New York Yankees Hall of Famer Derek Jeter has revealed why his once close friendship with Alex Rodriguez fell apart.
The two shortstops had become friends in the 1990s as they both rose to stardom. Jeter played in 15 games in 1995, then played in virtually every Yankees game in 1996, batting .314 and named AL Rookie of the Year as the Yankees won their first World Series in 18 years. Rodriguez played 17 games for the Seattle Mariners in 1994, then 48 in 1995 before playing in 146 games with a league-leading batting average of .358 along with 36 home runs and 123 RBI in 1996.
Jeter, 48, stated on the ESPN series “The Captain” that an April 2001 article about Rodriquez in Esquire catalyzed his anger toward Rodriguez. Rodriguez said in the article:
Jeter’s been blessed with great talent around him. He’s never had to lead. He can just go and play and have fun. He hits second — that’s totally different than third or fourth in a lineup. You go into New York, you wanna stop Bernie and O’Neill. You never say, “Don’t let Derek beat you.” He’s never your concern.”
Two months before that, as Jeter negotiated his contract with the Yankees, Rodriguez sniped that Jeter’s contract would not compare with Rodriguez’s $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers. He told Dan Patrick, “ … he just doesn’t do the power numbers and defensively he doesn’t do all those things.”
Asked at the time if those comments had bothered him, Jeter answered, “Not at all. I’ve known him for a long time. Obviously, it didn’t come out good, what he supposedly said, but he said his intentions weren’t bad, so that’s the way I look at it. We’re close. We obviously don’t spend a lot of time together because we’re in different cities, but he’s a good friend of mine.”
But Jeter, who was named the captain of the Yankees in 2003, the year before Rodriguez joined the team, told ESPN, “The Dan Patrick interview, he was talking about a comparison between me and him on the field. In my mind, he got his contract, so you’re trying to diminish what I’m doing maybe to justify why you got paid?” He admitted his statistics, “never compared to Alex’s statistics. … I’m not blind. I understand. But we won.”
The Esquire comments rankled Jeter. He admitted, “Those comments bothered me because, like I said, I’m very, very loyal. As a friend, I’m loyal. I just looked at it as ‘I wouldn’t have done it.’ And then it was the media. The constant hammer to the nail. They just kept hammering it in. It just became noise, which frustrated me. Just constant noise.”
Rodriguez, who shifted from his natural position at shortstop to third base when he joined the Yankees, doubled down on his 2001 comments when asked about them by ESPN. “When that came out, I felt really bad about it,” he confessed. “I saw the way it was playing out. The way it was written, I absolutely said exactly what I said. It was a comment that I stand behind today. It was a complete tsunami. It was one of the greatest teams ever. To say that you don’t have to focus on just one player is totally fair.”
“By the way, the same could be said about my team with the Mariners,” Rodriguez added. “We had Ken Griffey Jr., Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner. If someone said that about me, I’d be like, ‘No s***. Absolutely. You better not just worry about me.’”
“You can say whatever you want about me as a player, that’s fine, but then it goes back to the trust and the loyalty,” Jeter declared. “This is how the guy feels, he’s not a true friend, is how I felt. Because I wouldn’t do it to a friend.”
Rodriguez admitted that his comments “broke the trust” between the two men. “And I think from that moment on it was never quite the same ever again. I think it’s [me] really not understanding the way things work.”
The two men played together on the Yankees from 2004 through 2013, winning a World Series together in 2009. In that Series, Jeter batted .407 while Rodriguez batted .250.
Jeter retired after the 2014 season, which Rodriquez missed because he had been suspended from baseball for his involvement in Major League Baseball’s Biogenesis scandal.
“I’m still gonna be cordial. But you crossed the line, and I won’t let you in again,” Jeter concluded.