As Derek Jeter takes his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame, the New York Yankees captain will be etched into history as an all-time great shortstop and perhaps an even better cipher.
Jeter was the most central figure in the Yankees’ run of success in the late 1990s and early 2000s — unparalleled in modern baseball. And for a while, he was so unimpeachably good that he took on a God-like quality. That eventually gave way to reality and the internet — who’s to say which was the more forceful phenomenon — as the shape of Jeter’s greatness became the only subject of conversation around him.