The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter by Ian O'Connor Read Free Book Online Page A

happened?” Portage was going to defeat Central whether or not Jeter was in the lineup, only this moment was not about winning and losing on a high school scoreboard.
    “You could tell everyone was thinking, ‘I hope this doesn’t hurt Derek’s chances,’” Johnson said.
    Jeter was helped off the field by his father, and Kalamazoo went down by a 10–0 count. Derek was terrified he might have suffered a broken ankle, and he was only slightly relieved when the doctor told him he had a high ankle sprain and could miss most of the year.
    The injury could have cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars and a place in the first round of the draft. Only the six-foot-three Jeter had an inner toughness that cut against the grain of his praying mantis build.
    He missed a handful of games, slid his swollen ankle into a brace, and returned to his losing Kalamazoo Central team in high-tops and higher spirits. Derek was not about to let his human frailty defeat him.
    Jeter could not match his .557 batting average and 7 homers from his junior year, but he did hit .508 and finish with 23 RBI despite the fact that his injured ankle stripped him of all his home-run power.
    The numbers were good enough to earn Jeter plenty more than the all-district honors that had escaped him in 1991. The American Baseball Coaches Association and
USA Today
would name Jeter their national High School Player of the Year, and Gatorade would name him its High School Athlete of the Year.
    As it turned out, Derek’s draft status did not begin deflating the moment he blew a tire on the first-base bag at Portage. Hal Newhouser still believed Jeter was the best amateur prospect in America, high school or college, and he was hell-bent on the Astros selecting him with the number-one overall pick.
    With the Reds picking four slots behind Houston, Reds scouts Fred Hayes and Gene Bennett wanted their team to be ready to scoop up the Astros’ potential fumble.
    But Hayes and Bennett were not making the final call for Cincinnati any more than Newhouser was making the final call for Houston. Scouting directors, general managers, and team owners did not make a habit of watching high school games in the Michigan rain and snow, at least not the way their scouts did, and yet they were the ones responsible for deciding who was worth drafting and who was not.
    Sometimes those decisions were not about speed and power, but dollars and cents. So veteran scouts who were not in prime position to sign Jeter knew enough to hang in there with the Kalamazoo kid.
    Dick Groch was one of those scouts. He was hiding in plain sight at Jeter’s games, avoiding eye contact with the shortstop, and declining to introduce himself to Jeter’s coach.
    Zomer took calls all day from scouts needing directions to Kalamazoo Central, from scouts asking for weather reports and places to eat. Sometimes the phone rang in the small hours of night, and Zomer never cared.
    “When you’re doing it for a kid like Derek,” he said, “you don’t mind at all.”
    But Dick Groch did not bother to set up a meeting or even to stop by the batting cage to say hello.
    “Never met him,” Zomer said. “I had no idea who he was.”
    Groch was employed by the New York Yankees, and as draft day approached, he was finally emerging from the bushes and preparing to pounce.

    Dick Groch first saw Derek Jeter at a baseball camp in Mount Morris, Michigan, where the shortstop fielded ground balls, showed off his arm, and ran the sixty-yard dash. Groch was standing next to an assistant coach at Michigan State who was taken by the teen’s talents and who wanted to get Jeter on his mailing list.
    “You’d better save your postage,” Groch told the coach. “That kid’s not going to school.”
    The Yankees’ scout had been watching Jeter for only half an hour when he ruined that Michigan State assistant’s day. Groch had been a junior baseball coach for eighteen years, and he had seen dozens of prospects come and go