In an astonishing, Jack Armstrongish day, the peerless Derek Jeter reached the milestone of 3000 career hits by slugging a third-inning home run off hard-throwing right hander David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays. Jeter marked the day by going 5 for 5, with the hits including the homer, a double, and three singles, the last of which was the game-winning hit in a 5-4 Yankee victory. It was the third time in his career that Jeter went 5 for 5, and he finished the day with 3003 hits, good for 27th place all time. He was the 28th man to reach 3000 hots, the only man to achieve the feat in a Yankee uniform (others who had been Yankees: Dave Winfield, Rickey Henderson, Wade Boggs, and Paul Waner), only the eleventh player on the list to have played his entire career for one team, and only the second hitter besides Boggs to reach 300 hits with a home run.
Joe Posnanski has a beautiful appreciation of Jeter that was published in si.com last week when Jeter was on the verge of his accomplishment. It is an excellent piece of writing–I encourage you to read the entire thing if you have an interest in this sort of thing. It is a piece worthy of its subject. Meanwhile, here are two selections:
“Jeter, more than anyone else, is the personification of 3,000 hits. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. How do you get to 3,000 hits? Line drive after bloop after scorcher down the line. Seven times Derek Jeter got 200 hits in a season. No other shortstop has done that more than four. Eleven times he hit .300 or better … that’s as often as Clemente. Jeter hit double-digit homers 15 times, most ever for a shortstop. Jeter stole double-digit bases 15 times, most ever for a shortstop (tied with Ozzie Smith and Luis Aparicio). Jeter scored 100 runs 13 times, most ever for a shortstop. He has been unrelenting and undeniable. We can’t remember all the hits. But we can remember that there have been almost 3,000 of them by now.” . . .
“Jeter burst into the league on the first Yankees team in almost 20 years to win a championship. He hit .314 and carried himself like a man who had done it all before, perhaps in another life. At 24, he led the league in runs and led the Yankees to 125 victories, the most any team has had from April through October. He should have been MVP. At 25, he was even better; he hit .349, scored and drove in 100. He should have been MVP again.
“From that point on, his career has been a cavalcade of numbers: .343 average, 124 runs, 34 steals, 44 doubles, 97 RBIs, 212 hits, 23 homers, all achieved in different seasons. He is unquestionably one of the greatest-hitting shortstops in baseball history. Jeter’s defense has been more scrutinized than the defense of any player ever, I imagine. There seems to be no consensus even now. Managers and coaches began voting him Gold Gloves after he turned 30, which was just about the time that people who try to quantify defense began to suggest that he was much less effective than he looked. But in the end, he was out there at shortstop every day, and the Yankees won every year, and for most people this tends to be where the argument stops. . . .He 
has done another remarkable thing, perhaps the most remarkable thing: He has carried himself with grace and humility in a time and place that pushes hard against grace and humility. Reporters and cameras have surrounded him for more than 15 years, yet he has rarely misstepped. Steroid suspicions have circled the locker of every star player, but even the most cynical tend to believe that Jeter has been clean. He has been the subject of the most extravagant praise imaginable (I invented the word “Jeterate” to describe the overzealous praise of his intangibles) and some withering criticisms, too, but he seems relatively untouched by both. I know a father who both (A) gravely dislikes Jeter as a player and (B) is thrilled that his son emulates Jeter. With Derek Jeter, that is no contradiction.”