What’s funny is that A-Rod has the reputation for being slick, but it is Jeter who is slicker than snot on a doorknob. The difference is that with A-Rod, slickness comes off as an artifice. Jeter, on the other hand, was born that way.

A-Rod tries desperately to say the right thing; to make everyone like him. Jeter never gives the feeling that he cares what you think about him. He’s never turned a phrase worth repeating, never really said anything that’s deeper than his shadow, never given away even a 10th of what he’s really thinking. But dodging questions and issues comes naturally to the Yankee captain; A-Rod has to work at it.

And as hard as A-Rod works at it, he never gets it right. Jeter meanwhile, seems incapable of getting it wrong.

You could see where that could get annoying, especially when Jeter repelled every invitation last year to say something nice about his neighbor on the left side of the infield. A captain, it has been suggested, ought to defend his teammates from the outside world, but Jeter hasn’t done that. It’s as if he feels that since A-Rod thinks Jeter’s got it so easy, he can fend for himself.

There’s something to that. None of the Yankees ever leap to A-Rod’s defense, and as long as he keeps nursing his little hurts in public, they’re not going to. These are grown men and hardened professionals. They don’t want to hear about sleepovers.

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What they want is for A-Rod to hit the ball when it counts. They don’t care what he does or doesn’t say, as long as he does his job, which is to get big hits in big games, to carry the team when it’s down, to forget about his image and use his enormous talents to take the game by the throat and not let go.

They don’t care about stats or all-star appearances or endorsement deals. And they absolutely don’t care about his feelings.

They care about what the fans care about — performance.

When Reggie hit those three homers in ’77, Munson was one of the first guys to hug him in the clubhouse. And from that day on, the Yankees stopped noticing how annoying Reggie was. He still was called up for sleepovers, but he was fully a part of the team.

There’s a lesson for A-Rod in that.

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