Joe Posnanski, as he so often does, completely nails the Derek Jeter dynamic in his latest post. The upshot: we all know what’s going to happen. And we do:
We KNOW Derek Jeter will play for the New York Yankees in 2011. There is no chance for a surprise there. This is not 90% likely or 95% likely or even 99% likely. It is Hurricane Insurance In Kansas likely. There is simply no even remotely plausible scenario I can imagine where Derek Jeter goes.
I suspect that is why this story seems like so much fun. It gives us a lot of Yankeefreude and Jeterfreude, but at the same time, there’s not a real chance that this will end in a sad way. And I suspect that even the most anti-Yankees people out there would think it sad, at least on some level, if Jeter was missing grounders to his left for the Astros next year instead of the Yankees.