I met George Steinbrenner once at a grapefruit league spring training game. My brother and I were kids staying with our grandparents, and their neighbor, something of a muckety-muck in central Florida, had invited us along to see our beloved Yankees take on his Royals. Sometime around the fifth, Steinbrenner came by our seats with his immaculate gray coif, aviators, windbreaker, the whole deal. He called our neighbor by his first name, shook his hand, and sat down between us.
We were in awe of him and knew even at our tender age of his reputation as a blowhard. But he couldn’t have been nicer. In fact, he gave us what I recall was a crisp $100 bill, but was probably actually a $50, to buy some hot dogs and cokes and a baseball for him to sign.
I was nervous — but not too nervous to tell Mr. Steinbrenner that he should not have allowed Don Mattingly to retire. This was ‘96, and the Yankees had been bad for as long as I’d been alive. The ‘94 team had been playoff bound, but the players’ strike put an end to that. The next year, the Yankees had finally made the postseason, and Donnie Baseball had had his first taste of October in what would turn out to be his last season. But that run, too, had been cut short.
“My baseball people,” Steinbrenner replied to your correspondent, then a pudgy 11-year-old with a bowl cut, “tell me Tino is just as good.” That was Tino Martinez, a first baseman recently acquired from Seattle. And indeed, Tino would go on to have a storied run in New York.
What I didn’t know then was those same “baseball people” were at that very moment trying to convince Steinbrenner to trade a middling middle reliever named Mariano Rivera to Seattle for shortstop Tony Fermin and to send their homegrown shortstop prospect Derek Sanderson Jeter back to Triple-A to start the season. Only when the Yankees veteran option at short, Tony Fernandez, broke his arm the last week of spring training did the trade become untenable, and it was then that the Yankees committed to running the lanky Jeter out there on opening day.
Rivera is undoubtedly the greatest relief pitcher in history. Jeter became a Yankees legend, and sometime over the course of the five world championships and seven American League pennants he and Rivera presided over, he was named the Yankees 11th captain, an honorific the team is unique, and uniquely stingy, in handing out.
So that’s how Jeter became “The Captain,” which is also the title of the seven-part documentary executive produced by Jeter and his Players’ Tribune, currently partway through its streaming run on ESPN.
The almost-trade for Fermin, and the front office’s lack of faith in a then-struggling young Jeter, feature prominently in the early episodes. It’s the perfect setup to the story of Jeter’s first championship in ‘96, the year I sat with Steinbrenner and the beginning of a dynasty that would only end with their agonizing and traumatic loss to the Boston Red Sox in the 2004 American League Championship Series.
Up to that point in the story, it is mostly triumphs for our hero, with just enough adversity thrown in to render them all the more triumphant. And that’s kind of what I was expecting going in. Clearly going for the now-it-can-be-told vibe of the widely acclaimed Michael Jordan miniseries The Last Dance, I didn’t think The Captain was going to be able to go to all the same deep places because, unlike Jordan, Jeter conceived and executive produced the series himself. To Jeter’s credit and the credit of Spike Lee and Randy Wilkins, who co-executive produced and directed the series, that’s only about half true.
What is true is that Jeter may be the most boring New York sports superstar of all time, at least when it comes to his public-facing persona. Certainly, he’s the most boring Yankee superstar. Jeter has none of Babe Ruth’s titanic legend and lore, none of the adamantine dignity and tragedy of Lou Gehrig, the boozy “Florida Man” energy of Mickey Mantle, nor the Broadway bling-and-blow of Reggie Jackson and the rest of the Bronx Zoo Yankees. The closest match is probably Joe DiMaggio, who shared Jeter’s taciturnity and hustle and his obsession with excellence and who famously said that he played every single game at 100 because some kid might be watching him for the first time.
DiMaggio also famously walked around with Marilyn Monroe on his arm, yet that managed to generate shockingly few inches of copy in the tabloid rags. That’s something else he had in common with Jeter, whose exploits playing the field were matched only by his exploits playing the field.
So successful was the dimpled and blue-eyed Jeter that in 2014, ESPN’s SportsNation put together a graphic called “Derek Jeter’s Dating Diamond,” with names like Minka Kelly, Mariah Carey, Scarlett Johanssen, and Jessicas Biel and Alba slotted into various starting positions on a baseball diamond. The A-list beauties were so numerous that Tyra Banks was relegated to the DH spot.
Around the same time came the reports that Jeter had distributed pre-made gift baskets, including memorabilia, to overnight “guests” at his Florida and Manhattan homes, a fact that I have to think has caused at least one middle-aged man to wince upon receipt of a signed Jeter baseball from his grownup daughter on Father’s Day.
The last few episodes of the series haven’t yet aired as of this writing, and they focus on Jeter’s eventual marriage to Hannah Davis and their starting a family, so maybe there will be more on his personal life to come. But the juiciest bits are dealt with but lightly.
“I had fun. If I said I didn’t, I’d be lying to you,” Jeter comments of his frequenting of New York nightclubs through the late ’90s. He later jokes: “If there were phones back then, my career would have been three years long.” But that’s about it. That’s a function of Jeter’s executive producer’s veto, no doubt, but also of the fact that for all his “fun” he was a bachelor who never got a DUI, never embarrassed the team or got sued by a massage therapist, never had an ex utter so much as a bad word about him.
At one point in the documentary, a female fan billed as a “Boogie Down Bronx” native says that every girl growing up in New York in the ‘90s had a poster of Jeter on their bedroom wall. I can confirm that that was true of every girl who grew up in Jersey in the ‘90s, too, including my high school girlfriend. To many parents, Jeter surely beat the rock stars and matinee idols with burgeoning rap sheets. He was, as a character in The Other Guys puts it, “a biracial angel.”
And in front of the press, he was never false, never phony. But he was cagey. He gave perfectly serviceable, team-first sound bites, but in his body language, he always conveyed that what he owed you was maximum effort on every play and not some teary confessional — not a piece of his heart.
Jeter himself admits as much. “When I meet someone, one of the first things that goes through my mind is ‘What do they want?’” he says. “It’s not a good thing. I wish that didn’t go through my mind, but that’s one of the first things. Like, ‘What’s the angle?’ And I go into protection mode.” That’s in part a function, we learn, of early betrayals from people he thought were friends in his Kalamazoo, Michigan, youth but who revealed themselves to be bigots or to have problems with his parents’ mixed marriage.
It’s also a function of betrayals, or what Jeter viewed as betrayals, in his professional life, whether from certain people in the Yankees front office or from Alex Rodriguez, who was Jeter’s close friend before he was his longtime teammate, but never both at the same time.
The A-Rod stuff is the most surprisingly candid. Rodriguez himself participated and gives the kind of answers that anyone who has observed his post-steroids public persona will recognize. They’re articulate and well rehearsed, perhaps a little dodgy or lawyerly, but nevertheless with some residual rawness and pathos. What’s revealed is a kind of Amadeus-esque Salieri-Mozart dynamic, except if Mozart were the one with the toxic envy of Salieri.
Because while Jeter is undoubtedly the greater champion, A-Rod was, human growth hormone or not, the better player. And yet Rodriguez never managed Jeter’s success, his belovedness, or his comfort in his own skin. And that made him, he admits, profoundly insecure. That’s part of why he belittled Jeter in comments to Esquire magazine’s Scott Raab, saying Jeter had “never had to lead” or carry the team, never had to worry about batting cleanup. For his part, Raab, who also participated, all but admits that he took Rodriguez’s comments out of context to juice up his story. But the verbatim is what it is.
After the Esquire piece, Jeter flatly tells the camera, he cut Rodriguez out of his circle of trust. He was cordial and supportive after they became teammates, but the personal relationship was never the same. In one of the most telling moments in the series, the pair relay both sides of a confrontation they had during a rain delay that first season after A-Rod had agreed to move from shortstop to third base in order to come to the Yankees. In an empty clubhouse, A-Rod had asked Jeter some version of “Are we good?” Jeter replied with some variation of “kind of.”
Jeter admits he was trying to figure if A-Rod had something up his sleeve, some angle to steal his position and his place on the team. He simply couldn’t understand why Rodriguez would preemptively cede playing shortstop for the New York freaking Yankees. He couldn’t understand because there is nothing about Jeter’s makeup that would ever allow him to make the same decision. What Jeter doesn’t say is that this was all the more odd because Rodriguez was the better defender.
Jeter won several Gold Glove Awards, but as analytics dorks took over in the baseball press and in major league front offices, it became a running joke that Jeter was comically overrated as a defensive player. If you ask me, the “Jeter was overrated” stuff is overrated. Jeter was an average to slightly above average defender overall, and his biggest weakness, his range, also happens to be the aspect of defense that is most easily captured by pocket-protector metrics. What those metrics can’t ever capture — and you don’t have to be a baseball reactionary or curmudgeon to note this — is what it was like to watch him play. Jeter all but patented the “leaps, turns, fires!” throw from deep in the hole, and his two signature defensive plays, “The Dive” and “The Flip,” will go down as among the most iconic in baseball history.
Jeter was more fun to watch at short precisely because he was so clearly a man playing at the absolute edge of his abilities. Virtuosity has its charms and its place, but heroic struggle is always more interesting. If A-Rod made shortstop look easy, Jeter made it look hard. And I can tell you as my high school varsity team’s starting statistician, that it is hard. The hard, as Tom Hanks put it memorably in A League of Their Own, is what makes it great.
As a docuseries, The Captain may not rate as truly great. But ever since I was 11 years old and sitting there with George Steinbrenner’s change in my Velcro wallet, Derek Jeter surely has been.
Dan Foster is a contributing editor for National Review and a lifelong Yankee fan.
