Christian Lopez was the lucky fan who caught Jeter’s 3,000th hit. And when he could have, ahem, played hardball with the Yankees, he did something that in today’s “me-first, celebrity-driven” world is astounding: he gave the ball back without asking for anything. The Yankees wound up giving him tickets to games, signed bats/balls and other trinkets.
Lopez, sitting in the YES booth with Michael Kay and John Flahrety, said, ”He’s worked so hard for this. I’m not the kind of person to take away something like this. He earned it.”
It’s great to see a fan - who sells cellphones for a living - not even think to cash in when he had the opportunity to and instead do the right thing.
#2 becomes #28 to reach #3000!! And with a HOME RUN. Amazing.
The selling of Jeter’s historic hit — he is six short of 3,000 as he waits to heal from a calf strain — actually has its own campaign name: “DJ 3K,” and a logo that will appear on much of the merchandise capitalizing on his achievement. It is quite a list: T-shirts, caps, jerseys, bobbleheads, decals, cellphone skins, wall murals, patches, bats, balls, license plates and necklaces made by two dozen M.L.B. licensees.
For a guy who has selected his endorsements very carefully and has always (at least in public appearance) put team above himself, this just feels weird.
I understand the marketing ploy for MLB and for the Yankees, and that Jeter is a product of circumstance and longevity and, of course, a feat rare in baseball: there have only been 27 other ballplayers, of the tens of thousands to play, to have reached 3,000 hits in a career. But, it just feels wrong to have so much marketing behind this.
Then again, I guess it’s the age we live in, where everything is marketable as long as people are willing to buy (into) it.
Interesting point from Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski about an often overlooked aspect of the Gold Glove:
*I was talking about how the Gold Glove voting works with an editor, and something struck me that I had not thought about before. You probably know that the Gold Gloves are voted for by managers and coaches. And really … this is the only award they’ve got. They don’t vote for the MVP, for Rookie of the Year, for Cy Young, for Manager of the Year, for the Hall of Fame, for almost anything. They vote for the Gold Gloves. That’s it.
And I think that, in many of their minds, the Gold Gloves probably take on a larger meaning. Sure, it’s about defense. But I wonder if for many it really is about rewarding those players who PLAY THE GAME RIGHT. The advanced stats always suggested that Ken Griffey Jr. was overrated defensively, but he won the Gold Glove every year in part, I think, because the way he played appealed to managers and coaches. There are a lot of guys like that. And if you look at the Gold Gloves that way — not as the best defensive players, exactly, but as the players who most appeal to managers and coaches for the way they play — it starts to make a whole lot more sense.
To read the full article, click here.
