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Jeter's career transcends the cruel reality of sports
The most unusual union in sports? It isn't Monica [link widoczny dla zalogowanych] [/u]Seles and the billionaire Buffalo Sabres owner 32 years her senior. It doesn't involve the Beckhams, the Agassis or a Kardashian. It isn't the one in which a smitten Shaq reportedly proposes to a contestant from the Flavor Flav reality show, or the one that makes Tom Brady the second biggest paycheck in his own bed- room, or the ownership divorce destroying the Dodgers.
No, the most unique marriage in sports has to be between Derek Jeter and the New York Yan- kees.
For all the heart and tears and joy poured into them, sports can be bot- tom-line cold, always put- ting feelings on the disa- bled list. Outside of the greeting-card industry, big businesses don't run on emotion. So local icons Dan Marino, Jason Taylor and [link widoczny dla zalogowanych][/u] break their bodies for a cause but are evicted by their employer as soon as production wanes, and the hand placed on their lower backs to guide them toward the exit isn't gentle. That's how Emmitt Smith ends his career puttering as an Arizona Cardinal. This Arctic arena tends to be a meritocracy, survival-of-the-fittest Darwinian, and scoreboards aren't any more patient than guillotines.
But here is Jeter, as impervious as immortality, floating along on a cloud of intangibles like no one else in sports. He is 36, a very bad age in baseball now that that the forever fountain of steroids has dried up. Skills go very fast when you arrive here, as Chipper Jones can attest. And Jeter is having the worst season of his life at a terrible time, in a contract year. He is, rather suddenly, Marco Scutaro.
MONEY MATTERS
A player his age with these numbers entering free agency -- a player [link widoczny dla zalogowanych][/u] not named Jeter -- might be worth $10 million max for a single season. Maybe. Vladimir Guerrero is younger than Jeter, and all he got last offseason was a one-year, $5 million deal while Jermaine Dye, 36, quietly vanished from the sport altogether. But the only hard choice the Yankees are making is between giving Jeter five times his actual worth or 10 times it, over several seasons, until he's 40. They're going to pay him about $50 million over his current baseball value, in other words. For public relations. To do something that feels right if you are a human but usually feels wrong in most businesses and certainly in this business.
The Yankees can afford it, obviously. They gave A.J. Burnett $82 million, so overpaying Jeter hardly qualifies as dollars without sense. You probably don't want Jeter getting his 3,000th hit as an Astro. And he's the most popular player in the sport. Most wives aren't recognizing Albert Pujols. But popularity didn't help Marino, Taylor or [link widoczny dla zalogowanych][/u]. And it isn't like people will stop paying to watch a Jeter-less Yankee team.
So baseball's imbalanced finances and the lack of salary cap make it so that Jeter's next contract will be around the $55 million all the Marlins will be paid this season -- and for someone who has been worse offensively this season than Ian Desmond. The Pirates and Royals are an unholy kind of awful, but both teams have seven players each on their roster having better offensive seasons than Jeter. Baseball can be cruel that way, reducing to rubble a guy who was third in the MVP voting less than a year ago, but this is how declines happen in this sport at this age without illegal performance enhancers.

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