KALAMAZOO, Mich. — The letters and packages arrived more frequently 10 years ago when Mikael Mohamed first moved into the house at 2415 Cumberland Street, but a few still show up from time to time.
When he gets his mail every once in a while there is a baseball or a card and an accompanying plea for an autograph between the usual bills and junk mail. Not much of a baseball fan, Mohamed did not realize what owning Derek Jeter’s childhood home might mean.
This blue, split-level home was where Jeter’s journey to 3,000 hits took off. It began in West Milford, N.J. in games of catch with his grandmother, who loved the Yankees, but Jeter was molded here on this quiet street. The arm that would rocket throws to first base developed as he threw balls off the side of the house until one of his parents came out to play with him. The swing formed with thousands of swings on a hitting contraption set up in the one-car garage.
The endless confidence came in a house where the word “can’t” was banned, where the achievements of he and his sister, Sharlee, hung on the wall of the family room — a “Wall of Fame.” In his bedroom, a full Yankees uniform hung on the wall, signifying the dream.
Now, Mohamed would go to his mailbox each day and see this was a holy place in the eyes of baseball fans looking to get just a small piece of the Yankees captain.
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Derek Sanderson Jeter was born on June 26, 1974 at Chilton Memorial Hospital in Pequannock, N.J. His family moved from West Milford to Kalamazoo, a city of around 75,000, when he was four so that his father, Charles, could pursue his doctorate at Western Michigan University.
The family first lived in the Mount Royal Townhouse Complex near the college. There was a grassy play area across from unit No. 1183 where the family lived. Jeter writes in his book, “The Life You Imagine,” of playing endless games on that hill with his friend Doug Biro. Jeter was out there so much, the other kids began calling it “Derek Jeter’s Hill.”
When he was 10, Jeter moved into the house on Cumberland Street. The house had a large backyard, but the best feature in young Jeter’s eyes was its proximity to Kalamazoo Central High School. Jeter would hop the five-foot, chain-link fence and be on the school’s practice football field. He would walk to the baseball field with his father, mother Dorothy and sister, and they would take turns hitting and fielding.
Don Zomer, who would coach Jeter as a senior at Kalamazoo Central, saw the family’s practice routine years later after his high school practices.
“We’d be out here until we couldn’t stand it anymore,” said Zomer recently, sitting in the bleachers at the high school field. “Then we’d all go home and eat. I’d come back for a meeting and sure enough out on the field was Derek and his sister and his mother and his dad just getting a little bit more – a few more groundballs. Derek’s work ethic was unbelievable. That’s the thing I remember the most.”
Charles coached Jeter in the Westwood Little League, which had its complex about a mile from the Jeter home. The competition level was raised for Jeter the summer after his freshman year when he played on an under-16 team called Brundage Roofing. The coach was a 21-year-old named Courtney Jasiak, who was intent on giving the kids “the coaching I never got. That meant pushups at home plate and over-the-top practices.
Jeter’s cannon arm immediately impressed the young coach.
“You never see a kid that long and lean throwing a ball that hard,” Jasiak said. “He was really quiet. He didn’t say a word. He just went about his business.”
Jasiak would move Jeter back and forth between shortstop and third base, something that bothered Jeter although he never told the coach. Jasiak entered the team in a men’s city league where the kids faced men sometimes 10 years older than them. They got crushed most of the time, but Jeter left a lasting impression.
David Ferry was a player-manager for the Perrigo Pirates, the defending champions in the league. As his team prepared to play the Brundage Roofing team, he saw their young third baseman warming up.
“He was just coming up and throwing bullet after bullet to the first baseman just chest high,” Ferry said. “I walked in front of our dugout, which was a pretty rowdy group. I said, ‘Hey guys, look at this kid at third base.’ Our dugout just got quiet.”
Now, players from his team try to get copies of those scorecards to prove they once played against Jeter. Back then, they had no idea who the wiry kid with the big arm was destined to become.
“At no time did we realize we were watching the future captain of the Yankees,” Ferry said.
Like most people, they weren’t listening.
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Kalamazoo is about halfway between Detroit and Chicago, which means there are a lot of Tigers and Cubs fans. Today, it’s easy to find Yankees logos. In the late ’80s and early ’90s the interlocking NY was not likely to be found in Southwestern Michigan.
Except around Jeter.
Jeter wore a gold Yankees medallion everywhere, and told everyone that he would someday be the shortstop for the Yankees — he told his parents when he was about 8. In fourth grade, when the teacher asked her students what they wanted to be when they grew up, Jeter responded with “shortstop for the New York Yankees.”
“He would say, ‘I’m going to play for the Yankees’ and you’d say, ‘yeah, right,’ ” said Mike Hinga, who coached Jeter for three summers with the Kalamazoo Maroons, an elite traveling team. “It wasn’t cocky. He just really believed that was what he was going to do.”
His love of the Yankees came from his grandmother, Dorothy Connors, who listened to Joe DiMaggio on the radio and walked past Babe Ruth’s casket at Yankee Stadium. Jeter went to his first Yankees game with his grandmother during one of the summers he spent in New Jersey. Back in Kalamazoo, a poster of Dave Winfield hung on his bedroom wall.
In his eighth-grade yearbook at St. Augustine’s, the students had to write about a fictitious 10-year reunion. Jeter wrote, “Derek Jeter, a professional ballplayer for the Yankees, is coming around. You’ve seen him in grocery stores, on the Wheaties boxes, of course.”
As a junior in high school, Jeter designed a coat of arms in his British Literature class that had a Yankee at bat in half of it and Jeter playing basketball in the other half.
When Jeter played on the Kalamazoo Blues AAU basketball team, his roommate on trips was Monter Glasper. Every night when the lights went out, Jeter would tell him how he would someday be the shortstop in The Bronx.
“I used to think it was odd,” Glasper said. “I used to tease him and a few other guys would tease him. He used to sleep in New York Yankees boxers and a Yankees T-shirt.”
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The doubters had good reason when Jeter was a young player. At first glance, he did not have the look of a future All-Star, standing 6-foot-2 and weighing just 150 pounds.
“He was almost like a colt – long arms, long legs, very thin. You wouldn’t look at that and go, ‘Yeah, for sure,’ ” Hinga, his summer league coach, said. “But you could see there was this huge, huge upside.”
Jeter made Hinga’s Maroons as a 15-year-old in 1990, one of the youngest players ever to make the team. He played three years for the team and by the end scouts would line the fences at his games.
“He was just super nice where so many baseball players at young ages if they’re good they’re insufferable and their parents are insufferable,” Hinga said.
At this age, Jeter was sometimes too good. During one game in the Connie Mack Regional Tournament, he had two homeruns and had brought the Maroons back. But the other team won after it scored a run on a Jeter throwing error. The throw was not really an error, but it was too hard for the first baseman to handle.
The power of Jeter’s throwing arm was a problem at Kalamazoo Central, too. During his senior year, coach Zomer had to move his third baseman to first base because he was the only player who could handle Jeter’s throws, which were clocked at 90 miles per hour. Once, when Zomer saw the player catching the ball oddly in his webbing, he asked the kid what was up.
“He showed me his hand and it was completely black and blue from catching Derek’s throws,” Zomer said.
Jeter almost never made it to Kalamazoo Central, where his No. 13 is now retired in a trophy case. His parents wanted him to go to the smaller Catholic school in town, Hackett. They made a deal with him that if he made the Blues AAU basketball team, he could go to Central.
The team was filled with players that would go on to Division I basketball careers, but Jeter made the team by impressing coach Walter Hall with his work ethic.
“Derek was an outstanding athlete,” Hall said. “Basically, the thing that set him apart was not his basketball ability but his athleticism and his ability to work hard. He always tried to be better than everyone else in drills. He wasn’t a natural basketball player, but he was an athlete.”
Jeter was a shooting guard who loved the 3-point shot.
“There wasn’t a shot Derek wouldn’t shoot, and he could shoot it,” said Greg Williams, an assistant with the Blues.
He loved the last shot, and often shot it for the Blues and then for the Central Giant Maroons. In AAU, he faced future Michigan stars Jalen Rose and Chris Webber.
As a senior at Central, Jeter was second in the conference in scoring. Some people thought if he went to the University of Michigan to play baseball he might walk on to the basketball team, too.
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Charles Jeter worked as a substanceabuse counselor at Adventist Hospital in nearby Battle Creek. Exposed to the pitfalls of adolescence every day, he and Dorothy had Derek sign a contract before he entered high school detailing rules on everything from curfew and how to treat girls to eating his lunch.
Most of the people you talk to in Kalamazoo said the Jeter you see now is the Jeter they knew then – respectful and humble.
Jeter was in Sally Padley’s British literature class his junior year and a tutor in her computer lab during his junior and senior year. She said Jeter never sought special treatment.
“He was never, ever, ever cocky,” Padley said. “You wouldn’t have had any idea that he had so much talent from the way he acted.”
Jeter had a few close friends like Biro, Shanti Lal and Josh Ewbanks. Before he was dating starlets, he dated Marisa Novara for four years beginning in his junior year.
“They were just a really wonderful couple,” Padley said.
Jeter not only predicted his future vocation but also his romantic life. Once, while the two were playing catch before a Maroons game, Jeter told teammate Chad Casserly that he would date pop singer Mariah Carey someday, and even marry her.
“I just assumed he was joking around, Casserly said. “Then he ended up dating Mariah Carey. Everything he said came true.”
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Casserly holds the distinction of being the only player to strike Jeter out in his senior year. It happened in a big doubleheader between Kalamazoo Central and rival Portage Central.
The games had a huge buildup because it featured Jeter and Portage’s Ryan Topham, another highly ranked player who would go on to play at Notre Dame and get drafted by the White Sox.
“It was a crappy day,” Topham said. “A normal day in April in Michigan. The stands were packed. There had to be 40 scouts.
Jeter homered in the first game of the day and was struck out by Casserly. In the second game, everyone got a scare when he tried to beat out a throw on an infield single, but slipped on first base and turned his ankle.
As he fell to the ground just months before the 1992 draft, his coaches, teammates and opponents all wondered if his season was over and his future was in jeopardy. It turned out to be just a high ankle sprain and Jeter missed a few weeks before returning.
He came back, hit .508 and was named national player of the year by several outlets. The Yankees took him with the sixth pick that June and signed him a few weeks later.
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The relationship between Jeter and Kalamazoo today is complex. There is tremendous pride in many of the residents for what he’s accomplished and how he’s conducted himself. There is some resentment that he left his hometown and rarely returns. He usually comes back once a year in conjunction with his Turn 2 Foundation, which does a lot in the city. He was inducted into the Kalamazoo Central Hall of Fame in 2008 and came to the dinner.
Some of his old friends, teammates and coaches wonder why he no longer speaks to them. Others would not be interviewed for this article out of fear of getting cut out by Jeter.
Surprisingly, there is very little to mark that Jeter is from here. There is a display in the Kalamazoo Central trophy case with a No. 13 jersey, a plaque in the school’s Hall of Fame and a framed Yankees jersey outside the principal’s office.”
“We don’t recognize him enough,” Zomer said.
There was a movement a few years ago to get the baseball field named after him. It fizzled when the Jeters caught wind of some political pushback and told the supporters to drop it before it became controversial.
If you take a hard left at the left-field foul pole, though, you can make your way down to the blue split-level house where Jeter’s journey picked up speed. Close your eyes and you can picture young Jeter in a Yankees hat throwing balls against the house, waiting for his parents to join him.
The kid had plans — and hits — to get to.