THE

C A P TA I N
THE JOURNEY OF
DEREK JETER

IAN O’CONNOR
 Th e

CAPTAIN
The Journey of

Derek Jeter

IA N O’CON NOR

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

boston n e w y o rk
2011
 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
 CONTENTS

Introduction ix

1. The Kalamazoo Kid 1

2. The Draft 21
3. E-6 47
4. Rookie of the Year 73
5. Champion 97
6. Perfection 124
7. Dynasty 147
8. The Flip 178
9. New Guys 209
10. Alex 244
11. The Great Divide 273
12. Moment of Truth 299
13. Rebirth 331

Epilogue 364
Acknowledgments 379
A Note on the Author’s Interviews and Sources 382
Bibliography 388
Index 390
 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 be-
fore 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 short-
stop, Foster responded, “The ball beat you. He doesn’t have to tag you.”
 x ◆ introduction

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 act-
ing 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 em-
boldened by lavish guaranteed contracts, and with instant replay mak-
ing 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 gath-
ered 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 short-
stop (“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.
 introduction ◆ xi

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 Illus-
trated ’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 em-
barrass the umpires or his coaches or his teammates or himself. His
common acts of decency have made him the most respected and be-
loved 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 pa-
tron 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, admir-
 xii ◆ introduction

ers, 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 news-
paper and Internet columnist who has covered the shortstop since his
rookie year.
What was I searching for? The tangible explanation for Jeter’s in-
tangible 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, DiMag-
gio, 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

L ike a l l 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” Lis-
ton 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,
 2 ◆ the captain

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. Mi-
chael’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. Mi-
chael’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, includ-
ing his ace plumber, roofer, carpenter, and electrician from St. Mi-
chael’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 cas-
tle, 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 ad-
ditional 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
 the kalamazoo kid ◆ 3

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 fi nally made some real money with his church improvement
business and later bought himself a couple of Rolls-Royces to park out-
side 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 crafts-
man. None but Sonny, the one Tiedemann who did not share Tiede-
mann’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 quar-
ters, 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 busi-
ness 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, includ-
ing 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.