Andrew Marchand ordered to whip up a humanizing profile of the Captain because they can no longer write about his on-field excellence. He comes up with, "Derek kidded me about not seeing a movie. He's wonderful!" He could not believe I've never seen "American History X." He wanted my review, and he asked me a couple of times if I had seen it yet. I explained that I've got a job, a family, etc. Not everyone can just watch a movie whenever they want to. He joked that he was cutting me off. David Lennon, meanwhile, begs us to look away from Jeter's no longer spinnable performance and simply bask in his gentle goodness. What does it all mean in the final equation? Not much, I guess. Jeter deserves to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer and has been treated like one every step toward his retirement. The fact that he's played more games (132) than anyone else on the Yankees but Jacoby Ellsbury (143) and Brett Gardner (135) is remarkable. And that includes 121 games at shortstop, a high-impact position we didn't think his surgically repaired ankle could handle for an entire season. Girardi has remained loyal, Jeter, but he's also had a built-in alibi: Most of the lineup has been worse. Tinkering with a Yankees legend was pointless. The juice wasn't worth the squeeze. The Yankees didn't fail this season because Jeter didn't have the kind of year we're used to celebrating from him. Maybe we just wanted a better farewell party for him and ran out of suggestions on how to make it happen. Right now, we'll settle for a memorable two weeks. If his first-ballot Hall of Fame career has been so memorable, what difference does it make how his final two weeks unfurl? Gads, how they want him to be interesting and he just isn't and never was. The thing they admired him for -- he was always about winning and blah blah blah -- is no longer in play and they desperately want him to be a person after 20 years of being a robot so they can canonize him on both counts.