Tag: Derek Jeter

Wait For It

(Story originally appeared in the March 2017 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

When Tim Raines goes into Cooperstown next month, it will be — fittingly — as a member of the Montreal Expos (RIP). But he did play three seasons in New York, including the 1996 and ’98 world championship years. So in early January, just before the voting results were announced, I headed to Arizona to spend some time with a guy we were all very confident would be getting the good news. Thankfully, it turned out that we guessed correctly.

I loved getting to know Tim over the parts of two days that we spent together. He’s hilarious, and easy to laugh. He was perfectly willing to talk about the mistakes he made in his career and his life, and he did it all with the good cheer and confidence of a person who long ago came to terms with the entirety of his experiences.

I settled on my theme for the piece fairly quickly — he ran so fast in his career, but then he had to wait so long to get the reward he deserved. In my head, I was really just talking about the Hall of Fame and the World Series rings. But as we talked, a bunch of other examples of having to wait out unfair or upsetting circumstances. It all made for a pretty easy story to write, and I think I was able to do with it what I initially sought to. Enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/215870536/tim-raines-yankees-hall-of-fame-cooperstown/

Confidence Man

(Story originally appeared in the Derek Jeter Commemorative Edition of Yankees Magazine)

When Derek Jeter announced his retirement before the 2014 season, we knew that we needed to do something extra special to celebrate his career, so we put together a special edition of the magazine, looking back on the Captain’s entire career. It was an awesome project, with so much awesome material that we were able to unearth. We reran a bunch of old Yankees Magazine content and supplemented it with some great original pieces.

Obviously, there are only so many different ways to talk about Jeter on the field, particularly when you’re a house organ like Yankees Magazine. So it was really important to me that I find something a bit off-beat. I had always been intrigued by the story of Dick Groch, the scout who signed Jeter. The main is famous — trying to alleviate the concern in the Yankees’ war room that they were going to use the 6th pick in the Draft on a player who would spurn them to go play college ball at Michigan, Groch, the legend has it, insisted:

“He’s not going to the University of Michigan. The only place Derek Jeter is going is Cooperstown.”

That’s a lot of confidence, and as Groch says in the article, if he had been wrong, he probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer in the industry. But the belief paid off. Jeter became a generational player, a certain Hall of Famer and one of the most beloved Yankees of all time. Not a bad scouting job.

Here’s my attempt at putting Groch’s whole story together. Hope you’ll enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/229038088/dick-groch-scouted-jeter-for-cooperstown-in-92/

Man at the Top

(Story originally appeared in the September 2016 edition of Yankees Magazine)

Pretty simple one here — Joe Torre talking about the 1996 World Series champs, the moment when he turned from “Clueless Joe” into the guy who would be induced into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

This Q&A was part of our season-long retrospective on the ’96 world champs, so I had a lot of room to play with, and Torre was generous with his time. I had to massage my way into his confidence at the beginning — the first couple of minutes, he really didn’t want to dive too deep into any of my questions. But as time passed, he began to open up, and it definitely got emotional toward the end. There was so much on his mind during that World Series, with his brother in the hospital (another brother had passed away earlier that year), and he had such a total love for and devotion to the players on that team.

Anyway, there’s not too much fresh ground turned over in this one, but I think it ended up being a pretty good conversation. Hope you’ll read it.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/199114972/joe-torre-recalls-1996-and-yankees-dynasty/