Text by JON KELLYSEPT. 19, 2014  One summer morning in 1991, Dick Groch was driving to a baseball game in Battle Creek, Mich., when he made an unplanned detour to a high-school field in Mount Morris, somewhere between the state’s thumb and forefinger. Groch, a scout who covered the Midwest for the New York Yankees, decided he’d stop by a “talent identification” camp there. He didn’t expect to see anything special; the event, he figured, was just a way for some local coach to make a little extra money. Besides, the Yankees were considering Jeffrey Hammonds, an outfielder from Stanford, and Jim Pittsley, a hard-throwing right-hander, as possible picks in the next draft. But Groch thought, why not break up the day?  At the high school, a coach was conducting infield drills when he fungoed a ball into the hole between third and short. It looked as if it was going to dribble through to left field, when a wispy shortstop sprinted to his right, backhanded it, leapt into the air and, while leaning backward, contorted his body into a single, fluid throwing motion that culminated with the ball’s whistling into the first baseman’s mitt. “I said, ‘My God, that’s a major-league play,’ ” Groch recalled recently.  Baseball players are perennially judged against the so-called five tools of the game — fielding aptitude, arm strength, speed and the ability to hit for average and for power. Those with a surplus of talent in any of these areas are, in the vocabulary of scouts, said to have a “plus” arm or bat. “Within less than a 45-minute period,” Groch told me, “I saw someone flash three plus plus tools.”  In his subsequent evaluation for the team, Groch described this 159-pound high-school junior named Derek Jeter as a five-tool prospect. He also noted a sixth attribute: Jeter was “a Yankee.” This wasn’t intended as a brown-nosing observation. There was a sang-froid about the young man, Groch thought — an attitude that would be valuable in New York, because in those days, the Yankees were a mess. The team had not made the playoffs in more than a decade; during one five-year span, its roster of managers went like this: Billy Martin, Yogi Berra, Billy Martin, Lou Piniella, Billy Martin, Lou Piniella. At one point, the team’s owner, George Steinbrenner, paid a gambler $40,000 to spy on his best player, Dave Winfield. The environment, in other words, put a premium on having a thick skin. As Groch put it, “You’re playing in the toughest venue, you have to have an emotional constitution.” Jeter was good, but perhaps just as important, he didn’t seem like the wilting type.  A scout’s musings on the teenage Derek Jeter — provided by The New York Yankees, from Steiner Sports — notes his “active feet” and “long lean sinewy body.”  That self-possession never wavered. In 1993, the fine-art photographer Andrea Modica visited the Yankees’ spring-training camp in Tampa for her project on young ballplayers. She was working with an 8-by-10 camera, which required a collaboration between artist and subject: each sitting lasted for about 15 minutes, a pretty long time to hold any expression. Modica was captivated by the anxieties in her young and athletic subjects, particularly the minor leaguers hoping to make the team for the first time. “But Derek didn’t have that tension,” she says. “He was elegant.” Modica’s photograph of the 18-year-old — note the early-’90s fade! — did not make it into her book and exhibition. It has never been published until now.  Over the 19 seasons he has played in the major leagues since this picture was taken, Jeter, who will retire this fall, has led the Yankees to 16 postseason appearances and five World Series titles. He has hit better than .400 in 10 different playoff series and is the all-time playoff leader in singles and doubles and is tied for the lead in triples (he is third in home runs and fourth in R.B.I.). Even if he was never the best player in the league during any given year — he never won an M.V.P. award, like the shortstops Alex Rodriguez, Miguel Tejada and Cal Ripken Jr. — he was almost certainly the best shortstop of his generation. His prime lasted until his late 30s, and he played his entire career at the game’s most difficult position, after catcher. His ultimate plus tool might have been the surreal equilibrium on display from the start.  Scouting is an inexact science, especially when its subjects are teenagers. The Yankees’ top pick the year before they drafted Jeter was a pitcher named Brien Taylor, a can’t-miss phenom — who got in a bar fight and never pitched in the majors. In the end, though, Groch got this one right. The five players drafted before Jeter (including Jeffrey Hammonds) made a combined total of two All-Star appearances. Jim Pittsley played 81 games in the majors. “The report I wrote,” Groch said, “it’s exactly what he became.”  Andrea Modica is an associate professor of photography at Drexel University. Her work is in many collections, including the Museum of Modern Art.  A version of this article appears in print on September 21, 2014, on page MM43 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Boy of Summer. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
At 18, the shortstop could field, hit, run and throw – but he had a little something extra too.