AMERICA AT LARGE:While Derek Jeter attracts the New York media swarm, Seattle hero's feats go largely unnoticed, writes GEORGE KIMBALL

DEREK JETER went into last night’s game against the Tampa Bay Rays needing four hits to overtake Lou Gehrig and become the New York Yankees’ all-time leader in base hits.

Of course, Jeter has been four hits away from tying Gehrig’s 70-year old record since last Sunday. The Yankees had played three games since, but the team captain hadn’t seen first base since the weekend.

Whether this drought constitutes a bona fide slump or whether it reflects the extraordinary pressure produced by an ever-growing Big Apple media swarm could be in the eye of the beholder, but if it is the latter, well, who could blame him?

For all intents and purposes the Yanks wrapped up the AL East weeks ago, and in the absence of a pennant race, the spotlight has turned to the Jeter-Gehrig chase.

“Until Jeter moves past Gehrig (please, hurry) it’s all-schmaltz-all-the-time,” wrote the Daily News’ Bob Raissman a couple of days ago, and he’s right. It is getting a bit ridiculous, particularly when the tabloids start describing the quest as one for baseball “immortality.”

The truth of the matter is that in terms of raw baseball numbers, the Yankees team record is pretty small potatoes. Whether Jeter matches Gehrig’s 2,721 lifetime hits today or tomorrow or next week, it still won’t place him among the top 50 in baseball history.

We’ll have to confess that until this dog-and-pony show began to develop a life of its own a few weeks ago, we hadn’t given the matter much thought, but once we were forced to, a couple of things registered with some surprise.

One was that it was Gehrig (and not, say, Babe Ruth or Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle) who owned the team record. The other was that the number seemed comparatively trifling.

Ruth actually had 2,873 lifetime hits, but 203 of them came in his six-year tenure with the Boston Red Sox (when he was primarily a pitcher) and 13 more in a cameo role with the Boston Braves at the tail end of his career.

DiMaggio was a career .325 hitter, but lost three full seasons to wartime service. Mantle played 17 years in a Yankees uniform, but was often injured and sometimes otherwise indisposed.

As the screenwriter (and former Chicago sports columnist) John Schulian noted in an e-mail from Hollywood the other day: “If Mantle hadn’t been hungover half the time, he might have had 3,500 hits and 770 home runs and a career batting average way over .300. But that still doesn’t explain why the Yanks have never had a player reach 3,000 hits.”

In a game that sometimes seems in danger of being overrun by its obsession with statistics, 3,000 hits is considered the benchmark of greatness. This is not to minimise the accomplishments of Gehrig (whose iron-man streak of 2,130 consecutive games played stood for more half a century before it was surpassed by Baltimore’s Cal Ripken in 1995) or, for that matter, of Jeter, who at 35, might have half a dozen good seasons left in which to extend his mark, but we’re talking here about a club that has been around since 1903.

In that time almost 1,500 men have worn the Yankee uniform, including 39 who are enshrined in the Hall of Fame, and none of them rated among the top 50 career hits leaders while wearing pinstripes?

The Yankees’ captain for the past seven years, Jeter is only the 11th man to have that role, and no one has held it longer. (One of his predecessors, Ruth, lasted five days on the job in 1922.) The Yanks went 35 years without a captain between Gehrig’s death and Thurman Munson’s 1976 appointment to the job, and when Jeter assumed the role it had been vacant for eight years.

Beyond his baseball accomplishments, Jeter’s Q-factor has something to do with the attendant publicity as well.

Not only is the Yankee skipper handsome, articulate, and rich; he is also the anti-A-Rod.

At one time Alex Rodriguez might have been considered the more glamorous of the two, but just as the accomplishments of the game’s highest-paid player have been tarnished by steroid revelations, A-Rod’s well-chronicled extra-marital dalliances have embarrassingly landed him on the front pages of the tabloids with some regularity.

Jeter, by contrast, remains New York’s most eligible bachelor, and his movements are regularly chronicled in the society pages – although if the New York Post is proven correct in its surmise that he is about to marry fellow Irish-American Minka Kelly, that status may not last much longer than Lou Gehrig’s record.

That’s right, we did say fellow Irish-American.

Derek’s mother is the former Dorothy Conner of Kalamazoo, Michigan, but lest the Irish Baseball Association get its hopes up about having discovered the baseball equivalent of Tony Cascarino, Jeter wouldn’t be eligible even under the Granny Rule, since Dorothy’s parents were born in the United States.

Given the way things have gone over the past few days, you wouldn’t blame Derek for wanting to get out of town where he could conduct his battle with Gehrig’s shade under less scrutiny, but that isn’t going to happen.

The Yanks have six more games remaining on this protracted home-stand and, slump or no slump, you’d have to assume he could collect four hits by accident in that span.

In the meantime, a far more impressive statistical achievement taking place on the other side of the continent went all but unnoticed in New York.

A couple of days ago Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki collected his 2,000th major league hit. To appreciate the significance of this accomplishment, it should be noted that Ichiro turned 28 the year he played his first major league game.

Suzuki had played nine seasons for the Orix Blue Wave before his 2001 transfer to the Mariners, and while his Japanese statistics don’t count toward his major league numbers, he had been a three-tie Most Valuable Player in his homeland before being named the American League MVP and Rookie of the Year in the same season (2001). He has been an All-Star selection in each of his nine seasons in Seattle, and will finish this year having collected 200 hits in each of them, another major league record.

If Jeter reaches 200 hits this year, which he almost certainly will, it will be the seventh time he has done so in 15 major league seasons.

To put Ichiro’s accomplishments in perspective, a Seattle scribe pointed out a couple of days ago that if Suzuki went hitless for his next 667 times at bat, he would still be a lifetime 300 hitter. And, perhaps even more startlingly, if he didn’t collect a single hit for the next 13 months, he would still be averaging over 200 hits a season for his career. As a major leaguer of an earlier vintage, Reginald Martinez Jackson, once pointed out: “If I did that in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me!”