The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter Read Online Free PDF Page A

on the outside corner of the plate. The Kalamazoo Central coaches worked with Derek to take those outside pitches to right field, and before they knew it he was spraying balls all over creation and developing an inside-out swing that would put batters twice his age to shame.
    If Copeland was thrilled with Derek’s progress, he pushed for more. The coach wanted Jeter to make regular appearances on the mound, too.
    Derek liked to play deep at short to buy himself time on line drives, and to take advantage of his Nolan Ryan arm. During summer ball, when asked by
Kalamazoo Gazette
sportswriter Paul Morgan why he did not pitch, Derek shot Morgan a frightful look and said, “You’re too close to the hitter. Somebody could get killed.” Jeter, Morgan said, “wanted to be as far away from the hitter as possible.”
    Derek told his jayvee coach of a different fear, told him he was afraid that pitching might damage his arm. Copeland did persuade him to take the mound in one game, and Jeter threw eight warm-up pitches for eight strikes, and then he threw nine strikes to three batters who never once saw the ball. “But he didn’t want to be there,” Copeland said. “That was the one thing he was pretty emphatic about—staying at shortstop.”
    Jeter had no problem unleashing his fastballs at short. Kalamazoo Central was playing its local rival, Portage Central, in one jayvee game that devolved into a theater of the absurd for the Portage third-base coach.
    Three times Portage batters ripped liners with runners on base, and three times Kalamazoo outfielders hit Jeter with their cutoff throws, and three times Jeter threw from the outfield grass to nail runners at the plate. From his dugout, Copeland saw the Portage coach fling his cap in the air before saying the following:
    “I surrender. The first time I sent the kid, I didn’t even bother looking at home plate to see the play and I couldn’t believe it when I heard the umpire call him out. The second time I sent him, I watched it and I couldn’t believe it when the ball got there so quickly.
    “The third time I sent him, you made a believer out of me.”
    Jeter was promoted to varsity two-thirds of the way through the season, after Humphrey told Signeski he would clear the way by moving to second base. When the Central varsity faced Portage in the district playoffs, Jeter came to bat in a critical situation, with first base open. Casserly and Ryan Topham, another Portage player who was a summer teammate of Derek’s, turned toward their head coach in the hope he would walk the freshman.
    Bob Royer did not know enough about Jeter, so he chose to pitch to him. “And Derek hit a seed,” Casserly said.
    Jeter kept planting those seeds all over Kalamazoo, growing into one of the finest amateur players in the state. He played for Signeski and then Don Zomer at Central and graduated out of Jasiak’s boot camp and into Mike Hinga’s Maroons summer team, which played as many as seventy games a season. It was nonstop baseball for a kid who could not get enough, a charmed existence for a boy holding fast to his grown-up goal.
    As the shortstop next door, Derek Jeter was the antithesis of Eddie Haskell. “He was like Beaver Cleaver, except a Beaver who didn’t get in trouble,” Hinga said. “Derek’s mom and dad would’ve crushed him if he got in trouble.”
    By all accounts, Derek earned his parents’ wrath a single, solitary teenage time, committing a felony—at least in the court of Charles and Dot—that would not even have drawn a parking ticket in most American homes.
    Derek borrowed the family Datsun 310, joined some buddies for a night out, and ended up outside a house that was hosting a girls’ sleepover. A friend tossed rocks at the house windows, a man emerged from the house to chase the boys, and the cops were called to the scene, the whole event inspiring Charles and Dot to deny their son car privileges for two months.
    That was that for Derek, one small