Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

MLB

Jeter is master of the dramatic for Yankees

Later, Derek Jeter could laugh about a lot of things that hadn’t seemed so funny. He could chuckle about how the great Tony Gwynn had said that the last 10 hits leading up to 3,000 were the hardest to get.

“Took me a month to get 10 hits,” he said.

He could talk about how anxious he had been at the plate, how much pressure he had been under to reach the magic number on this homestand, how the usual cool façade that has served him so well for so long was little more than a carefully crafted ruse.

“I’ve been lying to you guys for weeks,” he joshed. “I don’t know if you caught onto that or not.”

MR. 3,000

BOX SCORE

PHOTOS: JETER HITS 3,000

JETER BY THE NUMBERS

He even would make light of his lately-acquired reputation as a slap-and-poke singles hitter, the guise he has slipped into so often during his last 1,000 or so plate appearances these past two years, when for the first time people started looking at Jeter as something other than an indestructible hitting automaton.

“I didn’t want it to be a slow roller to third base,” Jeter would say, asked if he envisioned what 3,000 would look like. “I didn’t want to have that replayed forever.”

Instead, he would have this: This day, fierce with sunshine and good feeling, a shared fellowship shared with 48,103 people inside a sold-out Yankee Stadium, described for millions of others by trusted voices belonging to Michael Kay, to John Sterling, or to thousands of others who simply had their ears glued to cell phones, eager to describe what they were seeing to cousins, fathers, uncles, friends who couldn’t see or hear for themselves.

He would work a count against Rays lefty David Price to 3-and-2. Price, with gold coursing through his left arm, who had challenged Jeter on fastball after fastball in the first inning before surrendering 2,999; Price, of whom Jeter said: “He can throw 98 miles an hour. I wasn’t looking for a breaking ball.”

He got a breaking ball, 78 miles an hour.

JETER MAKES HISTORY WITH 3,000TH HIT IN WIN OVER RAYS

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JETER’S LOVED ONES GET FRONT-SEAT VIEW OF HISTORY

COMPLETE YANKEES COVERAGE

“He could’ve thrown it in the dugout,” Jeter would say, “and I would have swung.”

Instead, it started around Jeter’s belt, spun slowly toward his knees. Jeter never got a chance to stride, stood flat-footed, but centered the ball perfectly.

It was exactly 2 o’clock in the afternoon.

And the afternoon was about to be turned upside down. The baseball soared through the air, tracing a perfect parabolic path in white against the blinding blue sky. Should we have known? Maybe we should have. We saw Jeter make that flip play all those years ago, saw him dive into the stands a couple of times, sometimes looking like Leroy Brown afterward, with a couple of pieces gone.

VIDEOS:

THE GAME IN WHICH JETER BECAME MR. 3,000

JETER DISCUSSES GETTING HIS 3,000TH HIT

JETER’S TEAMMATES ON HIS HISTORIC MOMENT

YANKEES FAN CHRISTIAN LOPEZ RETURNS JETER’S HR BALL

We’ve seen him seize more moments than anyone of his generation, oftentimes with a home run. We saw him make a star of Jeffrey Maier. We saw him dismiss Bobby Jones and the Mets with one swing of his bat, leading off Game 4 of the 2000 World Series. Saw him hit the first-ever November World Series home run off Byung-Hyun Kim, ending a forever World Series night in that awful autumn of 2001.

“Derek,” Jorge Posada would say of his friend, “always knows how to come through.”

Alex Rodriguez, watching the at-bat from the bench, sitting next to CC Sabathia, had a premonition. He saw Jeter take a splendid cut fouling off a nasty Price change-up a few pitches earlier.

“CC, if he gets another pitch like that,” Rodriguez said, “he’s liable to hit a home run.”

Then he went and he hit the home run, one that managed to leave the masses speechless and unable to stop screaming all at the same time, he clobbered a curve and sent an entire city into rapture. It shouldn’t be this easy, this routine, to take ridiculously huge moments and slip into them like a Technicolor dreamcoat. Yet he has done just that since he was 21 years old, winning an Opening Day in Cleveland with both his glove and his bat.

And rising again on this day of days, this 5-for-5 day, when, of course, he was at the plate with the winning run on third in the bottom of the eighth, and, of course, he got him in.

“That was the easy part,” Jeter would say. “I’ve been in those situations my whole career.”

There may even have been times when he failed to deliver in them. It was just hard to remember any on this day of days.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com

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