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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Wednesday, June 17, 2009FOX Sports: Morosi: Jeter getting better with age on defense
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At the end of the 1996 season, it appeared to me that Ripken needed to put some air under the ball to make the longer throws from SS. Opponents were beating out balls in the hole that Cal had consistently turned into outs in his younger days. Now maybe it was just a temporary late-season arm strain, but it also may have been a problem that's not all that predictive of Jeter's fate, since he still seems to be throwing well.
That was also the year Baltimore acquired the slick-fielding Mike Bordick, though I can't say whether that was cause or effect of Ripkin's move.
Anyway, I'm sure he'll play through his bad ankle for a week and thereby tank both his offense and his defense for the rest of the year. Nice while it lasted.
Except when they says something good about our beloved Captain.
Fact: Omar Vizquel won AL gold gloves every year from 1993 to 2001.
Fact: When Omar's streak was broken, the new gold glove shortstop was a guy who currently plays on the left side of the infield for the Yankees.
Fact: It was not Derek Jeter.
A-Rod broke the Vizquel streak, and had Vizquel declined/gotten hurt/been traded to the National league earlier, it is likely that A-Rod would have had a gold glove earlier, not Jeter. Jeter did break A-Rod's streak, of course, with some help from his manager and team, who decided to take A-Rod out of the competition.
There was talk of moving Ripken to 3B since his early days and I can't help but wonder if a lot of that was due more to Ripken not "looking" like a rangy no-hit shortstop like many of his contemporaries, and looking more like a 3B with his six foot plus frame and power bat, than anything to do with his defense.
Bill James' take on it was that part of it was that Ripken had an absolute gun of an arm, which allowed him to set up deeper, which allowed him to make more plays. Others have extolled his positioning and anticipation, and the statistics that I have seen bear out the fact that he was a truly excellent fielder for most of his career.
However, he was pretty much right in the middle of the pack last year in UZR, too:
Which will make him the best SS in the league if he can keep up the 830 OPS and the stolen bases.
Yes. But in his earliest days, the talk wasn't of moving Ripken to 3B, it was of keeping him at 3B, since that was where he mostly played in the minors, and that was where he played for most of the first half of 1982.
Concur that Jeter has looked at least decent defensively this season
Well when you wallow like a bottom feeder on the defensive rankings for so long, the only way to go is UP!
However, in saying that(and as a Red Sox fan, it pains me to type this), and considering the woe my guys have had to suffer over the past few years, he's been much better than what the Sox have thrown out there for some time...
Curses! Beaten to the punch!
Ripken played 220 games at third in the minors, and 60 at short.
Jeter getting better with age on defense
might be my favorite headline of the year.
It's not about Jeter, it's about the sheer unlikelihood of any shortstop getting "better with age" past the age of what, mid-20s? Sure, there's positioning and some other stuff with experience. After that, when even any what have to be rapidly diminishing marginal gains in experience start competing with the effects of aging, which robs explosiveness and blinding, lightning-quick reflexes first? And only then we add in the fact that the guy in question's biggest weakness has always been his first step, and that he's 34, about to be 35, and has not just 15 seasons and 2000 games behind him, he's got almost another entire season of only postseason games on top?
Come on.
That's only true if there was some bad luck/distortion in the ratings to cause him to rank that low. If he was really, truly, a -25/-30 run defender, you'd expect age to make him even worse, to the point where his play was so obviously bad that even Michael Kay would be screaming to replace him.
My current guess: He was a bad defender, but not worse than -10 runs or so true talent, has kept himself in good enough shape to avoid the age related decline so far, and is playing a bit over his head right now. If I had to bet on his UZR from now to season's end, I'd say he plays at a -10 pace.
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