A Captains Story by Maple Street Press

A Captains Story Derek Jeter and Lou Gehrig by Chip Greene

hen Derek Jeter singled last September to eclipse Lou Gehrig as the Yankees all-time hits leader, perhaps it was only fitting that his hit came against the Baltimore Orioles. After all, the last time that Gehrig’s legend had been so prominently recalled was in 1995, during Cal Ripken’s pursuit of the Iron Horse’s consecutive game streak, when the Oriole and Yankee icons were forever linked not just in the minds of baseball fans, but also among those who had little more than a passing interest in the game. For many who were unfamiliar with Gehrig’s legacy, Ripken’s accomplishment rekindled the Yankee first baseman’s tragic story, and celebrated the concepts of hard work and consistency embodied by those two great athletes. If Ripken and Gehrig shared a common theme, Jeter and Gehrig share an even more unique bond. Unlike Ripken they are both, of course, Yankees—two of the greatest—and beyond purely statistical similarities there are several surprising parallels in their careers. Standing figuratively back and watching those careers unfold across different eras, it’s easy to appreciate just what these two men have meant to the Yankee tradition. First and foremost, there’s the captaincy. In the history of the franchise, only 11 men have been named captain of the New York Yankees. (This number varies and is listed as high as 14 in some sources.) From 1909 to 1912, the honorary position, which these days represents all that is good and virtuous in a player who leads by example, surprisingly was held by the infamous Hal Chase, a man renowned for being one of the most corrupt players in baseball history. From 1914 to 1921, the year that 18-year-old Henry Louis Gehrig first played professional baseball when he appeared in 12 games for the Class A Hartford Senators, veteran shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh held the title. Another shortstop had the post from 1922 to 1925, Everett Scott, whose consecutive games © 2010 Maple Street Press, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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National League. After ten years playing in Ruth’s shadow, Gehrig was now the undisputed leader of the Yankees, and to ratify that position, on April 12, 1935, Ruppert named Gehrig captain of the team. True to his nature, Gehrig—a quiet, reserved, somewhat reticent man—told his wife Eleanor upon hearing the news that he didn’t know if he was right for the job. The man who had become known for his remarkable endurance and who was symbolic of all that was right about the game wasn’t sure he would be a good team captain. He wasn’t the kind of man who delivered rah-rah cheers and motivational speeches to his teammates. Yet in the end, Two men who have drawn comparisons to Lou Gehrig, Eleanor encouraged him to accept and to each other, Cal Ripken and Derek Jeter. the captaincy and to continue quietly played streak of 1,307 stood as the major league record until leading the team by example. Gehrig held the position until later broken by Gehrig himself. his death, on June 2, 1941. Oh, and let’s not forget Babe Ruth; he, too, became a For the next 35 years, the Yankees were again without Yankee captain, if only for a moment. According to several a captain. Following Gehrig’s death, manager Joe McCarthy sources, on May 20, 1922, Ruth, after two years of dramatic decreed that no player would ever again hold that title. By home run hitting, and despite flagrant and repeated flouting 1976, however, Thurman Munson had clearly emerged as of team rules, had finally been named team captain. Some say the leader of the team, and on April 17, 1976, Yankees owner it was to quell his demands that he be named player-manager. George Steinbrenner appointed Munson the Yankees captain, Less than a week later, on May 25, Ruth charged into the stating that “If Joe McCarthy and Lou Gehrig knew Thurman stands after a fan who had been heckling him at the Polo Munson, they would agree that he’s the right man for the Grounds. American League president Ban Johnson immedijob.” Like Gehrig before him, Munson held the title until his ately ordered the revocation of Ruth’s status as captain, and untimely death on August 2, 1979. the Babe never again held a leadership position with the team. Over the next ten years, three men assumed the captain’s He was replaced as captain by Everett Scott. mantle: Graig Nettles, Ron Guidry, and Willie Randolph. For the ten years from 1925 to 1935, no Yankee held the Then, on February 28, 1991, another Yankees first baseman, captain’s title. During that period, though, Gehrig came into 29-year-old Don Mattingly, accepted the role as the Yankees’ his own, not just as one of the greatest players in the game, leader, and he held the title with distinction, another quiet but also, in the words of author James Lincoln Ray, as “solid, captain who led by example until his retirement following the dependable and dignified… [a] new kind of baseball hero.” In 1995 season. For the next eight years, the captain’s title lay 1927, Gehrig won the first of two Most Valuable Player awards unused again. (the second in 1936). In 1934, he hit for the Triple Crown Enter Derek Sanderson Jeter. From the moment he (.363, 49 home runs, 165 RBI), and by 1935 he was the highest was selected by the Yankees with the sixth pick in the first paid player in the game. And he did it all while playing alonground of the 1992 draft, the young man from Kalamazoo side arguably the most flamboyant player of all time—Ruth. (MI) Central High School displayed the quiet confidence and That partnership ended after the 1934 season. Yankees leadership that had distinguished Lou Gehrig 60 years before. management had grown weary of Ruth’s often unpredictable By 1994, when he batted a combined .344 in three different behavior. So in 1935, as a way to get a troublesome and no minor league stops, it was simply a matter of time before longer effective Ruth off the team, Yankees owner Jacob Jeter joined the Yankees. “He’s got a chance to be something Ruppert engineered a secret deal with the owner of the special,” proclaimed Columbus manager Stump Merrill that Boston Braves, and the Babe ended his storied career in the year, and indeed, by 1996, Jeter had finally arrived. When © 2010 Maple Street Press, LLC. All Rights Reserved. 72 | Maple Street Press Yankees Annual 2010

Photo on previous page: Jim McIsaac/Getty Images Photo: Astrid Stawiarz/WireImage

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A Captains Story

Photo: Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images

he won the 1996 Rookie of the Year award as the Yankees’ starting shortstop, his position was secured. From that day forward, Derek Jeter affirmed his status as one of the all-time Yankee greats. It surely must have surprised very few people, then, on June 4, 2003, when Steinbrenner named Jeter captain. “I cannot think of a single player that I have ever had who is more deserving of this honor than Derek Jeter,” the Yankees owner proclaimed that day. “He is a young man of great character [who] has shown great leadership qualities.” And most importantly, Steinbrenner continued, “he believes, as I do… that there is no substitute for victory.” When Jeter had come up as a wide-eyed rookie in 1996, he referred to his manager as “Mister Torre” and the leaders of the club were veterans like Paul O’Neill and Tino Martinez. With those men gone, it became Jeter’s clubhouse, and Steinbrenner’s declaration made it official. Undoubtedly, Gehrig and Jeter earned the respect of their teammates not just with their play on the field, but also with their bearing in the clubhouse. Still, for all that they achieved, none of the accolades came easy for either man. Success for both was ultimately a byproduct of years of perseverance and hard work. If thousands of swings over thousands of hours in the batting cages had resulted in untold blistered palms, those hours had also finely honed their hitting strokes and brought each of them recognition almost from day one as among the best hitters at their respective positions. Fielding, however, was another matter. In many respects, when each

man arrived in the major leagues, his defense was somewhat of a work in progress. Errors litter both their resumes. In 1924, when Gehrig played his first full season at Hartford in the Eastern League, he committed 23 errors in 135 games at first base for a .984 fielding percentage. When he later began in New York, his defensive flaws were fully on display. And there were many. Gehrig biographer Ray Robinson wrote that initially the Yankee first baseman was particularly inept on cut-off plays. Even after constant fielding practice, manager Miller Huggins would counsel Gehrig that “you are still weak on the bare hand side” and “you don’t come in well on bunts.” Determined to correct his deficiencies, throughout those early years Gehrig subjected himself to a “grim daily pursuit to improve his performance,” and gradually, he did. Many years later, when he had become “as adept at guarding first base as anyone in his generation,” the first baseman recalled the methodical progression of his improvement. “In the beginning,” Gehrig told a writer, “I used to make one terrible play a game. Then it was one bad play a week, then finally I’d pull a bad one once a month.” By the end of his career, Gehrig was an accomplished defender. In 17 seasons he accepted 20,790 chances at first base, committed only 193 errors, and finished with a lifetime fielding percentage of .991. He also became especially adept at starting the 3-6-3 double play. Like Gehrig, Jeter, too, struggled through some early error-filled seasons. Sometimes, the numbers were astounding. Though we have better metrics now, for more than 100 years, fielding percentage has been the metric most commonly accepted as the measure of a player’s defensive abilities; the closer one gets to 1.000, the better defender he is presumed to be. In his first season in the minor leagues (though in only 57 games), Jeter fielded .919, in his second, .889. Even by his final season in the minors, at Columbus in 1995, his fielding percentage had climbed to just .953. Yet Jeter never stopped Gehrig delivered his “luckiest man” speech in 1939. working to improve. The year © 2010 Maple Street Press, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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he fielded .889 playing for Greensboro, he committed a mindnumbing 56 errors. He was a lonely, 18-year-old kid making $800,000 a year and, as he later recalled for correspondent Ed Bradley on CBS’s 60 Minutes, “I was actually at shortstop two weeks into the season saying… ‘Maybe they won’t hit me another ball the rest of the year.’ Sure enough,” however, he continued, “they hit the next one to me and I missed it.” For two more seasons in the minors, Jeter continued to miss a lot of chances. The young man was never one to shy away from hard work, though. Eventually, as a big league Yankee, Jeter stopped missing and started winning Gold Gloves. At the end of the 2009 season, at age 35, he won his fourth, his first since winning three years in a row from 2004–2006. The award was a testament to his work ethic, as he had worked all offseason with a special conditioning coach geared at improving defensively rather than dropping off as he aged. (See “Yankees Defensive Ratings” by Matt Sisson for more details.) As Jeter told Bradley in the same 60 Minutes interview, “I work extremely hard. I like to be involved. I like to be in the middle of things, and I’m not afraid to fail.” Jeter’s attitude had been fostered by his parents. Strong parental support and involvement in their son’s lives was

another similarity shared by Jeter and Gehrig, and to a large degree, one that made them the men they eventually became. The two men were raised in very disparate surroundings. As first generation German immigrants, Gehrig’s parents, Heinrich and Christina, were very poor. For much of Gehrig’s childhood, his father was unemployed. In spite of that, however, as Lou matured physically Heinrich would often take his son to the local gymnasium, where he introduced Gehrig to weights, bars, and pulleys, apparatus that eventually helped Gehrig develop a powerful physique. Having given birth to four children and watched three of them die in infancy, the Gehrigs naturally were devoted to their only surviving child. Christina wanted for her son all the things she never had, and she worked hard to try to provide them. Throughout his life Gehrig returned his parents’ devotion, and he always remained proud of their struggles on his behalf. When his mother fell seriously ill shortly before the 1927 World Series, Gehrig was so distraught that he considered missing the Series to stay by her bedside. “She means more to me than any ball game ever invented,” he told the press, “even a World Series.” If Jeter’s parents were a more modern and successful couple, they were no less than the Gehrigs their son’s biggest

Photo: Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images

Gehrig worked tirelessly to improve his fielding.

Photo: Rob Tringali/Sportschrome/Getty Images

A Captains Story fans. For Dorothy, an accountant, and Charles, a clinical social worker, education was very important. Even when it was clear Jeter’s future lay in baseball, after he’d been drafted they still demanded the Yankees pay Derek’s college tuition, no matter how long it took him to graduate. As a child, the boy played games with his parents, and often lost. His father explained that the losses taught Jeter to be competitive and instilled the lesson that “nobody’s going to let you win anything. It’s not going to be fair all the time.” Jeter took the message to heart. “I think the lesson was,” he later recalled on 60 Minutes, “things don’t come easy. You’re going to have to work at it.” That both men thrived on hard work was most acutely evident each time they took their place in the batter’s box. There, each was an artist in his own right, and if their roles in their respective lineups were decidedly different, Jeter and Gehrig nevertheless came through time and again when their teammates needed them most. While Jeter’s job at the top of the order was to get on base and score runs, Gehrig’s was to be the consummate clean-up hitter, hitting home runs and driving runners in. He did that more frequently than almost any other batter in the history of the game. At six-feet tall and 200 pounds, Gehrig was a powerful man with “blacksmith arms” and “heavy thighs and calves,” as described in Iron Horse: Lou Gehrig in His Time In contrast to the tall, slender (6'3" and 175 pounds), right-handed batting Jeter, Gehrig swung the bat from the left side, the same as Ruth, who usually batted in front of him. Together, Ruth and Gehrig became the most dominant home run tandem in history. Whereas Ruth was renowned for majestic, arcing, mammoth home runs, Gehrig—who finished his career with 493 dingers, second all-time to Ruth’s 714 when Gehrig retired in 1939—typically delivered low line drives that still appeared to be rising as they crossed the fence. At the plate, Gehrig was very still while he awaited a pitcher’s delivery. Beginning with his weight over his left (rear) foot, Gehrig stepped into the pitch with a short, compact stride and used his powerful wrists and forearms to drive the ball. Where Ruth was primarily a pull hitter, Gehrig drove the ball with equal power to all fields, and that ability to hit the pitch wherever it was delivered made him extremely difficult to The pitch to. Indeed, as told in Five O’Clock Lightning,

when an opposing manager was once asked how he planned to approach Gehrig’s at bats, he said he’d rather face Ruth. “You can usually figure what the Babe might do, but you can never tell about Gehrig,” said St. Louis manager Dan Howley. “Lou is likely to hit any kind of ball to any field.” The fact that the Iron Horse was also more than content to draw a walk (he led the American League three times and is 16th on the all-time list) meant that opposing pitcher was usually in for a very long afternoon. Jeter has been an altogether different kind of hitter. When a Yankee scout first saw the 16-year-old at an all-star baseball camp in Mt. Morris, MI, he was skeptical of the young man’s inside-out swing, assuming that pitchers would find it easy to jam Jeter with fastballs, thereby neutralizing any chance of his generating much power. Doubts vanished

ovation for Jeter upon breaking Gehrig’s franchise hits record went on for several minutes.

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to an endless pursuit on the part of both men to keep their bodies in the finest possible physical condition. Gehrig is still perhaps best remembered for his streak of 2,130 consecutive games played. From midway through the 1925 season to the end of the 1938 season, during an era when teams played a 154-game schedule, he played in every game. Likewise, during the era of 162-game schedule, Jeter has averaged 152 games played during his 14 full seasons. Also, in a sport where 200 hits in a season is a number usually accumulated only by the best of hitters, Gehrig reached that mark eight times, with Jeter’s family, here attending his SI Sportsman of the Year award a single-season best of 220; Jeter has ceremony, was always supportive of his major league dreams. amassed 200 hits seven times, with a when Jeter swung at just such an inside pitch and drove it to best of 219 (the only year he led the American League in hits). deep left field. Jeter had been hitting that way his whole life. Finally, with a lifetime batting average of .340, still 17th on Swinging with his hands inside the pitch, he had cultivated the all-time list, Gehrig batted .300 in a full season 12 times, the ability to foul off pitches into the first base stands until while Jeter has produced 11 .300 seasons, on the way to a he saw one he liked, and then slash it into right field or pull it career batting average of .314. It will take some very special sharply to left. “I think if you have that type of swing,” Jeter players to ever duplicate or exceed that kind of consistency. told reporters years later, shortly before surpassing Gehrig’s And so we’re left to wait for Derek Jeter to reach the hit total, “you’re able to hit a lot more pitches. Fastballs in, magic number of 3,000 hits. Barring any unforeseen disasters, you can hit. Off-speed pitches, you’re not really going to pull that should come sometime early in the 2011 season. With them foul too much.” Jeter was, in the estimation of scout 2,721 lifetime hits, there’s little doubt that Gehrig, too, had Dick Groch, a hitter of outstanding hand-eye coordination, he lived a natural life, would easily have reached the 3,000 a natural swinger in the mold of Pete Rose, Rod Carew, and plateau. Needing just 279 more, and having averaged 198 Tony Gwynn. Recalling his first look at the teenage Jeter, over his 13 full seasons, it would have taken him about the Groch said in wonder some 19 years later, “I’ve been doing same amount of time it will for Jeter before the Iron Horse this for 40 years now and I’ve said it 100 times, It’s like going would have achieved that goal. But it’s no matter; 3,000 is to the Kentucky Derby or the county fair. When you see just a number, and Gehrig long ago became one of baseball’s the stallion, you see it, and it still takes your breath away.” immortals. So, from now until, oh, 2020, around the time that That was the same type of eye-popping assessment another Jeter enters Cooperstown, Gehrig will just watch and cheer Yankee scout had made the first time he saw a 20-year-old for his teammate. Then he’ll extend a hand, show him his pitcher-outfielder named Lou Gehrig blast a 450-foot home famous dimpled grin, and say, “Welcome to the place reserved run for Columbia University in 1923. Within a week, Gehrig for the great Yankee captains.” MSP was a Yankee. And the rest, as they say, is history. (Gehrig had earlier played under two different assumed names at Hartford When not reading and writing about baseball, Chip Greene is a full-time so as not to jeopardize his college eligibility.) management consultant. A member of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), Chip is the grandson of Nelson Greene, who pitched As Jeter now enters the twilight years of his career, it’s for the Brooklyn Dodgers during parts of the 1924 and 1925 seasons. fascinating to consider the body of work that the two Yankee Chip’s work can be found on the SABR Biography Project website. Aside captains will ultimately leave behind. Although they might from baseball, he has also written about martial arts and fitness in Karate have been different kinds of players, their performances are Illustrated and SportsFocus magazines. Chip lives with his wife and two daughters in Waynesboro, PA. marked by a stark consistency and durability that few if any of their peers have been able to achieve, and are testament © 2010 Maple Street Press, LLC. All Rights Reserved. 76 | Maple Street Press Yankees Annual 2010

Photo: Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

The 2010 bronx bombers