This attitude is all in your head. The sabermetric crowd, for the most part, thinks that Jeter is a terrific baseball player. Perhaps one of the most widely-cited sabermetric analysis websites is Baseball Prospectus. Here’s a sampling of what they have had to say about Jeter since his arrival in the Major Leagues:
This is right in line with what most sabermetric folk have said about Derek Jeter over the years. The only people who interpret these sorts of comments as “disdain” are hypersensitive Yankee fans who aren’t happy with anything less than Jeter as the second coming of Jesus Christ himself.
I think the Baseball Prospectus summary for 2005 puts it in a nutshell:
The bolded sentences could usefully be posted on many a Yankee fan’s bedroom door.
As a data analyst and a sports nut I am forever looking at articles about analysis in sports. They are fun to read and I know that when I recommend them to other guys they will be read by them.
Jeter’s a legitimately great player who has awful lateral range for a shortstop. That’s not just some arcane equation, either; it’s visibly obvious to a reasonably trained eye that he had always moved poorly to the ball, especially to his left (he’s good at going straight back, though) and leaves his feet way too often and too early.
But since when were all Hall of Famers great at everything? Not every great player does everything well. Mike Schmidt wasn’t much of a contact hitter, Babe Ruth was a stupid and reckless baserunner, Ozzie Smith had no power, and Randy Johnson was a worse fielder than most pitchers in my slo-pich league. Were they not great players?
No, that’s not all that I saw, as he is deservedly commended on his overall game. Their judging of him in 2006 sounds like a backhanded compliment, and it underscores my point of how he is viewed by many. Sure he scored 122 runs, but it was only because of a, b, and c.
I would say that Bill James summation from Don’t Ask’s link hits the nail on the head regarding Jeter’s defense:
I was talking to a sabermetrician about Jeter and fielding and he wondered if Jeter’s playing shallow, and his apparent refusal to move to third, were both about disguising a mediocre arm. He wasn’t arguing the case, because he hadn’t measured Jeter’s throwing speed…he just wondered if that might be a plausible explanation. Yankee fans I know say that’s bullshit, and that he has a great arm, so I wonder (reading that Bill James article) if everyone’s somewhat correct, and what was really going on was that his mechanics were bad.
I understand now. It’s clear that you don’t know anything at all about how the sabermetric crowd think, which is why you constantly misinterpret what they say.
Here is the BP summary of Jeter that i gave for 2006:
If you knew anything at all about baseball statisticians, you would know that this is not some “backhanded compliment”; it is, in fact, high praise.
OBP is considered by the sabermetrics crowd to be one of the more important numbers in baseball. As stat people never tire of pointing out, every time a hitter makes an out, it brings his team one step closer to the end of the game. Every time a hitter does not make an out, it provides an opportunity for his team to continue batting, and to score more runs. So when a hitter steps to the plate, one of the most important things he can possibly do is not make an out, which is exactly what happens when he gets on base.
The importance of OBP is magnified for the guy hitting at the top of the order. Your lead-off hitter gets more plate appearances every year than any other player on the team, so he has more opportunities than anyone else to get on base and to score runs. A lead-off hitter with poor OBP is a liability, while a lead-off guy with good OBP gives the hitters behind him lots of opportunities to drive him home.
In 2005, Jeter ranked 7th in the AL in OBP, and was the highest ranked hitter to lead off, making him incredibly valuable to the Yankees, and giving all those power hitters behind him (people like Matsui and Sheffield and Rodriguez) a chance to bat him in.
Here, by the way, is the complete BP summary of Jeter for 2006, from which the above sentence was taken:
You interpret stat people’s critiques as “disdain” and their actual compliments as “backhanded compliments” because you apparently don’t understand them.
Which is pretty much the whole point that the BP guys were making.
I’m really not interested in insulting you, TOJ Lebowski; far less interested in it than you seem in insulting my ‘kind,’ but it appears that you are reading very intensely into descriptions in order to find an insult of Jeter. First, yes, many people say that Jeter’s defense used to be super-terrible. They’ve said the same things about Manny Ramirez and Mike Piazza, because in all three cases they are true statements about what they’ve observed. Do you feel like Piazza and Ramirez have been relegated to replacement level by the '“sabertronics?”
Second, I think it’s pretty interesting that when you say:
you add emphasis to a word which wasn’t even in the Baseball Prospectus quote. You literally inserted but when in fact all BP did was say “Jeter being good at A B C led to desirable outcome X.” It really seems that you’ve decided how Jeter is viewed “by many” without a leg to stand on, and I say that as the person who espoused the view of Jeter that you attacked in the first place.
This kind of thing is going on all the time in Baseball Prospectus, I promise. They report what the data indicates; nothing more and nothing less. That is in fact precisely why a lot of us are enamored of their approach. And all of us think Jeter is a great player.
I would think it is true that any informed baseball fan considers OBP to be THE most important statistic for measuring the ability of a major league baseball player.
(I’m operating here from the assumption that more complex stats aren’t raw statistics so much as they are analytical tools.)
You can pretty much sum up most of Derek Jeter’s value by pointing out that his career OBP is .388, which is quite outstanding, especially given that he’s a middle infielder who’s had a long career; he has been above average at getting on base every year for 14 years in a row, and only once has he missed a significant part of the season to injury. Jeter would be a very valuable player even if he’d been a DH his entire career. Of course he has other strengths - he has good power and is a sensational baserunner - but OBP is the center of major league offense, and Jeter’s OBP is dandy.
It’s often been said that he really should have been an outfielder, and I happen to agree. As has been mentioned, he’s fine at tracking popups but weak as hell moving to his side for grounders, which is consistent with a simple observation of his physical skills; he is VERY fast, but his reactions are slow and his footwork is poor. In the outfield his strengths - speed and moving to the ball on the fly - would be much more important than his weaknesses.
Jeter, IMHO, is (easily) the worst defensive player to ever win a Gold Glove. But if he’d been an outfielder, I think he would have won Gold Gloves in the outfield and I think he would have deserved them.
The reason i said “more” rather than “most” was that i was grouping under “stats” the things that you are calling “analytical tools,” everything from relatively simple measures like OPS through to much more complex things like WARP and Win Shares. I figured it was easier that way, and i also assumed that anyone who thinks that Baseball Prospectus’s 2005 comments about Jeter constitute a “backhanded compliment” wouldn’t be very interested in the distinction.
Well, yeah. If mounds of raw evidence don’t win someone over, something as hideously complicated as Win and Loss Shares isn’t gonna make them bite.
Just understanding the centrality of OBP is most of the battle. At the major league level (it’s not necessarily true at other levels of ball) OBP is most of the game. Getting on base or not getting on base is the great majority of what distiguishes winning teams from losing teams; if you get more guys on base than the other team you’ll win more than you lose. Really, the only complicating factor is power, and it’s not quite as important.
If you understand how important getting on base is, it’s amazing how much more fun the game can be to watch, because you understand it more. You start to hang on every pitch, because the difference between a ball and a strike veers the at bat so radically in terms of whether the batter’s likely to get on base or not. The nature of defense and the decisions that fielders and baserunners make changes. You appreciate pitchers more and throwers less.
I guess I’m rambling, but I suppose where I’m going is I’ve never understood the “bah, why bother with all that numbers stuff, you don’t enjoy the game” attitude. How can you not enjoy something by learning more about it? Doesn’t that enhance one’s enjoyment of things? I find I just can’t learn enough about baseball; I feel like I know 1% of what I’d like to know. Doesn’t matter if we’re talking about stats, techniques, history, coaching, playing, the way an outfielder should play in certain parks, whatever. I just love baseball, and I can’t imagine not wanting to know this stuff.
I hate the argument that Arod owes much of his success to Jeter leading off. It does not hold water. Arod is a hitting machine when he is on, a very scary guy to have come up. He is a game breaker.
Perhaps, now that we have voting functions it is time to restart it?
Arod played ss long enough along with the fact was capable of playing it longer means I’m comfortable considering him a ss. Thus, he is comfortably 1st or 2nd at ss with Wagner taking up the other spot.
It was not on this thread yet, but when I stared reading on Jeter on line I encountered it. Then I did not remember where the argument originated.Sorry.I read a bit about Jeter, who I thought of as another over hyped overpaid Yankee.
I tested 1000, and it worked - so no problems there. Definitely have a list beforehand, and maybe make a note at the top of your post for people to not post in the thread until the poll is up.