St. Jetersburg

Derek Jeter just tied Lou Gehrig's career hits record for the Yankees. I wonder how many I've seen, watching games on tv. I'd be surprised if it was lower than 2,200, 2,300. As an A-Rod apologist I get (foolishly) frustrated by Jeter devotion, but when he retires I'm gonna cry my eyes out; my Yankee fandom has mirrored his career. - XMASTIME

Looking back on the legend of Derek Jeter:

In the great Yankee patriarchy, Jeter is the eternal son: the precocious boy who follows the rules, knows his heritage and honors his elders. His career has been guided by a little sweat lodge of symbolic fathers: Steinbrenner, whom Jeter always addressed as Mr. Steinbrenner; Joe Torre, whom he referred to explicitly as a father figure; and the benevolent ghost of Joe DiMaggio, who pioneered Jeter’s signature combination of natural grace on the field and private dignity off of it. Jeter’s simmering drama with Alex Rodriguez, meanwhile, is exactly like a sibling rivalry, with the insecure little brother struggling in his perfect older brother’s shadow. The psychological gulf between the two is often traced to their childhoods: Jeter grew up with a father; A-Rod didn’t.

This passage in particular is curious BECAUSE it's somehow true - despite the fact that Jeter has been with an endless string of Hollywood starlets, we still like to picture him as going home to Donnna Reed:

Jeter’s mythology is, at this point, basically impenetrable. His public image is almost scandalously banal — as Buster Olney once put it, he is “Jimmy Stewart in pinstripes.” He’s like an after-school special about the Protestant work ethic. His every motion expresses the quiet dignity of champion champion dignity champion dignity champion. (Sorry: my word-processing software figured out that I was writing about Derek Jeter and started automatically filling in the text.) 

And, of course, his real legacy:

No one, of course, will ever forget Derek Jeter’s final at-bat. He came to the plate in the bottom of the third, one out, nobody on. He swung at the first pitch, hit a dribbler back to the mound and was thrown out in roughly two seconds. This, however, did not faze him. Jeter kept running at full speed, past first base, all the way into the outfield. He was running out one last ground ball.

When he reached the outfield wall, Jeter touched it and turned left and — still hustling — ran along its entire periphery. At this point, the crowd started to feel that something special might be happening and rose to its feet. When he reached the left-field corner, he vaulted the wall and ran into the bleachers, head down, legs pumping. He ran up and down the stairs, chugging hard, all the way around the stadium. Slowly it dawned on us: Derek Jeter was running out all of life’s ground balls, for everyone, everywhere, forever. After a while, it didn’t matter that he’d been thrown out 20 minutes earlier or that the teams on the field had resumed playing and were now deep into the next inning. The crowd started to chant his name. The commissioner appeared on the JumboTron to give Jeter nine honorary retroactive M.V.P. awards and a lifetime-achievement batting title, but Jeter didn’t even look up.
He was running, very fast, head down, running and running, running out that grounder. Whenever a player in the actual game hit a ball on the ground, Jeter would sprint back down from the stands and run alongside the batter as he ran to first base, then run tight little circles around him as he walked back to the dugout.