Such outcomes seem unthinkable for a player who has had only one address in his career: the Bronx. And they become doubly unrealistic when a simple fact enters the discussion: Jeter, after 15 full seasons in the major leagues, is 74 hits short of 3,000 for his career. When he reaches that milestone, probably in early June, maybe with a signature flare into right field, he will become the first player to do so as a Yankee despite the team’s long championship tradition.

The achievement will underline that consistency is his hallmark, that what Babe Ruth is to home runs and Lou Gehrig is to runs batted in, Jeter is to hits. In the last two seasons, Jeter first passed Gehrig for career hits as a Yankee and then Ruth for total hits in a career.

Now he is on the verge of a historic accomplishment for the third straight season, and if he can do it at home it will be the first time that either version of Yankee Stadium has been the host for a 3,000th hit for any player on any team. Perfect games? No problem. Landmark home runs? Absolutely. But a 3,000th hit has been a missing piece. Jeter could provide it, and the notion that he could instead reach the milestone while wearing the uniform of the San Francisco Giants and playing a night game in Arizona seems preposterous.

When he does get to 3,000, Jeter will become the 28th member of the fraternity. Right now, he stands in 36th place on the career list, but when the 2011 season begins, he can move past three Hall of Famers — Al Simmons (2,927), Rogers Hornsby (2,930) and Jake Beckley (2,930) — almost immediately, perhaps against Detroit in the Yankees’ opening series. Barry Bonds (2,935) and Frank Robinson (2,943) are next, with only Willie Keeler (2,955), Sam Crawford (2,964) and Sam Rice (2,987) then left before Roberto Clemente greets him right at hit No. 3,000.

Membership to the 3,000-hit club is on the decline, with just four players — Rickey Henderson, Cal Ripken, Rafael Palmeiro and Craig Biggio — having gained entry since 2000.

In the 2011 edition of "The Bill James Handbook," which uses mathematical formulas to estimate a player’s likelihood of achieving a particular milestone, only three active players besides Jeter are projected to have a better than 50-50 chance at getting 3,000 hits. The three are Alex Rodriguez (93 percent), Johnny Damon (57) and Albert Pujols (51). ...

For now, the player right behind Jeter on the active career hits list is the 39-year-old catcher Ivan Rodriguez, who is unlikely to be behind the plate in 2011 for as many games (102) as he was last year but could stick around long enough to collect the 183 hits he needs. Alex Rodriguez, with 2,672 hits, may get there before Ivan does.

...baseball history is littered with players who were essentially in the wrong uniform when they joined exclusive company — Wade Boggs (3,000th hit, Tampa Bay), Randy Johnson (300th win, San Francisco), Gary Sheffield (500th home run, Mets).

Washington Embassy, People’s Republic of China, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs Beijing, TOP SECRET/Subject: America today.

Things are going well here for China. America remains a deeply politically polarized country, which is certainly helpful for our goal of overtaking the U.S. as the world’s most powerful economy and nation. But we’re particularly optimistic because the Americans are polarized over all the wrong things.

There is a willful self-destructiveness in the air here as if America has all the time and money in the world for petty politics. They fight over things like — we are not making this up — how and where an airport security officer can touch them.

How silly Americans are. Here in China our people know we have the right to reach out and touch them anywhere and any time we wish, even in their beds at home in the middle of the night, so they sensibly bow their heads and assume the angle. Our "reach out and touch someone" motto is emblazoned upon our Human Rights banner, and believe me those we reached out and touched knew perfectly well what it felt like. Some of their survivors do, too.

They are fighting — we are happy to report — over the latest nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia. It seems as if the Republicans are so interested in weakening President Obama that they are going to scuttle a treaty that would have fostered closer U.S.-Russian cooperation on issues like Iran. And since anything that brings Russia and America closer could end up isolating us, we are grateful to Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona for putting our interests ahead of America’s and blocking Senate ratification of the treaty. The ambassador has invited Senator Kyl and his wife for dinner at Mr. Kao’s Chinese restaurant to praise him for his steadfastness in protecting America’s (read: our) interests.

Some Americans feel their interests are not really served all that well by appeasing Russia...excuse me, I meant "fostering closer cooperation"...but fortunately there may not be enough of them to help our plan of fighting Russian interests. They do not share a long and contentious border with the Russian hegemony like we do.

Of course, Americans are hopelessly naïve if they really believe the Russians will cooperate in any way which does not first serve their own self-interests, but if we can diminish the stature of this Kyl guy by taking him to see Kao, that’s worth a try.

Americans just had what they call an "election." Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

True, we are basing our analysis of what the incoming new government is going to do based entirely upon what their lead liar promised he would do during his own election campaign and did not, but why wait to actually see what happens when we can project so easily? This is why we have eliminated elections in China...we already know in advance there aren’t going to be any changes other than the few we authorize in order to prevent an uprising by the peasants in the countryside. Americans are so foolish that when one of their politicians offer change they actually not only believe him but think it will be change that they like. What simple people they can be.

Frankly, America would have fewer problems if their peasants out in the countryside—amusingly enough described as "red," how droll!—were not allowed to vote any more and the Liberal Democrat Party had the same supreme powers than we do. At least we no longer are forced to lie on television in order to keep our power, which must mean we are more moral than they are.

Of course, since the new lying politicians have not yet taken office we recognize, as truthful scientists, that we do not know for certain if they will not actually reduce their deficit—even their Lying Leader from the previous election says it is one of his own goals, after all, so if he is uncharacteristically telling the truth all bets may be off—and perhaps they will work on the crumbling infrastructure that the Democrats who have been in control the past four years have seriously neglected, who can say? Fortunately, teachers themselves do not seem interested in improving declining educational performance or else they would do so—who else, after all, can actually do that?—government fiat? Give teachers more money? How foolish...our teachers are beating theirs like stepchildren and we pay our teachers as little as possible. Potential involuntary assignment to our equivalent of Siberia is a powerful motivation for them, but American teachers’ unions, although wonderfully communistic and thus admirable, have prevented our way from working, oddly enough.

Oh, yes, we are quite happy about their immigration policy, which seems to allow unlimited unskilled illegal immigration—they have this "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy their military no longer finds useful—and our concern would be if the new incoming group of liars actually intended to do something about that. Fortunately, their president and attorney general seem to be intent on thwarting their own country’s best interests in this regard and illiterate bean-pickers will be allowed amnesty whereas scientific bean-counters will not.

The ambassador recently took what the Americans call a fast train — the Acela — from Washington to New York City. Our bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin would have made the trip in 90 minutes. His took three hours — and it was on time!

Of course, America has some 233,000 miles of railroads serving their 300 million citizens, many built in earlier centuries, whereas here in China we have 43,131 miles, give or take, for our 1 billion 331 million, which is longer than our 31,000 mile Great Wall built in earlier centuries to keep would-be immigrants out—how we laugh at your feeble Mexican border attempts--but the very few who can use our bullet train go really, really fast!

Along the way the ambassador used his cellphone to call his embassy office, and in one hour he experienced 12 dropped calls — again, we are not making this up. We have a joke in the embassy: "When someone calls you from China today it sounds like they are next door. And when someone calls you from next door in America, it sounds like they are calling from China!" Those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia often note that Africa’s cellphone service was better than America’s.

Yes, those of us who worked in China’s embassy in Zambia know, unlike Americans who do not travel as much as columnist Friedman, that Africa is not a country which has cellphone service, they do not say "welcome to Africa" when travelers arrive in Zambia, and comparing the service for 241,000 cellphones there with that of "America" is, well...okay I guess if you are really, really struggling to find some kind, any kind, of negative comparison...

In foreign policy, we see no chance of Obama extricating U.S. forces from Afghanistan. He knows the Republicans will call him a wimp if he does, so America will keep hemorrhaging $190 million a day there.

For some reason, Obama is more afraid of being called a wimp than anything else, so Republicans can manipulate him in any manner they please only by threatening to use the word. We think he is a fine president as far as China is concerned.

Therefore, America will lack the military means to challenge us anywhere else, particularly on North Korea, where our lunatic friends continue to yank America’s chain every six months so that the Americans have to come and beg us to calm things down.

True, we do not have a military presence in North Korea, ourselves, and would like nothing better than for Obama to pull all of American forces out of Afghanistan in order to "challenge" us in North Korea, hopefully invading in order to challenge us directly, somehow, that would be our preferred choice,

Pay no attention to the fact that we are calling for a resumption of the 6-party talks even while America’s nonexistent military is holding joint exercises off of Korea’s coast with enough firepower to reduce Pyongyang to ashes, those are mere diplomatic illusions like this one.

Most of the Republicans just elected to Congress do not believe what their scientists tell them about man-made climate change. America’s politicians are mostly lawyers — not engineers or scientists like ours — so they’ll just say crazy things about science and nobody calls them on it. It’s good. It means they will not support any bill to spur clean energy innovation, which is central to our next five-year plan. And this ensures that our efforts to dominate the wind, solar, nuclear and electric car industries will not be challenged by America.

It is true that our engineers and scientists are not actually politicians, either, but do what we tell them, just like everyone else does in this country, but we’re only building one new coal-fired power plant a week and buying up all of the world’s coal and oil that we can manage to acquire only so we can save the world from pollution. This is because we argue that our more-efficient technology, reducing carbon emissions to 1/3, lets us build 3 times as many plants for zero net gain.

Yes, we know that is only a story, but some mathematics-deficient idiots will buy it. If we truly believed that our engineers and scientists were in complete agreement and absolutely certain that manmade carbon dioxide would destroy the planet, do you think we would really be creating more of it than anyone else in the world? And on a pace to leave everyone far behind, save perhaps India? Of course we would not, because we believe our engineers and scientists completely. Unlike those stupid American lawyers.

Together we have billions more carbon-using people than America does, plus we have stolen all of their carbon-emitting industrial plants, yet our goal is, as it should be, forcing THEM to cut back on their economic production in the name of saving the planet.

What sort of scientific illiterate believes that the electricity for electric cars comes from nowhere, for instance? It used to be joked that Americans were so far removed from their earlier farming economy that most now thought milk came from cartons, not cows, and now they apparently think electricity comes from wall outlets, not power plants.

No, comrades, we have not and will not sign any binding agreements about carbon dioxide restrictions, much less create cap-and-trade legislation suitable for the Americans to follow, surely even the Americans are not all naïve enough to believe this ridiculous thought even if a few useful fools do. We are and always have been and always will be exempt even from Kyoto, that ancient red herring, just like we will remain aloof from every other international agreement which may impede China’s economic growth.

What fools Americans are to sign on to such ridiculous one-way streets. Do you think that WE would ever be foolish enough to sign any START agreement with Russia...or anyone else? No, not even to support President Obama.

Finally, record numbers of U.S. high school students are now studying Chinese, which should guarantee us a steady supply of cheap labor that speaks our language here, as we use our $2.3 trillion in reserves to quietly buy up U.S. factories. In sum, things are going well for China in America.

Yes, we know that American high schools are failing, dismal institutions of declining educational performance, as we noted earlier, but they teach pretty good Chinese in order for students to be able to order in Chinese restaurants so when they talk about walking their dogs at lunchtime they don’t wind up with their woked dog for lunch.

Americans who think they cannot understand the cheap labor working at Burger King today will be impressed at how well those undereducated kids speak Chinese. By God, they may fail in math, English and the sciences, but oh how they learn Chinese!

Not to mention using our $2.3 trillion to buy up industries which have already been outsourced. We can buy the entire city of Detroit, maybe the whole state of Michigan, at a bargain price, including cheap-labor Chinese-speaking Obamaclones, and produce cars no one will buy, such a deal.

Thank goodness the Americans can’t read our diplomatic cables.