Neither Jeter nor his agent, Casey Close, has disclosed what numbers they are seeking, but it is believed Jeter wants a five- to six-year deal somewhere in the range of $20 million a year. If you do the math, that’s a difference of at least $50 million from the Yanks’ offer.

Most baseball analysts agree that, on the open market, the 36-year-old Jeter would attract no more than a two-year deal for a total of $15 million to $20 million.

– Anthony McCarron and Bill Madden, N.Y. Daily News.

OK, it’s important — as always — to take the contract details with several grains of salt, since neither Jeter nor his agent is on record with his contract demands. And I know that essentially every single human in the N.Y. sports media has provided his or her opinion on the negotiations, so there’s probably nothing new here.

But it strikes me that Jeter stands to lose a lot more than the Yankees if the two part ways. For one thing, there’s the straight-up cash part of it: No other Major League team would offer Jeter even the three-year, $50 million offer that’s rumored to be the Yankees’ starting bid.

Second, if Jeter cares at all about loyalty and legacy and all that jazz — and presumably he does, since those are like the most Derek Jeter-y things about Jeter at this point — then it behooves him to stay in the Bronx. He must know as well as anyone how offputting it would be to his fans to see him playing in another team’s uniform.

The Yankees stand to take a pretty sizy marketing hit if they let Jeter walk, but it seems unlikely that their fans will stop showing up en masse and watching games on YES as long as the team continues winning. And, straight up, it’s unclear that signing Derek Jeter to a big, expensive contract extension is the best way to keep winning.

If the Yankees’ payroll is finite — which has never been entirely clear — and a $20 mil-a-year pledge to Jeter could feasibly keep them out of the bidding for some future free agent stud (also unlikely), then they’d be better off putting some of their considerable resources toward finding a younger, less expensive shortstop. Jeter is still a good player in spite of his shaky defense and diminishing production. But J.J. Hardy, Rafael Furcal and Jose Reyes — all years younger than Jeter and all currently slated for free agency next offseason — posted similar or better WARs in 2010. Jeter is hardly irreplaceable.

Barring unforeseen circumstances, Jeter will still be rich, handsome, bound for the Hall of Fame and dating Minka Kelly regardless of where he signs this offseason, so it’s hard to say he’ll lose all that much by leaving the Yankees. But he’ll stand to lose money — both contractually and likely due to fewer endorsements — and he’ll forever forgo some of that mystical “True Lifelong Yankee” legacy he has developed in the Bronx.

So it strikes me that the Yanks could easily call his bluff. Leave the three-year, $50 million on the table and tell him to come back to them if he finds anything better. He won’t.

Through the first five games of this series, the Texas Rangers have succeeded for the most part in stifling Mr. Rodriguez, the Yankees third baseman. He has just three hits in 17 at-bats for a .176 batting average and hasn’t hit a home run.

Mr. Rodriguez, who earlier this year became the youngest player to reach the 600-home run mark, was supposed to have buried the notion that he wilted amid the pressure of October baseball. He batted .365 with six home runs in 15 postseason games last year, and Yankees manager Joe Girardi said Thursday that this season has been easier for Mr. Rodriguez because he hasn’t had to answer similar questions about his playoff performance.

– Mike Sielski, Wall Street Journal.

The excerpted portion isn’t really a fair representation of Sielski’s piece, since it later examines the way the Rangers are approaching A-Rod and considers the possibility that he’s just not getting too much to hit.

But it’s completely baffling to me that A-Rod’s performance just last postseason didn’t seem to teach anyone anything about the nature of that stigma. Rodriguez now has a .927 career postseason OPS and a .958 career regular-season OPS.

I’m sorry this story sucks: Sample size. Sample size. Sample size. Even great players, the best of their generation, endure rough 17 or 28 at-bat stretches sometimes. When they are isolated and magnified by a short playoff series, we fixate on them and assume that they are somehow meaningful.

Also — allow an only tangentially related rant — Mike Lupica’s column on the same subject is epically Lupica-esque. Allen Barra produced this monumental and must-read bit of trolling earlier this week, exposing Lupica’s tendency to belabor the obvious, and it helped me grasp exactly why I find Lupica’s stuff so frustrating to read. In this particular piece he uses nearly 1,000 words to say, essentially, “A-Rod should hit a home run tonight.”

I think the major reason I no longer harbor any particular distaste toward the Yankees — besides a general preference for underdogs — is that I’m no longer in high school and so no longer need to regularly interact with people like this guy:

The Yankee fans I deal with now tend to be people more like Alex Belth, a guy reasonable enough to recognize that he is lucky to root for a team with the resources to contend every year, who does so without the obnoxious sense of entitlement too frequently demonstrated by people like the fellow seen here.

I know plenty of Yankee fans like that and I suspect they might actually make up more of the actual fanbase than we assume; we merely associate Yankee fandom with people like this guy because of confirmation bias, and because they express their allegiance in a much more vocal and detestable fashion than the Yankee fans smart enough to realize that not everyone gets to root for a perpetual winner.

That GIF (taken from Scratchbomb) is mesmerizing. I could watch this guy for hours.