Christian Lopez

The guy that gave Derek Jeter's 3000 ball back to him was rewarded with luxury seats and memorabilia that's now looking to be taxed on those gifts to the tune of up to about $13K.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jeter will step in and pay the taxes for the kid.  Not just because Jeter himself is the king of doing the right thing, but even the most asshole MLB player would be told by his publicist or whatever what great publicity such a move would make, for basically what any player makes in about the time it takes him to say the word "tax."

This makes me think of something else I've thought over the last several days.  Like everybody else, I guess I was like "the kid's crazy" to not cash the ball in.  But then I started thinking about how much more cash being known as "The Guy That Returned Derek Jeter's 3000th Hit" could bring in, starting with when him oh-so-casually letting it be known he's got $100K in student loans, opening the door for the Yankees to step in, take care of the $100K and let people fawn "aawwwwwwww" over how great the "Evil Empire" is.  Then, the Yankees could actually hire him to be "The Guy That Returned Derek Jeter's 3000th Hit", paying him $100k/year to go around and talk to kids about "doing the right thing" or whatever, and show up whenever one of the Yankees has a charity event etc.  Otherwise he'd have made about $100K, immediately gotten a chunk taken by the IRS, and nobody would ever give a fuck about him since he'd have been just like every other douchebag out there looking to cash in on something they had nothing to do with.  I'd like the think the kid quickly calculated all this and purposely "selflessly" returned the ball, but I doubt it.