Deuces Wild: Jeter gets 3,000th hit!

    While there certainly was an inevitability to it, all the hoopla cannot take away the enormity of reaching the 3,000 hit milestone.  To become only the 28th person in the history of baseball to accomplish such a feat is remarkable enough; to become the first person to do so as a New York Yankee is historic.  For people of my generation who started following baseball when Joe DiMaggio was still patrolling center field, I am among those fortunate to have seen many wonderful players in pinstripes: Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford and Phil Rizzuto just to name a few.  But even those at the very pinnacle of what is called the Yankee's "storied franchise," DiMaggio, Gehrig and the incomparable Babe Ruth, were unable to match yesterday's achievement by Derek Jeter.  Ruth, of course, should be cut some slack in this regard; he spent several years as an excellent pitcher, which deprived him of hundreds of plate opportunities.  DiMaggio's career was foreshortened by both military service and injury, and--of course--the first Yankee Captain, Lou Gehrig's by a career (and life) ending disease.  But still, there are always reasons "why not."  Doing it is the tough thing. Simply stated, 3,000 hits means 15 seasons of 200 hits.  This is incredibly hard to do, but Derek has done it.   It goes without saying that Jeter's number 2 will be retired when he hangs up his spikes, and that he'll get a plaque in Monument Park and will be inducted in the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.  The Jeter memories are legion, and can be recalled by short-hand: the "flip play," "Mr. November," and the "dive into the stands" are but three.  Let's put these to the side for a moment, and focus on the improbability of his day at the plate on July 10, 2011.  In doing so, let's be brutally candid.  Derek Jeter is in what we baseball fans euphemistically call "the twilight of his career."  Talk about deuces wild, Yankee announcer Michael Kay focused on the mystical quality to what happened.  Up comes number 2, in the second game of the series against the Rays, two hits shy of 3,000.  At precisely 2:00 pm, in his second plate appearance, he gets his second hit of the day, a home run.  In doing so, he becomes the second man in history to do so with a homer (Wade Boggs was the other), and the second man to get five hits on the day he reached 3,000 (Craig Biggio was the first, but it took him six at-bats to do so).  But enough about synchronicity, let's talk baseball and unlikeliness.
   Derek Jeter is, by and large, an opposite field hitter.  He knows how to hit the ball "inside out," and when he does so, the shot is known so well, it is called "Jeterian."  And it is usually a single or, less often, a double.  So what happens for hit 3,000?  He pulls the ball into the left-field seats for something more "Ruthian" than "Jeterian."  And, lest we forget, he goes on to hit the game-winning single for hit number five.
   Baseball is a wonderful game, prone to fall in love with its own lore to the point of forgetting the cold-eyed business that it is.  Even this game reflected that.  After Friday's rain-out, the Yankees and Rays split over whether to make it up in a double-header.  The Rays would have done it back-to-back, but the Yankees insisted it be a day-nighter with, of course, separate admissions.  But be that as it may, two things happened that reminded me of why my love affair with baseball has continued through six-decades plus.  When Derek rounded first on his 3,000th hit, Rays first-baseman, Casey Kotchman, doffed his hat.  And then Christian Lopez, the young man in the stands who caught the ball,  (arguably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars on the memorabilia "market") returned it to the Yankees, saying it was Jeter's accomplishment and he deserved the ball.  So hats off to both Kotchman and Lopez and--most of all--to Derek Jeter, who rose to the occasion in a manner beyond his (and our) wildest dreams.