forever looking for a game. His grandfather was not an enthusiastic sports fan, but as much as anyone Connors showed the boy the necessity of running out every single one of life’s ground balls.

  Connors was a shy and earnest handyman who had lost his parents to illness when he was young, and who had honed his workshop skills under John Tiedemann’s careful watch. Tiedemann and his wife, Julia, raised Sonny along with twelve children of their own, sparing him a teenager’s life as a ward of the state.

  Tiedemann was a worthy role model for Sonny. He had left school in the sixth grade to work in a Jersey City foundry and help his widowed mother pay the bills. At thirteen, Tiedemann already was operating a small electrical business of his own.

  In the wake of the Great Depression he landed a job inside St. Michael’s Church, where Tiedemann did everything for Monsignor LeRoy McWilliams, even built him a parish gym. When Msgr. McWilliams did not have the money to cover the scaffolding needed to paint St. Michael’s, Tiedemann invented a jeep-mounted boom that could elevate a man to the highest reaches of the ceiling. He ultimately got into the business of painting and decorating church walls.

  Around the same time, in the mid-fifties, Tiedemann was overseeing work on a 2.7-acre Greenwood Lake, New York, lot he had purchased for $15,000. His main objective was the restoration of a German-style castle that had been gutted by fire more than a decade earlier.

  Tiedemann’s labor force amounted to his eleven sons, including his ace plumber, roofer, carpenter, and electrician from St. Michael’s—Sonny Connors.

  “Sonny was a Tiedemann,” said one of the patriarch’s own, George. “We all counted him as one of our brothers.”

  And every weekend, year after year after year, this band of Jersey City brothers gathered to breathe new life into the dark slate-tiled castle, an Old World hideaway originally built by a New York City dentist in 1903. The Tiedemann boys started by digging out the ashes and removing the trees that had grown inside the structure.

  They did this for their father, the self-made man the old St. Michael’s pastor liked to call “the Michelangelo of the tool chest.” The castle was John Tiedemann’s dream house, and the boys helped him build additional homes on the property so some of his thirteen children and fifty-four grandchildren could live there.

  “We weren’t a huggy, kissy type of family,” George said. “We weren’t the Waltons. But the love was there, and it didn’t have to manifest itself more than it did.”

  John Tiedemann was a tough and simple man who liked to fish, watch boxing, and move the earth with his callused hands. Long before he poured himself into the Greenwood Lake project, Tiedemann was proud of being the first resident on his Jersey City block, 7th Street, to own a television set. He enjoyed having his friends over to take in the Friday night fights.

  He finally made some real money with his church improvement business and later bought himself a couple of Rolls-Royces to park outside his renovated castle. But Tiedemann was a laborer at heart, and he had taught his eleven sons all the necessary trades.

  As it turned out, none of the boys could match the father as a craftsman. None but Sonny, the one Tiedemann who did not share Tiedemann’s blood.

  For years Sonny was John’s most reliable aide, at least when he was not working his full-time job as head of maintenance at Queen of Peace in North Arlington, New Jersey, an hour’s commute from the castle. Sonny would drive through heavy snowstorms in the middle of the night to clean the Queen of Peace parking lots by 4:00 a.m. He would vacuum the rugs around the altar, paint the priests’ living quarters, and repair the parishioners’ sputtering cars for no charge.

  Sonny never once called in sick and never once forgot the family that gave him a chance. Every Friday, payday, Sonny would stop at a bakery and buy a large strawberry shortcake so all the Tiedemanns could enjoy dessert.

  “Sonny was the spark that kept us going,” George said, “because he never took a break.” Sonny idolized Julia Tiedemann, and he liked to make her husband proud. If John Tiedemann wanted a room painted, Sonny made sure that room got painted while John was away on business so he would be pleasantly surprised on his return.

  Sonny married a Tiedemann; of course he did. Dorothy was a niece of John and Julia’s, a devoted Yankees fan who loved hearing the crack of Joe D.’s bat on the radio, and who hated seeing Babe Ruth’s lifeless body when she passed his open casket inside Yankee Stadium in 1948.

  Sonny and Dorothy, or Dot, would raise fourteen children, including another Dorothy, or Dot. The Connors family spent some time in the castle before moving to nearby West Milford, New Jersey, where Sonny served as the same working-class hero for his kids that John Tiedemann was for him.

  Sonny and his wife took in troubled or orphaned children and made them their own, and it never mattered that money was tight. “Sonny went back to his own experience as a boy,” said Monsignor Thomas Madden, the pastor at Queen of Peace. “The Tiedemanns took care of Sonny, so it was in his nature to take care of others. . . . And Dorothy had just as big a heart as he did.”

  One of their flesh-and-blood daughters, Dot, ended up in the army and was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany, where in 1972 she met a black soldier named Sanderson Charles Jeter, raised by a single mother in Montgomery, Alabama. They marri
ed the following year, at a time in America when the notion of a biracial president was more absurd than that of a human colony on Mars.

  Naturally, Sonny did not approve of the marriage. He worried over the way the children would be treated, worried they would be teased and taunted by black and white. “Sonny was very concerned about that,” Msgr. Madden said. “He would ask, ‘Will they be accepted? Will they have to fight battles?’”

  His questions would start to be answered on June 26, 1974, when Derek Sanderson Jeter was born at Chilton Memorial Hospital in the Pompton Plains section of Pequannock, New Jersey.

  If Sonny initially did not have a relationship with his daughter’s husband, that did not stop him from pursuing one with his daughter’s son.

  Derek was four when his parents moved with him from Jersey to Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Charles enrolled in Western Michigan University to pursue a master’s and doctorate in social work. But every summer, Derek stayed with the Connors clan in West Milford and made almost daily visits to the castle in Greenwood Lake.

  The Tiedemanns put down sand near the water to give the boys and girls the feel of a beachfront, and Derek’s grandmother brought him over to play with the Tiedemann grandchildren and escape the heat. Derek was not looking for a chance to swim as much as he was looking for a partner in a game of catch.

  “He was always talking about baseball,” said Michael Tiedemann, one of John’s grandchildren. They played Wiffle ball games and threw footballs and tennis balls around the lake. “And no matter what we played,” Michael said, “Derek was by leaps and bounds the best athlete. He kept his eye on the ball and moved a lot faster than the rest of us did.”

  Despite the fact he was reed thin, Derek surely claimed some of his physicality from Sonny, a roundish but powerfully built man who stood five foot eleven and projected the body language of a dockworker—in other words, someone to be avoided in a bar fight. But it was Derek’s father, Charles, who passed down the genetic coding of a ballplayer.