The Times has a good piece on what makes him so focused. He gets so upset if the Yankees aren’t in the World Series, he hasn’t even watched a World Series game since 2003, when the Yankees last played in the championship.

“He really disconnects himself from everything,” said Jorge Posada, the Yankees’ catcher and Jeter’s close friend. “You can see how he gets so frustrated and so mad that we lost.”

By avoiding World Series games for the last five seasons, Jeter tried to make his transition into the off-season easier. Once the Yankees lose, he is already thinking about the next workout, the next game, the next season. He does not retrace history and despises comparing one season to another.

I saw a little flash of this the other night, after the Yankees won Game 6 against the Angels, when Fox’s Ken Rosenthal started to interview Jeter by talking about how long it’s been since the Yanks have won the Series.

And Jeter—doing something very unlike him—not only interrupted but revealed a hint of temper. “Got to focus on the negative, don’t you?” he said (or something very close to that).

For most people, that would have been a joke. But Jeter was dead serious. You could tell he took this philosophy to heart: Let the bad stuff go, focus on the positive, always look forward.

I know it’s hard for non-Yankee fans to see it, and I know that Jeter may be an imperfect person in his personal life. But at what he does best, baseball, he is really remarkable, and one of the great joys of being a Yankee fan over the past almost 15 years is watching Jeter become one of the legends of the game. Nobody plays it better.