I was sitting at my locker at Turner Field a couple of hours before Game 1 of the World Series when one of our security guards came in and said, “Sharon is here.”
I looked at the clock. It was 6:00 P.M. That’s weird. She’s not supposed to be here yet. I met her in the tunnel.
“What are you doing here so early?” I said.
What I was thinking was It’s the first game of the World Series. We’re playing the Yankees. I’m facing El Duque in an hour. You don’t need to be here right now.
Then I realized she was trembling.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“I’m pregnant,” she said.
You could have knocked me over with a feather.
“Are you happy about this?” she said.
“Yes, I’m so happy,” I said, putting on my best “I’m so happy” face. But all I could think was Oh shit, I’m not divorced yet. I wanted to have kids. I wanted to be a full-time dad, but I wanted to close the last chapter before I started this one. My divorce with Karin wouldn’t be final for three months.
I loved Sharon. I wanted to be with Sharon every moment I wasn’t at the ballpark. We’d been living together for almost a year. Kids and marriage had certainly come up, but I wasn’t ready.
I went back into the clubhouse, sat down, and stared into the back of my locker. This was going to change my life forever. And unlike with Matthew, this would mean full-time dad status. I was happy we were going to have a child, but it was a shock to my system, especially a few hours before the World Series started. I was going to have to put my personal life to the back of my mind and concentrate on the game. I thought about it during the game. How could I not? But I wasn’t digging in the box against El Duque—Orlando Hernandez—thinking, Oh my god, I’ve got a kid coming. This is crazy. You can’t lose focus playing third base either, or you will get your teeth knocked out. When I let my mind wander, it was during lulls in the game and between innings.
El Duque was perfect through three and two-thirds innings, and Doggie was pitching great. The game was still scoreless when I came up in the bottom of the fourth.
Duque, with his patented high leg kick, was just in his second year in the league after defecting from Cuba. We’d faced him earlier in the year in interleague play and somehow lit him up for four homers, but this was October. It was cold, and he was bringing it.
All right, stay short, stay compact, and let’s try to get something started. He took a page out of the Mets’ book and threw me a fastball in. I mean, I turned on it. I got out in front of it and kept it fair down the right field line for a homer to put us up 1–0. I hadn’t gone deep since our sweep of the Mets a month earlier. It was my first home run in a World Series game.
The 1–0 lead wouldn’t last, though. The Yankees scored four off Doggie in the eighth. That buried us because they had a really good bullpen with the big boy—Mariano Rivera—now at the end closing games. We didn’t score another run that game, and we had a tough time all series. The Yankees swept us—two games in Atlanta, two games in New York.
In ’99 it was glaringly obvious the Yankees were a better ball club than we were, just as I thought we were the better team in ’96. A lot of those Yankee teams in the late ’90s and early 2000s were better than everybody. A team of National League All-Stars probably couldn’t have beaten them.
The end of the World Series meant no more daily diversions from my divorce proceedings. Karin wanted everything, and she was threatening to come after my future earnings. Was she entitled to something? No doubt. But we’d been haggling for more than a year and I was sick of it.
Finally one day, I sat down with my attorney, Jeffrey Bogart, and asked him how to put an end to it.
“Well, there’s one way to make it go away right now,” he said.
“Give her everything?” I said.
“Yep.”
“How much do I have?” I said.
“Everything you have liquid, all your assets, is probably seven million dollars,” he said.
“Give it to her,” I said. “I want fifty thousand dollars. I can put forty thousand down on a new house and still have ten thousand to put some furniture in it. Give her everything else.”
I had a new contract on the horizon, and we suspected she wanted to come after that, too. I didn’t want to go into those negotiations, much less another season, with a divorce hanging over my head. We finalized it in January 2000, and I felt as if the weight of the world was off my shoulders.
A couple of days before the end of spring training, Sharon and I got married in my parents’ front yard in Pierson. Going through an entire pregnancy with Sharon was really cool. I didn’t get to experience that with Matthew. Our son Larry Wayne Jones III—we call him Trey—was born on June 30, 2000. I flew home for the delivery, from where else—New York.
—
I probably could have had my own reality TV show in ’99. But even with all the drama of ongoing divorce proceedings, a new relationship, and getting to know Matthew, I had a career year and won the National League MVP. Don Baylor is the main reason why.
Under his tutelage, I put up a combination of numbers nobody had before. I hit over .300, knocked in 100-plus runs, scored 100-plus runs, walked 100-plus times, hit 40-plus homers, hit 40-plus doubles, and stole 25 bags.
Winning an MVP propels you into the upper echelon of players in the league. I never thought of myself as an MVP, even after I won it. Baggy—Jeff Bagwell? Perennial MVP candidate. Barry Bonds, Matt Williams, Caminiti, Piazza. Those guys were the upper echelon.
No doubt the Mets series pushed me over the edge in a lot of voters’ minds. I was shocked I got so many first place votes—twenty-nine of the thirty-two—but hitting four home runs in a tight race against a team from New York put me on the front pages of a lot of newspapers. Everybody was watching that race.
A lot of people thought the love/hate relationship between the Mets fans and me was my primary motivation. I got my inspiration long before 1999, with everything I grew up hearing about Mickey and New York. So it was fitting that to accept my MVP, I was invited to the Baseball Writers’ Association dinner in New York.
Hank Aaron flew up to present it to me. If you’re an Atlanta Brave and you don’t bow down at the feet of Hank Aaron, you don’t have a pulse. I cherish every moment I get to spend with him.
I also got to hobnob with some of the best players in the game, including some of the Yankees we had just faced, like David Cone, Derek Jeter, and Mariano Rivera.
When it came to the fans of New York, my relationships weren’t quite as civilized. At that point, it wasn’t really a love/hate relationship; it was more hate/hate. In ’99, I was a villain in the city of New York.
I hated going there. My first eight years in the big leagues, I didn’t leave my room at the Grand Hyatt until it was time to leave for the ballpark. New York is one of the reasons I went under an alias, because I used to get crank calls in my hotel room. It was intimidating being out in public around that many people, especially as a Brave. Everybody knew us. When we walked out of the hotel, we were hounded. So I chose to stay in.
Eventually, I learned how to sneak out of the Grand Hyatt without being followed. I threw out decoys. I’d walk into the second-floor lobby and wait until I saw the autograph hounds coming. Then I’d shoot back down the escalators and out the front door to a car I’d arranged to have waiting. Before long, they started using walkie-talkies, which made it tougher. If I went out the main lobby, they’d tell the guys upstairs to come down. It was crazy.
I had people chase me for blocks. Even if I had stopped and signed in front of the hotel, they’d lie and say, “You didn’t get me.” But I knew who they were. I’d fuzz up every once in a while. There’s no way you can get to everybody. But it’s New York. There are guys there who’d run over their mom in a bus to get to you if they could make money off your autograph.
I wanted to beat the Mets more than any other team on the planet, and it had nothing to do with their players or manager. It was their fans. When you walked out on deck in Shea Stadium in Flushing, New York, in an opposing team’s jersey, you were going to have your ancestry questioned as well as your mother and father’s honor. I hated making a right-hand turn from first base and giving them any kind of satisfaction. I hated striking out and having that long walk back to the third base dugout. It motivated me to play at my best whenever we were there.
—
Whatever news my relationship with the fans of New York made in 1999 was nothing compared to the shitstorm Rocker kicked up that offseason.
He and I both got caught up in the emotion of that last regular season series in New York, but he took it to a different level. I had to pull him by the collar coming off the field after the last game. He was screaming at people over our dugout: “I just struck out your best hitter!”
John was being John. But a month after the season was over, after he’d had a chance to cool down, he trashed the city of New York in a Sports Illustrated article, taking shots at every minority group in the book. He became public enemy number one.
I have no doubt that the reporter who wrote the Sports Illustrated story exploited Rock. And in some ways, Rock exploited the situation, too. He got to villain status because he wouldn’t shut up on a car ride with a reporter, and maybe that’s a stereotype Rock likes—I don’t know.
I’ll say this about Rock: He was a good teammate. He said very little in the clubhouse, and he was always jacked up to pitch. I don’t know if some of that was artificially enhanced—he admitted to taking steroids a few years back—but he was ready to go every time he was called upon, and that’s all you can ask for from a closer.
Once everything broke in Sports Illustrated, though, he stopped talking to the media. He left his teammates to talk on his behalf, and none of us wanted that responsibility. He should have explained himself to the reporters and taken the heat.
But he didn’t do much of anything to defuse the situation and it was still volatile in June of 2000 when we went to Shea Stadium for the first time since the NLCS. Normally, we walked past Mets fans when we got off the bus at Shea and walked thirty yards to the tunnel. This time, we walked through sixty or seventy of New York’s finest in full body armor—all because people wanted to hurt Rocker.
We took batting practice with police snipers on the roof. We had bomb-sniffing dogs running through our clubhouse. We were on a first-name basis with some German shepherds. It was unbelievable.
Rocker wouldn’t back down from Mets fans either. He taunted them. He goaded them. It was ridiculous. The media didn’t see half of it. There’s a reason John got traded in 2001. He was good at his job and pitching in his prime. The brass, his teammates, and his coaches were sick of the extracurricular stuff.
John was still under contract to go on a morning radio show in Atlanta after he got traded to Cleveland. He had the audacity to call me white trash on the air one morning.
Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black? I wanted to fight the guy.
I knew our clubhouse guys had Rocker’s cell phone number. So when I got to the ballpark, I closed the doors in Chris Van Zant and Ben Acree’s office and called Rocker. We screamed at each other for about fifteen minutes. We got a bunch of stuff off our chests, and toward the end, it actually became almost civil.
I talked to Rocker for the first time since that phone call at a Braves alumni weekend in 2014. He was on my softball team, and we signed autographs together. He came up and shook my hand. It was all I needed.
John took all the pressure off me in New York. Compared to John Rocker, I was Opie Taylor.
—
My relationship with the fans of New York changed after 9/11. I didn’t spend all day in my hotel room. I would walk down Forty-Second Street to Portabella men’s clothing store and interact with people along the way.
“Hey, Larry,” they’d say. “Take it easy on my Mets tonight.”
Or “Hey, Chippuh, take it easy on my Yanks tonight.”
If I took just five or ten seconds to acknowledge them, I got a smile instead of venom.
The owner of Portabella, Joel Oks, used to invite guys to his store for lunch. He’d order out and have my favorite Chinese food, Shrimp Grand Marnier, waiting on me. I’d buy some suits or sign autographs for a while.
Joel is a Yankee fan and a fun-loving guy. He used to moon our team bus every time we left the Grand Hyatt. He came to our games sometimes and yelled at me in the on-deck circle.
“How’s your whole?” he’d say.
I’d turn around.
“Family,” he’d say. You had to laugh.
Over time I think the fans of New York and I gained a mutual respect. That respect was at the root of Sharon’s and my decision to name our second son, born in 2004, Shea. People assumed, “Oh, you owned the Mets at Shea Stadium; that’s why you named your kid Shea.” But that wasn’t the full story.
Yes, I hit a lot of meaningful home runs in that ballpark and I had almost 50 homers overall against the Mets. I tied one of my boyhood idols, Mike Schmidt, for the second-most homers against the Mets behind my old mentor Willie Stargell, who had 60. I enjoyed playing on that stage. Other than Atlanta, there’s nowhere else I wanted to play more than New York. I didn’t mean it to be a slap in the face to the fans of New York. I wanted them to take it as a sign of respect.
And I always loved the name Shea, as in Shea Hillenbrand, the former infielder for the Red Sox and Diamondbacks. Whether we had a boy or a girl, the name was going to be Shea.
When our son Shea was young and he saw Shea Stadium on TV, he’d say, “Is that my stadium?”
“Yep,” we’d say. “That’s it.”
We got two of the old seats from Shea bolted to his bedroom wall.
I wanted him to see Shea before the Mets demolished it to build Citi Field, so I took him to our last series there in September 2008 when he was four. Sharon, the boys, and I got there early one afternoon. As we got out of the car and walked past about fifty people on our way into the tunnel, some Mets fan yelled out, “Which one is Shea?”
Shea raised his hand, like “Right here!” He loved it.
—
I used to hate Derek Jeter. Hate him. He was my archnemesis. He was the good-looking captain of the Yankees. He’d won all those championships. He’d beat me out of two World Series, not to mention the 2000 All-Star MVP after I’d hit a homer in my home ballpark. Then we played together in the 2006 World Baseball Classic (WBC).
I didn’t know what to expect from him when I got to Phoenix for our first workout with Team USA. I was going to keep to myself and do my own thing. But Jeter walked right up to me in the clubhouse. We chatted for a minute, then he said, “Hey, after we’re done working out, take a shower, get dressed, you’re coming with me.”
He took me out to dinner in Phoenix, and we went out afterward for a couple of drinks. From then on, we were attached at the hip. We hit in the same group during BP. We warmed up together before games. We talked throughout the games. I ate it up. I soaked up everything I could learn from him.
And it wasn’t just Jeter; it was other guys as well. That first US WBC team was an intergalactic all-star team. We had Roger Clemens, Jake Peavy, and Dontrelle Willis in the rotation and some really good relievers like Joe Nathan, Brad Lidge, and Chad Cordero. We had my old childhood nemesis Jason Varitek catching. Ken Griffey Jr., Johnny Damon, Vernon Wells, Michael Young, Frenchy—my Braves teammate Jeff Francoeur—were in the outfield. We had Derrek Lee and Mark Teixeira, Chase Utley and Alex Rodriguez on the infield.
Our manager, Buck Martinez, sat A-Rod and me down and told us we would split time at third base. When one of us was playing third, the other would DH.
“Buck, I don’t care how much you play me or where you hit me,” I said. “The only thing I want to do is hit a home run with ‘USA’ across my chest.”
One of my dreams was to hit a home run for the United States in an international game. I’d never gotten to play for an Olympic team. It didn’t take long to get my wish.
Our first game was against Mexico, and I was facing one of my current Braves teammates, Oscar Villarreal, who had come on in relief.
I’d kidded him in batting practice, “If I face you, just give me a fastball middle away and I’ll hit a ground ball to short and we’ll make each other look good.”
He threw me a sinker middle away and I hit it out of the ballpark to left center field. I wasn’t trying to hit a homer. I was just trying to go up the middle with the pitch. He didn’t lay it in there; it was a painted pitch, but I felt so bad. All I could think making the turn around first was Man, he is going to be pissed at me when we get back to spring training. I wouldn’t look at him.
We won the game 2–0, but Mexico ended up knocking us out of the WBC in the second round. Oscar, who was one of my favorite Braves teammates, got the last laugh.
That ’06 WBC experience was some of the most fun I’d ever had playing baseball. It was pretty damn cool catching a ball from Derek Jeter, throwing it around the infield and flipping it to Roger Clemens. It was cool to hit a home run and have Ken Griffey standing at home plate waiting on me.
I’d never even spoken to Roger Clemens before. He had an aura about him and didn’t seem all that sociable. Of course, when I was young, I was intimidated. I wasn’t going to go up and say, “Hey, Rocket! How you doin’?” He would have squashed me like a bug.
But once you share a clubhouse and a dugout, it’s different. Jeter and Clemens rented a house in Anaheim during the WBC, and we spent a lot of time over there. Derek and I probably went out to dinner ten times. I asked him about playing for the Yankees, and he asked me about how things were done with the Braves.
I think he and I realized we were connected. He was the face of the Yankees and I was the face of the Braves, and we had had so many great battles throughout the years. We respected each other’s game and wanted to learn from each other.
From then on, whenever I went to New York to play interleague games against the Yankees, he’d send a note over to our clubhouse: “After the game, you’re coming with me.” We would go out for dinner or a drink.
Derek could walk right through the door of a club that cost a hundred bucks to get into; there was no waiting in line. The guy’s meal ticket was signed the second he walked into a restaurant. He always had everything set up beforehand. If we were eating dinner, there was a table in the back. If we showed up at a club, we were ushered right up to VIP.
Most people knew Jete was there, but they’d take one look at me and say, “Wait, what? Chipper Jones? You’re hanging out with Jeter?”
The first time he invited me into his home, I walked up to the base of his apartment building and looked up. It was a cloudy, rainy night in New York and I couldn’t see the top of his building. My ears popped going up the elevator. He lived in the penthouse, of course, and it was lavish. Looking out his big glass windows, I couldn’t even see the city for the clouds, we were up so high. I was in awe.
He had dinner, which was prepared by a personal chef, waiting on us. Chicken parmesan—it was phenomenal. He went all out to impress me, and he certainly did.
The next day, he drove us to the ballpark. Walking into Yankee Stadium from the players’ lot was weird. Yankee fans yelled, “Hey, Jeter! . . . Wait, that’s Chipper Jones. What’s going on?” It was cool to walk in his shoes for a moment. I’ve made the same walk into Yankee Stadium that Jeter has.
It would have been different if we played in the same division and faced each other eighteen times a year. I never would have had that relationship with somebody like a Piazza or Ventura, a Chase Utley or Ryan Howard. They were rivals. You hated them. But this was a unique opportunity. For three hours we’d do whatever we had to do to help our team win a ball game. Once that game was over, we hung out as friends.
It was a little different when Jeter came to Atlanta. I was married, and I had to go home from the ballpark to the wife and kids. But Sharon and I met Derek and Jorge Posada out in Atlanta a time or two. We always took the opportunity to hang out and reconnect.
I saw an interview Derek did when the Yankees came to town in 2012. He was asked about me as I was approaching retirement. He said, “He just looks like a ballplayer, you know? His actions, his mannerisms, everything he does.”
I felt the same way about him. He was a consummate professional, and he deserved everything he got. If there was one guy I would have wanted in my foxhole day in and day out, it was Derek Jeter. If he and I had played side by side for twenty years, we’d have done a lot of winning. I can promise you that.