 The first time I ever met Derek Jeter was in 1992. He was the Yankees' first-round draft pick, six-pick in the draft, and the Yankees made him available to their radio and television crew. So he came up to the radio booth, and he talked with me and John Sterling for a half an inning, and all you could think about him at that time in retrospect now, oh, he's really thin. He really doesn't say that much. He's very polite, very pleasant. He's not gonna really break the atom in terms of telling you what you want to know, but you're never gonna go away feeling as if you were disrespected. That was just the initial response. So I didn't know what type of player he was. And the next day, I went down to the manager's office and spoke with Buck Showalter, who had also met him that day. And I said, well, what do you think of the kid the Yankees drafted? He said, I don't know what type of player he is. He said, I have seen all the scouting reports. They say he can do everything. He's gonna be great on the field, but I will tell you this. I'll guarantee you this. I said, what? I've met him. I've met his parents. And if he plays 20 years for the New York Yankees, he will never, ever embarrass the New York Yankee Organization. And boy was Showalter right. We all know everything that he did on the field, but every time that cheater came to a fork in the road, he always took the right path. He never made the wrong move. With the media, this is the way I always describe Derek. You can knock on Derek's screen door. He'll talk to you through the screen door. He'll never invite you into the house. You're never gonna know the intimate details, but you'll go away feeling, okay, he told me enough. That was the brilliance of Derek playing in the New York market. And then what he did on the field was hard to argue with that. I am so blessed. And I told him this the last time I saw him that I, in some small way, is just a bit of the soundtrack to his career. Just think about some of the major moments that he had. And I was at the mic, and I'll always, always be grateful for that because I saw almost every single game he ever played from when he came up in 1995, all the way to the end in the last game at Fenway Park. Mr. November, the dive into the stands, the flip, the 3,000th hit, the walk-off in his final game at Yankee Stadium. I was in the cat bird seat for that, and I feel so fortunate that I got to see one of the greatest players of all time on an everyday basis. And the funny thing is that when you watch Derek Jeter every single day, you didn't look at him and think, this is one of the greatest players who ever lived. But then when you took a seat and looked back, you go, wow, he's one of the greatest players who ever lived. You can make the argument with his 3,465 hits. Only five guys in Major League history have had more. You can make the argument with the five championships, the 14 All-Star games, the five gold gloves. There are very few short stops, if any, that had a better career than him. Bottom line is this. Derek Jeter did it all. He did it with class, he did it with elegance, and he did it with grace. And that's not easy to do, especially in the scalding market that is New York. It never flustered him. And this is the best stat that I could tell you about Derek Jeter. You look at his lifetime batting average of 3,10. His lifetime batting average in the postseason was 3,09. And he almost played a full season, I think 158 games in the postseason. Nothing flustered him. In big moments, weaker players, the game speeds up. Derek Jeter was the same as a game in May. That's why his batting average career-wise was the same as his batting average in the postseason. We all know for the longest time, this guy's a Hall of Famer. Today, it just became official.