Folded onto the back of J. J. Hardy's chair in the Baltimore Orioles' clubhouse at Yankee Stadium this week was a white towel emblazoned with a No. 2 framed against a Gatorade logo. A teammate had placed it there after the previous night's game.
'It's a Jeter thing,' Hardy said, in no apparent rush to remove it. After all, he is also No. 2, a shortstop - and not that he mentioned it - in possession of what Derek Jeter is retiring without: a division title and entry into the 2014 baseball postseason.
But Orioles Manager Buck Showalter, who was Jeter's first big-league manager and knows such amplified Yankee ways, teased Hardy, saying, 'That's as close to the Jeter treatment as you're going to get.'
For five seasons in Milwaukee, Hardy wore No. 7. That, he said, was a Mickey Mantle thing, so he wasn't about to cop the attitude that those damn Yankees and Jeter in particular were somebody else's business.
'I didn't pick No. 2 when I got here, but when I did get it, Jeter was the first guy I thought of,' Hardy said. 'It's definitely going to be a number that will be attached to him for a very long time.'
After Thursday night's game, weather permitting, No. 2 will never again be attached to the back of a pinstriped player at Yankee Stadium, joining the other retired single digits, which happens to be all of them.
Some numbers are removed from circulation because of sheer greatness, general excellence, extended collective glory, sentiment or a combination of those reasons. Much rarer are numbers that transcend team veneration and become defining symbols for an entire sport. For baseball, none could be weightier than Jackie Robinson's No. 42, sidelined by all teams in 1997 (and destined to have Mariano Rivera, who was allowed to keep wearing the number, attached to it for 19 seasons at Yankee Stadium).
Wayne Gretzky's No. 99 was retired by the N.H.L. LeBron James lobbied unsuccessfully for the N.B.A. to do likewise for Michael Jordan's No. 23, an indelible symbol of global prominence that James wore in his first tour with the Cleveland Cavaliers and will reprise for his return.
Jim Brown's No. 32 was iconic in football. Mantle's No. 7 and Willie Mays's No. 24 were arguably as impactful to their generations and beyond as Babe Ruth's No. 3 was for his now-ancient time.
On the basis of newsmaking impact and even pure talent, Jeter fell short of the aforementioned stars. But his uniform number reflects a hard baseball lesson across two tumultuous decades: It's not always or even often about the numbers. No. 2 was never baseball's No. 1, its leading man. But by reputation, and for the purpose of competitive authentication, Jeter was the sport's most essential or ambassadorial player in times of scandal and scorn.
His was a classic storybook tale about a single-minded kid whose dream was to play shortstop for one team, the Yankees. The sixth pick of the 1992 major league draft, he took a path to the organization highlighted by a series of fortunate events that in retrospect might seem to have been preordained.
Perhaps the only serendipitous part of the Jeter legacy is the single-digit number itself, bestowed on him on the day he reported for big-league duty - May 29, 1995 - at the Kingdome in Seattle, where he found uniform No. 2 hanging in his dressing stall.
According to YankeeNumbers.com, Jeter wore No. 73 during his first big-league training camp. But a Google search for the Yankees' 1995 yearbook seems to yield, in an eBay display, a baby-faced Jeter, bat cocked, with No. 70 on his back.
By that point, the only single-digit Yankees numbers not retired were 2 and 6, but it wasn't as if those numbers seemed reserved for potential Hall of Famers. Writing for MLB.com, Marty Noble told of how football's Deion Sanders, issued a spring training invitation in 1989, showed up and announced to the clubhouse equipment manager, Nick Priore: 'I don't wear no double digits. I have to have the lowest number on my team.'
That would have been No. 2, worn by the veteran infielder Wayne Tolleson.
By 1994, another journeyman infielder, Mike Gallego, wore No. 2 before it was left available to Jeter when he arrived in Seattle to substitute for the injured Tony Fernandez.
'The way I remember it, Nick Priore was the toughest guy to sell, the protector of right and wrong,' Showalter said. 'He was ready to give Derek something else; what, I can't remember. But it didn't take Abner Doubleday to figure out that Derek had a good future with the Yankees. So we talked about it, me, Nick and Stick, and Stick approved giving him No. 2.'
Stick, or Gene Michael, the general manager credited for refusing to trade prospects while George Steinbrenner was suspended from baseball, recalled: 'We had already decided that winter that Jeter would be the starting shortstop in 1996. And we always thought that if a guy was going to be a starter, we could give him a low number. But it wasn't like we had any big idea. We could have given him something higher, and now they'd have to retire that number.'
Instead, we have a generation of shortstops - from Colorado's Troy Tulowitzki to Boston's Xander Bogaerts, with more to come - who wear No. 2, who apparently always got what the stat geeks and the Jeter critics did not. A printout doesn't tell you what is inside a player's head and heart, nor does it measure how he fits into or affects the fabric of a team.
Before we see what Thursday night has in store, it is fair to say that Jeter's farewell tour has hardly matched the emotional highs set last year by Rivera. Jeter is a very different man, gracious in many ways and charitable through his Turn 2 Foundation, but with an almost freakish fixation on the game and, yes, the excessive and exploitative gifts (this week's theater production with the huckstering Brandon Steiner is a prime example) it provides.
So as a nation turns its lonely eyes this week to No. 2, we are reminded that in certain ways Jeter is very much like No. 23, Jordan, his Nike stablemate. The crying towel for his grand departure was a corporate souvenir, a sign of the times.
But even J.J. Hardy seemed to think the towel was a keeper. Again, he said, 'It's a Jeter thing.' Two words to explain that shorthand for generational excellence: Who else?
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