Free The Captain: The Journey of Derek Jeter by Ian O'Connor

size, Mottola was thrilled to be a first-round pick, never mind a top-five pick. He took the $400,000 deal with the Reds because he wanted to play baseball, because it sure seemed like a lot of money, and because nobody had projected him as a high draft choice entering his final year of college ball.
    But the fourth pick, Hammonds of the Orioles, would sign for $975,000. Even the twenty-fifth selection in that draft, Todd Steverson, scored a bigger bonus than Mottola did—$450,000 from Toronto.
    “A big reason the Reds took me was my signability,” Mottola would say. “When you’re that young you think, ‘Four hundred thousand to go in the first round? Great, where do I sign?’ You don’t realize people are trying to take advantage of you.”
    The Reds scout who saw Jeter the most, Fred Hayes, was just as devastated as Bennett. Jim Bowden, Cincinnati’s thirty-one-year-old director of player development and a man on the verge of becoming the youngest general manager in baseball history, could not believe Mock had ignored Bennett’s claim that Jeter could develop into a better player than the O’Neills, Sabos, and Larkins he had signed in the past.
    Mock was not moved by anyone’s counterarguments. He explained he did not know if Jeter would ever play shortstop for the Reds and figured Jeter might end up getting traded to another club.
    “I thought of our needs,” Mock said, “and of the fact I thought we had a superstar in Mottola.”
    Before he could do any of that explaining, Morgan was on the phone and speed-dialing the Jeters. The sportswriter knew if he did not get to Derek immediately after the Yankees selected him at number 6, he would never get through.
    Morgan even beat the team and Dick Groch to the punch. This time Charles Jeter answered the phone.
    “Charles, has he heard yet?” Morgan asked.
    “No,” the father answered.
    “He’s a Yankee.”
    Charles let out a cry of unmitigated joy and immediately handed the phone to his son.
    “Derek, you’re going to be a Yankee,” Morgan told him.
    “I can’t believe it,” Derek shouted. “I just can’t believe it.”
    Morgan heard bedlam breaking out in the background, and the sportswriter let Derek go, knowing the Yankees would be trying to call. Morgan hopped into his car and headed to the Jeter home.
    Meanwhile, Sharlee Jeter wrapped her big brother in a hug before her father shook Derek’s hand.
    “I’m so proud of you,” Charles shrieked. “New York Yankees. That’s your dream, man!”
    It was as if Jeter had willed this to happen. All those years of wearing Yankee shirts and caps and pendants, all those promises to friends, teammates, and teachers that he would grow up to become the shortstop for the world’s most famous ball team—they created some cosmic force too potent for an antiquated draft system to repel.
    The dreamer was living the impossible dream, yet one that still required a signature and the rejection of a free education at Michigan.
    The Yankees’ Brian Sabean immediately began negotiations with Caruso, a labor relations consultant turned beginner agent who landed Jeter as a client after landing A. J. Hinch, the Oklahoma high school star.
    Caruso would come to see Jeter as the second-best teenage prospect he had ever seen, right behind a Miami phenom named Alex Rodriguez. On a strong recommendation from Hinch’s father, Charles Jeter had invited Caruso to Kalamazoo and, over a few slices of pizza, agreed to let him represent his son.
    “Then [Scott] Boras showed up at the airport and he was bugging Charles a couple of weeks later,” Caruso said. “Charles, to his credit, wouldn’t let Boras come over because he’d already made a deal with me.”
    Caruso would go to bat for Jeter, a client he saw as “a skinny seventeen-year-old who barely said three words,” a client who lived in a home modest enough to greet a visitor with a broken handle on the screen door. That modest existence was about to change in a big