Over at ESPN, here’s Jeff MacGregor on Derek Jeter:

Jeter is our sphinx, as fixed and inscrutable as those marble lions in front of the New York Public Library.

Eighteen seasons, 3,304 hits. Who knows how many starlets. Captain Intangibles in the City of the Damned. To reasonable people from anywhere else, New York is crazy, a bughouse — an asylum, a hive, a slice of 99-cent pizza falling on a pair of $1,600 shoes. It’s bike messengers and violinists, grime and Champagne. It’s a Babel, a bad dream, a siren, a grinding of the teeth. It’s that smell. It’s horse carts and nightclubs and town cars and bridges. It’s Trump and Jay-Z, The Times and the Post, three-card monte and the stock exchange. It’s a Korean bodega in a Greek neighborhood run by 4 guys from Yemen. It’s what America used to be before focus groups got hold of it.

But New York makes sense to New Yorkers. Our cops and firefighters all look and sound like cops and firefighters, and the daily parade up and down the avenue of our actors and junkies and account executives is straight out of central casting. The ballplayers all look like ballplayers and first among them is Derek Jeter. As much a part of the mind’s skyline as the Flatiron or the Waldorf; as much a part of the tri-state subconscious as every car commercial they’ve ever bounced off your skull. Even if you hate baseball, he’s as permanent an impermanence as most New Yorkers can imagine.

The only question is for how long?

[Photo Credit: Bags]