[新聞] A-Rod, Jeter are Yankees of different pinstripes

[leddy (耿秋)]

A-Rod, Jeter are Yankees of different pinstripes
Updated 9/29/2006 10:09 AM ET
By Paul White, USA TODAY

They stand next to each other on baseball's most famous field, but their
lockers are on opposite sides of the Yankee Stadium clubhouse.
Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez are the game's most marketable players, have
the sport's richest contracts, produce some of its most spectacular
performances. Yet, judging by their public images, these megastars might as
well be on opposite sides of the planet.

Jeter is an unquestioned hero, the captain and face of the Yankees, defined
by his four World Series championships with the team. Rodriguez might never
be able to hit enough home runs or win enough titles to escape the shadow
cast by his unprecedented 10-year, $252 million contract.

Both enhance their significant incomes with calculated marketing strategies,
yet while the intense Rodriguez is painted as the cold, calculating
mercenary, Jeter comes across as pop-star cool.

"He's just beloved," says Brandon Steiner, who often accompanies Jeter to New
York events for Steiner's collectibles company. "(Fans) look at him like they
used to look at Mickey Mantle."

In a season when Jeter is a favorite to be the American League's Most
Valuable Player, the award won by Rodriguez last year, Rodriguez has been
booed regularly at home and battered as often in the New York media. Jeter
has been booed there, most notably during a 0-for-32 stretch two years ago,
but Rodriguez's hitting and fielding slumps this year were fuel for fans who
have been slow to warm up to him since he became a Yankee in 2004.

The tabloid headline writers seized on his play: "E-Rod" in reference to his
errors; but also got personal: "Do You Hate This Man?"

"I would have thought he'd have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge by now," says
Doug Mientkiewicz, the Kansas City Royals first baseman who was Rodriguez's
high school teammate and childhood neighbor in Coral Gables, Fla.

"It has been a very challenging year," Rodriguez says. "You have to
experience it and learn from it. I feel pretty good about the way I've been
able to turn things around."

Rodriguez had a stretch in June with four hits in 32 at-bats and a 2-for-27
streak in August during which he struck out 14 times, and his 23 errors are
the most among AL third basemen.

He has been one of the Yankees' most productive hitters for the last month.
He even was cheered enough during a couple of games to step out of the dugout
and doff his cap after hitting home runs.

That hardly ended the barrage, which intensified again this month after a
Sports Illustrated article portrayed Rodriguez as putting appearances above
all else and reported that some teammates shared that perception.

Jeter has 'built up a legacy'

Although Rodriguez's contract seems to follow him wherever he goes, Jeter is
actually getting more money from the Yankees this season. So are pitcher Mike
Mussina and first baseman Jason Giambi.

The Texas Rangers, who signed Rodriguez to the record contract in December
2000, are paying $5.6 million of Rodriguez's $21.6 million base salary this
year, a stipulation of the trade that sent him to New York. Jeter, whose
10-year, $189 million deal signed in February 2001 remains baseball's
second-largest contract, is being paid $20.6 million this year.

Seldom, though, does Jeter hear anyone questioning his income.

"Derek's built up a legacy," says Ben Kabak, who interacts with Yankees fans
as director of baseball for Most Valuable Network, a network of blogs and fan
discussions. "He's built up a way of handling himself in New York that A-Rod
hasn't."

"Just keep things simple," Jeter says of how he deals with fans and media. "I
believe if you do that, everything will work out. Sometimes people complicate
things by thinking too much about what someone might think of what they said."

They're pitted as rivals in everything, regardless of whether they want to
be. They became friends as minor leaguers, when both were learning to deal
with the expectations heaped on first-round draft picks. The relationship
cooled after Rodriguez called Jeter "a number-two hitter," meaning not the
key player in a team's offense, in a 2001 GQ article.

Nowadays, teammates is a term both players use. The rest of the Yankees want
no part of the discussion, at least on the record.

Rodriguez says he keeps it real

Rodriguez maintains, "I just kind of laugh at all the stuff going on around
me."

Maybe so, but that's not always the message others receive. Even his friends
understand why he can be perceived as packaged.

"Alex is not an 'I' guy," says Mientkiewicz, who spent countless hours
practicing hitting with Rodriguez in a batting cage in the Mientkiewicz
backyard. "But he comes across that way too often. Then you have Jeter. He
never talks about himself. He talks about 'we.' "

Jeter, 32, has been a Yankee since the team drafted him in 1992 from
Kalamazoo (Mich.) Central High School. He's close friends with catcher Jorge
Posada and pitcher Mariano Rivera, also products of the team's minor league
system.

Rodriguez, 31, is more reserved. His smile is warm, but he seldom raises his
voice or dives into the normal locker-room banter.

None of that has hurt him in the endorsement arena. In a 2005 survey of
advertising and marketing executives by Sports BusinessDaily, Rodriguez was
ranked second among baseball's most marketable players. Jeter was first.

"You've got to be your own person," Rodriguez says. "If you're not authentic,
people will figure it out."

Mientkiewicz says Rodriguez, who's fiercely protective of his family (he's
married, with a 2-year-old daughter, Natasha) and private life, merely needs
to crack the door and give the world a peek.

"If he would let people into his personal side, people would get him,"
Mientkiewicz says. "Sometimes I think, 'Alex, get mad, throw something.'
Alex's biggest detriment is Alex, and he knows that. He expects non-stop
perfection."

Rodriguez admits he spends too much time thinking about games, at-bats. He
can't step away from it.

"It's not like I sit there and say, 'Wow, what I did yesterday was pretty
cool,' " Rodriguez says. "I'm one who believes you're never there."

Both amass marketing deals

That drive extends to Rodriguez's world off the field. He's just as
comfortable in a pinstriped suit as in Yankees pinstripes. In the offseason
he works 10- to 12-hour days in the office of the real estate investment
company he founded in Florida. He was so inspired by the strategies of Dolf
de Roos that he wrote the foreword to the revised version of de Roos' book,
Real Estate Riches: How to Become Rich Using Your Banker's Money.

Rodriguez set up his own marketing operation when he came to the Yankees.

"He had an idea of what was going to face him," says Steve Fortunato, whom
Rodriguez hired to run Impact Marketing Solutions, which since has been
merged into the operation of Scott Boras, Rodriguez's agent. "He came to New
York not to be Mr. Madison Avenue."

Rodriguez has deals with Nike, Rawlings, Topps baseball cards, Wheaties, the
Got Milk campaign, Pepsi and an arcade-style game for cellphones with Oasys
Mobile. Plus, he has the AROD Family Foundation, which helps families in the
Miami area.

"I've never really enjoyed the whole marketing thing," Rodriguez says. "I
know that 98% of all the phone calls we get, the answer is going to be 'no.' "

The "yes" he currently is most excited about is Out of the Ballpark, a
children's book he's writing for release in English and Spanish next spring.
Rodriguez hopes it's the first of a series about a boy called Little Alex.

"It's about the way I grew up," he says. "It's fictional, but it's about 95%
drawn from truthful stuff that happened to me. I want kids to understand that
if an underdog like me can make it, so can they. I came from a single-parent
home. I'm a minority, from a poor background."

Alex Rodriguez, the underdog? No matter how accurate that might be, he knows
it's more fodder for his detractors.

"That's the message for the kids," he says. "Adults are going to think what
they want to. I don't care about that. People are not going to change what
they think."

Jeter has no such problem with perception. He's marketed every bit as
strategically as Rodriguez and has deals with Nike, Gatorade, XM Radio,
Rawlings Sporting Goods, 2K Sports video games, Steiner Sports Collectibles,
Upper Deck cards, Movado watches, Pro Performance sports training devices and
New York-area Ford dealers. He just launched his own cologne, Driven.

Jeter says the last step of considering offers is, "I run it by Mom and Dad."

Mom and Dad are part of Jeter's team with agent Casey Close.

Charles Jeter, who has a Ph.D. in sociology and worked as a social worker for
nearly 20 years, now is the full-time vice president of Jeter's Turn 2
Foundation, which runs substance-abuse prevention and treatment programs in
New York and Michigan. His mother, Dorothy, is executive director, and his
sister, Sharlee, program director.

"Family unity, that's what I remember," says Dick Groch, the scout who signed
Jeter in 1992. "I think Derek Jeter went to a family picnic and started a
pickup game and hasn't stopped competing."

That contract wasn't Jeter's first. He has been signing them with his parents
since elementary school.

"We would sit down and discuss expectations," Charles Jeter says. "It
included drugs — there were no negotiations on that one — curfews, grades.
He had to pick a club in school to be part of, something other than sports.

"You've got to have consequences, grounding, not playing sports. But we were
fortunate. We never had to invoke those things."

Playoffs turn up pressure

When the playoffs start Tuesday, the spotlight will get even brighter for
Jeter and Rodriguez. Winning the World Series is treated like a birthright in
the Yankees family. They've done it an unmatched 26 times but not since 2000.

Rodriguez was there for the 2004 playoff collapse against the archrival
Boston Red Sox, when the Yankees became the first team to lose a seven-game
series after winning the first three games. He batted .133 last year when the
Los Angeles Angels eliminated New York in the first round of the playoffs.

That's ammunition used often by his detractors, though Rodriguez's career
postseason batting average is .305, two points lower than Jeter's. But
Jeter's edge is he has won four World Series titles.

"It's tough love," Kabak says of the treatment of Rodriguez. "If he has a
good October and the Yankees win the World Series, fans will love him."

Posted 9/28/2006 6:56 PM ET

--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) 
◆ From: 220.132.198.21
推 iambiaggi:好長...先推等神人翻譯....XD
推 leddy:a-rod寫的童書明天會出版
→ leddy:a-rod出身貧寒的單親家庭, jeter的父親是位Ph.D, 差真多
推 FW190:這是USA Today本週末版的頭版文章,很長但不算難懂
推 Maia:好文，從兩個人的背景來談現在的個性與形象，滿有趣的文章
推 djcc:在季後賽發威吧