ROCKY ROAD LED TO HALL
Before enshrinement, Jeter’s career got off to error-filled start
The players on the Greensboro ballclub lived in an apartment complex called Sterling Pointe. The players always pronounced the “e” on the end of the name because “that made it much more fancy,” says Mike Buddie, a pitcher. There were makeshift games of golf in the hallways — baseballs would serve as the balls — and card games in someone’s apartment to unwind. Meal staples included hot dogs mixed in with a batch of ramen noodles or mac and cheese.
When it was time to leave for War Memorial Stadium, players would pour out of apartments and pile into whoever’s cars were going to make the five-mile trek to the ballpark that day. Included in that group was a kid from Kalamazoo, Mich., who turned 19 during that 1993 season.
Derek Jeter’s first full season of pro ball was a slice of low-level, no-frills baseball life that every minor leaguer experiences, far from the wealth and celebrity that can come in the Major Leagues. But it was something deeper for the highly-touted Yankees prospect, too: a year fraught with fielding failure, growing up and, ultimately, the steely perseverance that helped him construct a Hall of Fame career.
Jeter, a raw bean pole who was the sixth overall pick in the 1992 draft, made 56 errors while playing 126 games at shortstop. While he showed growth as a hitter, batting .295 with 152 hits, his glove fueled speculation that he’d never be a big-league shortstop. His fielding got so bad that the Greensboro official scorer later told local media that someone from the Yankee high command had called to complain that the scorer was too harsh on Jeter.
“Derek talks about that season all the time,” says Tino Martinez, Jeter’s friend and former Yankee teammate. “It’s the first thing he tells kids at a baseball clinic: firstround pick, making all those errors. Called his dad crying, ‘I want to come home.’ He stuck it out. It’s just an amazing career. He made himself better.”
Several opposing managers in the Class A South Atlantic League wrote reports to their organizations saying Jeter couldn’t stay at short. Maybe he’d be better off in center field or at third base? Imagine that — the legendary Yankees shortstop playing elsewhere. In 20 MLB seasons all with the Yanks, Jeter played 2,674 games at short and 73 as the designated hitter. He never played another position.
“He was just erratic in anything he did,” recalls former big-leaguer Bobby Ramos, who managed the Asheville Tourists, then an Astros affiliate, in 1993. “He didn’t read the ball well. He was wild with his release point. He didn’t look fluid and he looked like he was in a rush. It was a big red flag.”
“I thought he was an elite player, but he made a lot of mistakes at short,” adds Ron Washington, the ex-MLB shortstop and former Texas Rangers manager who piloted the Capital City Bombers, a Mets affiliate, in 1993. “I told Willie Randolph that the kid can play, but he might have to move to third.
“If I would’ve known the kid a little more, maybe I would’ve thought differently. But from the outside, I didn’t think he’d be a shortstop. Sometimes you make decisions on kids and you’re proven wrong. It’s up to the kid to change the scenario and he did.
“Derek made us all look like liars.”
In 1992, Jeter had played a half-season in the minors — 47 games in rookie ball and 11 more at Greensboro — after signing at 18. Minor-league ball is a grind — the Sally League was played during the sticky, humid Southern summer on bumpy infields in ballparks that were “mostly right out of Bull Durham,” says Buddie.
“This wasn’t the age of new minor-league stadiums with great craft beer,” Buddie adds. “There were 200 people at the games. Sometimes the speakers would work, sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes, the sprinklers really would come on.”
Most of Jeter’s Greensboro teammates in 1993 had been drafted out of college and had signed for much less than the $800,000 Jeter got. Jeter was the youngest regular on a team in which the average age was 21.5 years old, according to baseball-reference. com.
“There were natural barriers Derek had to overcome,” says Buddie, who is now the athletic director at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “With people, there’s a natural inclination for jealousy. The rest of us went to college and signed for $2,000 or maybe $100,000 on the high end.
“Half of the team had played together in Oneonta the year before, but Derek hadn’t. There were already cliques and relationships and Derek was chronologically
an outlier and financially an outlier, too. He had to kind of insert himself.”
Turns out, that was easy. “He was a phenomenally likeable guy,” Buddie says. He had a knack for lightening the mood after a game. Jeter adored music, Buddie says, and loved to sing Mary J. Blige songs. How was the shortstop’s voice?
“Sadly, he actually was good at singing,” Buddie says. “We’d play pickup basketball, he was the best player at that, too. He obviously had potential in baseball.”
Then Buddie laughs and jokes: “He was one of those guys you wanted to punch in the face.”
It might have been frustrating for Buddie, a self-professed ground-ball pitcher, and other Hornets to have a shortstop struggling so badly defensively. But Jeter “took away your ammo” by working so hard, Buddie says.
“That buys you a lot of credibility when you are struggling,”
Buddie adds. “No one ever lost patience, because it was obvious he knew his game needed work and he was attacking it as much or more than the rest of us. A lot of people sign for big money and think it’s a lesson to work less. You see what his career became.”
Derek Shelton, the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates who played on that ’93 Greensboro team, recalls one play in which Jeter made a stunning backhand grab in the hole and then unleashed a rocket. “The arm strength was incredible,” Shelton says. “It made you say, ‘Wow!’ But it went wild. He was still learning to move, learning how to do it.”
In the years since, Jeter has admitted that his early pro seasons made him wonder if he had made a mistake forgoing a scholarship to play at the University of Michigan. In Hall of Fame press conferences, he’s talked about feeling “overmatched” in those days.
In ’93, Jeter did not despair, at least not outwardly. “You would never know whether he had a great day or a bad day, which was unique in a guy his age,” says Bill Evers, who managed Greensboro part of that season. “I’m sure it ate at him when he didn’t play well, but at 19, he acted more like a 25-year-old who had been around and knew there were good and bad games.”
The ’93 Hornets finished 8556, losing in the championship series. Nine players who made appearances for Greensboro reached the big leagues, including Buddie, Mariano Rivera, Shane Spencer and Ramiro Mendoza, who all became teammates again on the World Series champion 1998 Yankees.
After the 1993 season, Jeter went to Tampa for the Yankees’ Instructional League. There, working with infield coach Brian Butterfield, he revamped his defense, erasing the extraneous movement in his technique. Jeter’s career soared.
He started the 1994 season at High-A Tampa and got promoted twice, finishing the year in Triple-A. He made only 25 errors total. In 1995, he made his MLB debut and was AL Rookie of the Year in 1996.
“We were together in Tampa in the first half of ’94 and that was the year he lapped the field,” Buddie says. “He worked during the offseason, taking an apartment in Tampa instead of going back to Michigan. He physically looked different when we got there in ’94 and he was over some of his homesickness.
“His defensive struggles were completely gone. It was clear by the end of spring training in ’94 that he was going to be something special.”
The ’93 season, and all those errors, helped him do it. In the majors, Jeter never rated highly according to different defensive metric systems. But while he was an offensive force, amassing 3,465 hits (sixth all-time), he also was awarded five Gold Gloves for his play at short. And he never lost his job, even when Álex Rodriguez, arguably a better option, joined the Yanks.
“For Derek, 1993 was a great growth year, not only physically, but mentally, being able to deal with the challenges of failure,” Evers says. “There’s guys in the big leagues now who don’t handle it. That’s what makes individuals special, when they can learn to handle failure.”