I hope you had the pleasure of watching Derek Jeter's final game in Yankee Stadium where, moments ago, he hit a walk-off single in the bottom of the 9th inning to win the game.

It was the kind of absurd storybook ending that Hollywood's best writers couldn't have imagined and a perfect example of why baseball is so much fun to watch.

Derek will be a first ballot Hall of Famer and no Yankee will ever wear the #2 on their jersey again. I could spend this entire blog talking about the accomplishments that have made him a baseball immortal and one of the Yankee greats. But I will always look back at Jeter's career as way more than a collection of statistics.

More important than his 3000 hits, or All-Star games appearances, or World Series rings is the fact that Derek was the PERFECT model of baseball professionalism for all 20 years of his career.

Here's something you might not know about him: in 20 years in the MLB he was ejected by an umpire exactly ZERO times. ZERO!

Does this mean he wasn't competitive? Absolutely not. Does this mean he didn't care about winning? Not a chance. Does this mean he agreed with every call every umpire ever made? Let's be serious.

What that stat really means is that he had ultimate respect for the umpires and for the game and that nothing - not his own emotions, or his desire to win, or own opinions about a call - was more important than that.

One other thing you might not have noticed even if you watched the broadcast. After getting mobbed by his teammates near second base after his game-winning hit, when he started walking back towards the dugout to shake hands with his former teammates who had come to send him off, Derek tucked his jersey back in, which had come untucked during the celebration.

The game was over, he was the hero, in his last game in Yankee Stadium, and he had just been in a teammate mosh pit celebrating a walk-off win.

But he was still a baseball player, and he was still on a baseball field. And being on a baseball field with your jersey untucked is disrespectful to the game.

So despite all the excitement and fanfare around HIM, Derek made sure to tuck his jersey back in because the GAME is bigger and more important than any single player. Derek played every game of his career with that belief at his core.

That simple act of tucking his shirt in, which was probably not even noticed by 99.9% of the people watching at home, in my opinion, said everything you would ever need to know about what kind of ballplayer Derek Jeter was and how he felt about baseball.

For 10 years, I've tried to teach my players to honor the game in every way I know how by emphasizing hustle, attitude, sportsmanship, respect for umpires, and respect for opponents above all else.

All I really needed to do was tell them to play like Derek Jeter.

RE2PECT