Baseball is losing its face

— -- Late last August, here at ESPN.com, we took a poll. It turned out to be just the latest, greatest window into the true legacy of Derek Jeter.

We commissioned our friends at Turnkey Intelligence, one of America's most prominent sports polling firms, to ask people a question that the sport of baseball needs to pay close attention to -- now more than ever:

Who's the Face of Baseball?

Guess who won?

Yep.

When Turnkey gave 1,028 baseball fans a list of players that did not include Alex Rodriguez, who had somehow wriggled his way into a few "SportsCenter" segments at the time, and told those fans they could pick up to three players they'd identify as the Face of Baseball, Jeter pretty much squashed the rest of the field.

He was chosen by 38 percent of those polled. As opposed to 25 percent for the runner-up, Miguel Cabrera. And once you got past those two, nobody was really even in the same solar system.

Jeter was picked by more than double the number of folks who named David Ortiz (17 percent) or Mike Trout (16) or Mariano Rivera (12). He quadrupled Bryce Harper (9 percent) -- and got more than seven times as many votes as your other official Bright Young Stars of the Game, Andrew McCutchen and Buster Posey (5 percent each).