“I never listen to that type of music,” Rivera said about “Enter Sandman,” “I didn’t know the song before. Once (Metallica) came and I met the singers. But I like gospel music, Christian music.”

He doesn’t like “Sandman,” but says nothing. He lets them play the song.

“I just don’t care,” Rivera said.

– Filip Bondy, N.Y. Daily News.

With most players, I wish they cared more about their warm-up and walk-up music, even if I realize that becoming a Major League baseball player requires so much time and effort and focus that you probably have to let pursuits like developing awesome taste in music, or spending lots of time considering your at-bat music, fall to the wayside.

With Rivera, though, I kind of like that he just doesn’t care about what song they play when he runs in, and I like that he says it that way, too. I think a big part of the Rivera mystique is that he’s totally unflappable. Of course he doesn’t care. You could play Peter Cetera’s “You’re the Inspiration” and he’d seem just as intimidating to opposing hitters, and he’d still come in and throw his unbelievable pitch over and over again.

What’s happening now happens every now and then it seems, and Yankee fans always freak a bit and wonder if this is finally the end of Mariano Rivera. It isn’t. He allows a couple of singles and a few stolen bases and people allow their short-term memories to overwhelm 15 years of dominance.

Just look at his season line: 235 ERA+, 0.857 WHIP. Both better than his career rates. And he’s 40. The dude is ridiculous.

The only minor cause for concern for Yankee fans might be the hiccup in his strikeout rate — Mo’s whiffing only 6.8 batters per nine innings this season as compared to 9.6 over the prior three years and 8.2 for his career. But even if that holds, if that’s not just a small-sample blip and it turns out he’s been a tiny bit lucky to maintain an ERA so low this year, he still doesn’t walk anybody or allow home runs, and still induces groundballs at a rate above 50%, so he’s likely to continue being awesome. Doubting this man is a fool’s errand.

I saw the video of the Derek Jeter acting thing from last night but I haven’t yet seen the way the Internet or newspapers are taking to it. Put me down for thinking it’s pretty awesome, though.

Look: It’s downright silly, and certainly something for which Jeter deserves to be taunted mercilessly by opposing fans. But he exploited the situation to gain a competitive advantage. Is that cheating? Kind of, but if you’re going to get bent out of shape every time a player tries to mislead an umpire you’re going to have a whole lot of blustering to do. It just so happens that this example was particularly egregious, the evidence proving it nonsensical particularly strong, and Jeter’s reaction particularly absurd.

But what matters most is, like he said, that he got to first base. And it’s cool that he recognized the opportunity, and that he appropriately values that chance. Probably realizing how important it is to reach first base and seizing every opportunity you have to do so is a big part of the mindset that makes you become Derek Jeter.

The doubling over felt a little unnecessary though.

Another thing I want to reiterate, since this is coming up all over again now: It really amazes me that so many people can be so certain that the quality of Major League umpiring has gotten worse in some tangible way. This strikes me as a combination of confirmation bias — there are lots of stories of how the umpiring is bad, so we’re seeing a normal amount of bad calls and every time thinking, “yup, more bad umpiring!” — and new technologies that allow us to better assess umpiring.

I imagine if we could watch back every game from the 60s, 70s and 80s in high definition with ultra-mo replay and a billion camera angles like we have today, we’d spot thousands of blown calls at first and a hundred gaffes like Jeter’s last night that just got shrugged off by fans and media in the past because they appeared too close to contend with.

The 5,425 square-foot apartment has four bedrooms, five and a half bathrooms and a chef’s eat-in kitchen. It also has 16-foot floor-to-ceiling windows, which flood the apartment with light and give jaw-dropping views of the East River.

But don’t worry that Jeter won’t have a place to call home now that plans on vacating 845 United Nations Plaza.

He is putting the finishing touches on a massive, 30,875 square-foot, seven-bedroom, nine-bathroom waterfront home on Davis Island in Tampa, Fla.

– FoxSports.com.

OK, here’s what jumps out at me. And I don’t traffic in high-end real estate or hobnob with the elite too much, so maybe some of you can help me out here: Do rich people’s homes always have so many bathrooms, or is this something particular to Jeter?

Because five and a half baths, when you’ve got four bedrooms, that just seems excessive. And at the new place — nine bathrooms for seven bedrooms? Am I nuts or is that just weird?

I mean I guess it makes sense to have a bathroom for every bedroom so Derek Jeter’s houseguests don’t need to be inconvenienced by having to share bathrooms, but having two additional bathrooms means he’s either anticipating more guests than he has bedrooms — Nick Swisher crashing on the sofa, a couple Giambis strewn about on the floor — or he expects there’ll be situations in which people don’t want to go all the way back to their rooms to shower and so could stop at either of the two extra bathrooms Jeter has strategically placed inside the mansion.

And you know what? When you’re dealing with 30,875 square feet I guess that’s a reasonable possibility.

Also, when you have multiple half-bathrooms in your home, how is that listed? Do two half-bathrooms count as one bathroom? Could it be that Jeter’s new place just has one regular bathroom and 16 half-bathrooms? That would be kind of awesome. Maybe he has the world’s smallest bladder and just wanted a water closet at every turn, for his comfort.

I just got a review copy of Alex Belth’s Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories, a collection of essays from well-known and less-well-known writers about, well, their lasting memories of Yankee Stadium.

I haven’t read them all yet, but the book looks awesome. I’m obviously biased because I’m in there — near the back, in the section about the new stadium — but at the same time, often I’m disappointed with my writing when I go back and read it later and I’m pretty happy with the way my entry came out.

Of particular note, of the stuff I’ve read so far, are Tony Kornheiser’s piece about growing up a Giants fan — poo-pooing all Billy Crystal’s hoopla around Yankee Stadium — and Emma Span’s hilarious bit about Game 6 of the 2004 LCS in the Bronx.

You should probably buy this book, even though you’re probably a Mets fan. It’s got contributions from all sorts of famous writers and great baseball writers, plus from Luis Guzman and John C. McGinley, because that’s just how Belth rolls. Many, maybe most, of the writers involved aren’t Yankee fans. It’s just about the stadium, and baseball and memories and all that.

Plus it’s got me in there.

It ships in October but you can pre-order it from Amazon.com now.