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Editor's Note:The story below about the close friendship of Yankee greats Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams, was featured in the October 2005 issue of Reader's Digest. It was written by Molly O'Neill, food writer and sister of former Yankee Paul O'Neill, now a Yankees broadcaster. On November 4, 2009 the Yankees won their 27th World Series title. It was the fifth championship for Jeter, Posada, Rivera and pitcher Andy Pettitte. Collectively, they are known as the "core four." With the exception of a three-year stint that took Pettitte to Houston, the core four have played together for 14 years. Williams has since retired.
In It Together
Jorge Posada sat in the hallway of a Manhattan hospital in August 2000, unaware of the usual hospital noises -- the squeak of rubber-soled shoes against the polished floors, the announcements and pages, the rattle of gurneys being pushed into the pediatric surgery suite. His infant son had craniosynostosis -- a congenital birth defect in which the skull fails to expand properly to accommodate a child's growing brain -- and was about to undergo a corrective surgery.
After the seven-month-old was carried into the operating room by Posada's wife, Laura, the ballplayer sat, elbows to thighs, head in hands, staring down at his loafers in the terrible silence that occurs when your child's life hangs in the balance and there is nothing you can do.
It was early morning, and the silence, said the 34-year-old Yankees catcher, was unbearable. Only death could be this quiet, he thought.
But sometime after the surgery, on another day, he remembers sensing a powerful, athletic body take the chair next to his, and like a shift in wind, the silence changed.
"Derek didn't say anything," said Posada of shortstop Derek Jeter, a teammate he has known since 1992 when they played minor-league ball in Greensboro, North Carolina. "That's the way it is with us. When you're in it together, you don't always need so many words."
In the five years since, young Jorge has undergone four additional major surgeries and is thriving. Posada spends hundreds of hours a year raising money for the foundation he created for the research and treatment of craniosynostosis. His closest teammates -- Jeter, center fielder Bernie Williams and pitcher Mariano Rivera -- have donated money and attended fund-raising events.
"My friends came together around little Jorge," said Posada. "I didn't have to ask."
The four superstar athletes are the only players remaining since the Yankees began their amazing ten-year run -- seven wins in the American League Division Series, six League Championships and four World Series titles.
They have spent 2,200 days working together, playing some 1,500 games and logging hundreds of thousands of miles on the team plane. As a group or in pairs, they have shared thousands of restaurant meals, and shopped together for clothes, cars, stainless steel barbecues and state-of-the-art in-home theater systems. They've exchanged investment tips, supported one another's charities, served in one another's weddings, made fun of one another and sat in hospitals during family emergencies.
With trading rampant and team alliances constantly shifting, this sort of continuity is unusual. In a deeply interdependent game, where a single error can mean that every player loses his post-season bonus, the fact that the friendship has survived each player's bobbles and slumps as well as the glory days is remarkable.
The four-way friendship began in 1994 when Posada, Rivera and Jeter were playing for the club's triple-A team in Columbus, Ohio. There was, initially, with Posada and Rivera, the natural connection that occurs between a pitcher and his catcher. There was also the matter of the movies.
Posada, a family man, and Rivera, who is deeply religious, were not into partying, and Jeter was too young to get into the bars, so they went to the movies. "We've seen about a thousand movies together," said Jeter. "You don't spend that long sitting in a dark place with anybody you don't love."
By the 1995 post-season, "Jorgie," "Jeet" and "Mo" had been moved to the Bronx. There, watching the playoff series from the dugout, the friendship, said Jeter, "really jelled." Like soldiers after the war, the rookies exhaled.
Eleven years later, they are four -- they hooked up with Williams along the way -- and possibly facing their final year together, now that he'll be a free agent at the end of this season.
Their accord is powerful, constant, palpable. Even as their clubhouse filled with new additions at spring training this year, the four veterans remained anchors of the locker room, communicating with one another with just looks and nods. A glance from Jeter alerted Williams to the approach of an unfriendly reporter. A look from Williams let the others know that several well-loved old-timers had entered the room. And when Rivera returned from the training room -- his shoulder fat with ice packs and medical wraps -- a simple nod from Posada asked the pitcher about the state of his arm.
When asked about their friendship, the players exchanged looks of alarm, followed by stares that dared the other to go first.
As effusive off the field as he is serious and contained on the mound, Rivera is the eternal jokester in the foursome, the clown who wears his feelings on his sleeve. "I love these guys," he said, his eyes narrowing slightly as they do in the moment before he releases his fastball. "They touch my heart deep. They make me better than I am."
His catcher is more circumspect. "Not many people have shared this sort of experience -- the grit, the dream, the separateness," said Posada. "We spend more time with each other than we do with our families. You almost become close by default."
Neither this forced intimacy nor the bonds of accomplishment, wealth, prestige and history fully explain their friendship. "They share a turn of character that doesn't really have a name," said Joe Torre, the Yankees manager. "It's the same thing that tells me whether a guy will survive in New York City or crumble under the pressure."
Whatever that quality is, it yields big hearts and an awareness of one another that is deeply moving -- and highly effective.
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