Derek Jeter Addresses Feud With Former MLB Teammate Alex Rodriguez

Not every friendship made on the baseball field is a home run.

Sports fans will never forget the early 2000s when Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter became teammates while playing for the New York Yankees. But as the dynamic duo helped their team reach the playoffs, some behind-the-scenes drama took place that threatened their bond for good.

In ESPN’s upcoming The Captain documentary, viewers get a sense into what went wrong between the players after Alex participated in a 2001 interview with Esquire. According to Derek, his teammate’s public comments “bothered me.”

“I’m very, very loyal,” he said in the documentary, according to the New York Post. “As a friend, I’m loyal. I just looked at it as, ‘I wouldn’t have done it.’ And then it was the media. The constant hammer to the nail. They just kept hammering it in. It just became noise, which frustrated me. Just constant noise.” 

So what did Alex say exactly that was so upsetting? When speaking to writer Scott Raab in 2001, Alex said Derek was fortunate to play for an absolutely stacked New York team.