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Thursday, March 20, 2008
Dugout Central: Payne: How Valuable Has Jeter Really Been to the Yankees?
According to Women’s Health magazine...very!
Surprisingly, the Yankees’ winning percentage was actually slightly higher without Jeter. Whether you think Jeter is overrated or not, I think you have to concede he has been one of the great players in the game and a future Hall of Famer. However, the difference in winning percentage with and without Jeter isn’t all that large.
So what can we conclude from all this? Well, Jeter has only missed about .06 percent of all Yankee games since 1996. It’s silly to pretend we can get a comprehensive view of Jeter’s value from just looking at the 122 games he missed out of 1,942 possible games. But, obviously the Yankees were a darn good team during Jeter’s career. And the numbers show that the Yankees haven’t missed Jeter when he’s missed time. New York has been just fine with and without Jeter.
Jeter is a .317/.388/.462 hitting shortstop. It would be foolish to pretend he hasn’t been an important part of the current Yankee run that began in the mid-1990s, if not the most important part. But the idea that the Yankees wouldn’t be anywhere near the same team without him seems somewhat overblown. Yes, if the Yankees replaced Jeter with an average shortstop, they certainly wouldn’t have won as many games. But based on how great they were and what they did without Jeter in the lineup, I think it’s pretty clear they would have still been a contending team all those years.
Jeter is not quite the superhuman, Michael Jordan type that some want to make him out to be. This is mainly because no baseball player is that type of player. Baseball is not a game in which an individual can often impact. Clearly one player does not a great team make.
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.06 percent of a possible 1,942 games is about 1 game.
Is it too much to ask that people who throw numbers around in their articles understand what "percent" means?
Gah.
EDIT: what salvo said.
He's not a selfish ballhog coddled by the league and protected by on-court officials? Well, I for one am thankful.
Yes, definitely.
That's what happens when your audience
is a bunch of geekspassed high school math.Of course, that's being too hard on Payne, it was probably just a typo and it didn't materially affect his point.
EDIT: goddamit, how do you do the whole crossing out thing?
EDIT: nevermind, got it.
didn't think so.
Gatorade? I mean, Jeter is so good, I watch all his highlights in fast-mo!
Peter King
I just think the problem is some want to emphasize intangibles instead of the things the we know make Jeter great. That's my biggest beef.
Your mother's basement should be safe.
Well, he should have won two. We live in an extremely bizarre world. Those of us who supposedly can't appreciate Jeter would laud him more than those who write poetry to his greatness.
Ouch. Very nice.
But your mom said I could stay at her place.
OK, but I must warn you, she's going to expect you to "earn" your keep, fancy man.
Yes, he should have. To infinity!
Haha. Fair enough. And for the record we never had a basement. APBA and I were confined to the attic.
Well, it wasn't always terrible was it? Are his GG wins inversely proportionate to his fielding ability?
No, it wasn't. Not really, he was around average in 04-06. He's never really been good in the field.
But you should really ignore kevin when he's talking about Yankee players or defense in general.
nathan
"Has anybody ever seriously claimed that Jeter is to baseball what Jordan was to basketball?"
kevin
once again, kevin tries to steal my thunder...
What I'm saying is we know through all kinds of fielding metrics his defence the last few years (the gold glove ones) has been pretty bad, right? In the late 90's to the early...00's(?) when he was hitting really well was his defense average? Or a lot worse? I'm frankly suprised that with the teams he's been on and the supposed 'east-coast bias' he's never won an MVP award.
Ah, see mostly I catch him on the steroid threads. I forget he's a BoSox honk, yes? No offense to anyone here, but often listening to NYY and BoSox fans talking about the other team is like listening to the extreme left or right talk about the other political party.
Some are confusing a lack of greatness in particular aspects of the game with overall greatness. Just because Jeter’s never won a batting title, never led the league in OBP, never hit 30 homers, never stole 40 bases doesn’t mean he’s not great and that we must explain his greatness with things that don’t appear in the stats.
Jeter’s greatness is in the fact that he is, while not great, significantly above average in virtually every important aspect of the game offensively. He hits for a high average, he get on base at a good rate, he has solid power, he steals a fair amount of bases at a very good rate. While you won’t see anything that stands out, I challenge anyone to find a weakness in Jeter’s offensive game.
As often discussed, there is no east-coast bias in MVP voting, one excellent reason being that the voting is set up to be geographically fair.
If there is a bias, though, it's toward "guys who had unexpectedly good years for teams that made the playoffs without being huge favorites": unless a guy is hugely overqualified like Bonds or AROD, the MVP often comes from that group. Jeter, needless to say, has been in that group approximately once, in 1996 – and that year, he won Rookie of the Year.
I'm a huge Jeter fan, and this is a huge nitpick, but sometimes he seems too content to "inside-out" the ball the other way for a single instead of really waiting for a pitch to drive. It works, in that it keeps his average and OBP up, which is awesome, but I'm not sure he couldn't maintain most of those gains and gain some more power if he tried a little bit more to really drive the ball.
Again, not really a weakness, but it's the most I got.
Tim Raines talked about this once, that when came up, alot of people saw 30 HR power in him, and it's true that he used to really drive the ball when he got a hold of it, but that Jeter just loved to hit to much and would take on a pitch if he thought he could get a hit rather than wait for one he could put in the bleachers.
I don't think Jeter really has that kind of power anymore. He used to really drill them to left and right center, but I haven't seen many of those kinds of bombs from him in last few years.
And:
Well, it sounds like you are denying those attributes. This is the problem with the article (aside from the Jeter is Jordan strawman). You sabotage your own argument with the constant hedging. Every paragraph has disclaimers, including the statement that it is "silly to pretend" that the lynchpin statistic to your argument actually means anything.
So you present a statistic as the springboard for your argument, immediately admit that the statistic is useless, and follow that with a lot of nervous-sounding analysis that #8 parodied well. The sum total is a "fun fact" followed by the conclusion that the dominant baseball team of the past decade still probably would have been pretty good had it lost one of its best players.
I don't think Jeter really has that kind of power anymore. He used to really drill them to left and right center, but I haven't seen many of those kinds of bombs from him in last few years.
It seems like the only balls he really crushes to left now are hanging breaking pitches. I think the hardest ball I saw him hit all last year was the Schilling slider he put on Landsdowne Street in September. It hung there like a Salem witch and he put a charge into it. Even a league average fastball for Jeter means at best a line drive double to right these days.
He ate up John Maine's two seamer in Shea last year, but other than that I can't recall any HRs off of fastballs from last year (I think I missed quite a few though). I think you're right, and I believe it's due to a change in approach, although I guess it could be slower bat speed. Should be interesting to see what he does this year.
Yeah, but it's not the same team.
But they weren't the same team for 125 games.
Edit: Beaten to the punch.
I wish I had said that (as I was reading along, that's what sat in my mind as the most cogent rebuttal to this analysis).
I think two things:
One, that people who watch him everyday tend to overrate Jeter a bit, and people who don't watch him that much and use his raw numbers more in their judgment seem to underrate him more. He's probably somewhere in the middle, but I wouldn't take issue with the claim, based on what I've seen of him, that he's the best right-handed #2 hitter of my lifetime. He's tremendous at picking up the slack when the leadoff guy fails to start the engine, his inside out swing is perfect for moving runners over, he has patience at the plate, a bit of power, good deal of speed, fantastic smarts as a batter and baserunner. He's not an especially good bunter, but that is in this case overlookable given his other skill set (I'd rather have Jeter than Rizzuto in the 2-hole).
When you look at the guys who were regular #2 hitters for recent World Series championships (just for example), there are guys like Youkilis, Duncan/Taguchi, Iguchi, Bellhorn, Luis Castillo, Erstad, Jay Bell. Jeter is heads and shoulders, way, way above every #2 guy I can think of (off the top of my head) back to Joe Morgan, and I take Jeter over Morgan in a heartbeat as well.
Guh?
Best OPS+
Morgan 187
Morgan 169
Morgan 159
Morgan 154
Jeter 153
Morgan 149
Morgan 145
Morgan 138
Morgan 136
Morgan 132
In an era with a lower standard deviation than Jeter's. And Jeter isn't taking it with basestealing, either (Morgan 689 stolen bases, 80%).
Tee hee. You so funny.
Oh, you meant as an announcer. Sorry, I misunderstood.
Voros, thanks for the comment.
No need to do a serious study when we can just look up VORP or Win Shares for Jeter. This was more of an anti-Jeter mystique, anti-Jeter aura piece, inspired by this from the Dugout Central AL East Preview (by Jay Higgins...sorry Jay):
"Player Yankees cannot afford to lose: Derek Jeter. While Alex Rodriguez may be the best player on the Yankees, he is not the most important. At the risk of sounding like Pags, could the Yankees win a World Series if A-Rod went down? Maybe. Could the Yankees win a World Series if Jeter went down? No."
It was just hard for me to believe somebody actually believed this.
Pffffft. Bellhorn is so much better than Jeter!
(..risks wisecrack opening here..)
Anyway, Jeter can be a first-ballot HOFer without matching Morgan's level.
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