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If Dr. D's musings on Life, Love, and Hope tend to run contrary to your taste, you certainly ain't going to like this one.  Run screaming.  Your friend, Jeff

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Gordon sez,

Gordon Gross: ESPN has a poll: "Where does Derek Jeter rank among the best baseball players of all time?" Options are top 5, top 10, top 15. top 25 and not in the top 25. Only 30% of ESPN correctly guessed "not in the top 25." The rest must be New Yawkahs or silly football fans on a 9 day bender...

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"Correctly guessed"  :- )  Heh!  Matt follows on, "Not in the top 50," which is commendable objectivity since he's from that area, right?

In fairness, Jeter has racked up nearly 3,500 hits AND:

• He plays an extreme glove position
• His OBP is wonderful
• He's had considerable gap power

If the M's could come up with a shortstop who went over 3,000 hits, all in our unie, here's guessing that we'd think he's pretty cool too.

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That said, Jeter has the same career WAR as does Rafael Palmeiro.  His WAR are almost identical to Bobby Grich, who split his career between the Orioles and Angels, who a lot of you kiddies have probably never heard of.  Larry Walker has more WAR than Jeter.  None of those guys are deified, much less shoved into a stratum with Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle. 

There are a LOT of great baseball players on the list, if you're going to start talking "top 25 who ever lived."  Jeter was a first-ballot Hall of Famer, not "The Greatest Ever."

Just call Jeter a Hall of Famer, as Edgar was, and leave it at that.  It helps both that they:

• Played their whole careers in one uniform
• Got a lot of "black ink" (led the league in USA Today-type stats)
• Were soft-spoken and classy (and therefore slowly accumulated massive respect)

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It's funny, because at BJOL there was just a question asking whether Jeter ranks as one of the greatest Americans ever ... George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Derek Jeter.  The asker could not have been more serious.

Derek Jeter never hit me right; he always rankled me as being just a little bit made-for-TV.  Just a few generations ago, his lifestyle would have been regarded "irresponsible" at the very kindest.  He was hardly the kind of guy to cut the Yankees a hometown discount.  His refusal to move off of shortstop for ARod, when ARod was age 28, firmly declared Jeter's priorities as to personal goals vs. victory.

Jeter sending a different girl home every morning, with the big fat hairy magnanimous gesture of a fruit basket in the back seat of the limo for her ... in Manhattan they think, "I wish I was Jeter!"  in ESPN studios they believe Derek Jeter is the pinnacle of all this life is about, or can be about.  

Dr. D has a daughter, the age of a Jeter groupie.  From my office, as opposed to from Manhattan, I see Jeter's philosophical principles as vaguely nauseating.  See the last paragraph below!

So personally, I never had an inkling for him.  But you can see how Yankees fans would swoon.

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At BJOL, there is a free article by Dave Fleming.  It asks what Derek Jeter says about us.  (Tell me what heroes a culture has, and I'll tell you a lot about that culture.)  Derek Jeter, says Fleming, is THE most iconic player of his generation, absolutely the #1 representative of baseball the last twenty years.

Dave observes that Warren Spahn was the icon for the post-WWII generation -- the hard fight for stability, security, consistency, in the face of the new Nuclear Threat.  1950's America didn't want to be edgy; it wanted to hold on tight to what it had, as long as it could.

Joe DiMaggio, suggests Dave, represented a generation of immigrants who badly wanted to fit in here.  Who wanted to conform to that which was most basically American.

He has a thought-provoking list going.

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Leaving Derek Jeter where?

According to Fleming, the America of the last 20 years has become dangerously polarized.  One manifestation of this is the "gross excess" in baseball salaries.  Baseball stars no longer make 10 times what we do, like Johnny Bench did.  They now make 500 times what we do.  Nobody is friends with someone who makes 500 times what they do.  How do you split the check at a restaurant?  You can't.  Resentments are impossible to avoid; you go hang with your own crowd.

EVERY article about Jeter is on the North Pole or the South Pole.  EVERY article tries to pull him down, or push him up higher.  This mirrors America in 2014, where we talk AT each other rather than WITH each other.  There are two huge echo chambers in America.  It could easily lead to civil war.

He "fit our age of division and anxiety."  We like to argue viciously.  Jeter was the baseball player around which this could be done.  

So says Fleming.

We note also that Jeter comes from Central Headquarters of the Blue States.  He's a Hunger Games icon.  It's important for ESPN, which comes out of New York, to feel its self-validation through the athletes it is proudest of.  If your baseball heroes are bogus, what does that say about your life?

;- )

I don't know if Jeter is "bogus."  I know that it would be bogus to put him on Mt. Rushmore; that kind of pap says something about us.  But as baseball players of his generation go, he was pretty cool.

Warm regards,

Jeff