The Marchman Act: Enables Yankee family members to obtain help for a SS who is unwilling to seek substance wayout outlier abuse services voluntarily.
Many of those outs will come by strikeout, which is good, because Jeter strikes out skillfully. (My favorites are the failed uppercut, where he braces his own back with his bat, and the called third strike on the inside corner, which inevitably ends with Jeter arching backwards as if the pitch nearly hit him, but he has as many strikeout moves as Michael Jordan had jumpers.) He also strikes out a lot. At his current rate, three years should be enough to reach 2,000 Ks, which only five men have done. Sadly, he likely has no shot at Reggie Jackson’s career record of 2,597, but he’ll at least be able to cheer on teammate Alex Rodriguez, who very much does.
Many of his outs will also involve double plays. Going into Friday’s game, Jeter had grounded into one just 87 fewer times than Cal Ripken Jr., the all-time champion. Since he grounds into about 20 per year, this is one mark at which he has a very real shot, assuming he wants to play long enough. The Yankees could help by moving him into the second spot in the lineup; Jeter can also help himself by not running down the line as hard as possible, though he likely won’t.
Finally, it should be noted that every time he takes the field, Jeter extends a remarkable record that he already holds—at least, depending on whom you ask. According to Michael Humphreys, the sabermetrician who wrote “Wizardry,” an excellent book on how to evaluate defense, Jeter is, if not the worst fielder of all time, “far and away the worst in career impact relative to his position.” Humphreys’ math shows his bad fielding as being equivalent to about 50 points of batting average.
If Jeter cares about any of this, it’s hard to tell. When I asked him this week what he thought about coming up on the leaderboards for double plays and outs, he just said, “I’ll let you have fun with that,” which is fair enough. Hopefully, though, one day years from now, he’ll sit polishing his rings and Gold Gloves and reflect with satisfaction on the full scope of his accomplishments. Kobe Bryant will almost certainly retire as the career leader in missed shots; Brett Favre was sacked and picked off more than any quarterback ever; Jeter, given his health, will set their futility marks to shame. It takes a hell of a player to make 9,000 outs.
Repoz
Posted: August 25, 2012 at 09:36 AM |
57 comment(s)
Login to Bookmark
Tags:
yankees
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. Matt Waters Posted: August 25, 2012 at 10:22 AM (#4217821)He's made the top ten in strikeouts once in 18 years, when he was 23.
He's reached 20 GDP's 3 times in his career. His average is about 15 a year, not 20.
As for outs made, one reason he's so high on the list is because he's also so high up on list for plate appearances (2nd active, 22nd career).
Sure.
But nobody hates on Jeter.
The all-time MLB leader in outs is Pete Rose. By more than a thousand. This is because he is also the all-time leader in plate appearances, by almost two thousand. You have to be damned good for a damned long time for anybody to let you make that many damned outs.
Sure.
Well, when you combine Derek Jeter with our gatekeeper's undying love for all things Yankee, you're going to get what you get. You could pretty much make a drinking game out of the Jeter pinata posts alone.
Jeter has won 5 GGs, 5 WS rings, the Yankees have made the postseason every year of his career except 2008, and here they are comfortably in first place yet again. It is simply unrealistic to expect him, or even to suggest that you expect him, to focus on his weaknesses. What is he going to say? "Damn, these stat guys have my number! Forget the banners and the rings and the standings. Time to move off my butt off shortstop to a position that I can handle!"
It is certainly very legitimate to analyze Jeter's D in terms of the Yankees as a team, and in terms of placing him on any lists of all-time shortstops. But to ask him to his face about the all-time outs record nad then to use that to take a little shot at him is just stupid.
it's embarrassing.
Yup.
Notably, the guys holding each of these negative records that Jeter is "threatening" to break are all Hall-of-Famers. (Well, Pete Rose isn't, but, well, you know...)
On the all-time outs list, Jeter is currently 22nd behind 17 Hall-of-Famers, two not yet eligible (Vizquel and Biggio), and two tainted players whose numbers would otherwise be Hall-of-Famer worthy (Rose and Palmeiro).
I agree with TDA; you guys are overreacting.
EDIT: For those who don't have WSJ.com access, the rest of the article seems pretty flattering.
Nah. We're disagreeing with your read of the tone of the piece. There is a guy at ESPN named Henry Abbott who has a redass about Kobe Bryant; as a Lakers fan, he annoys me. He writes stuff a lot like this--passive-aggressive, subtle cheap shots, backhanded compliments, re-covering old ground. I am not a Yankees fan, but this style is quite familiar to me. People who dislike the players in question tend to defend stuff like Marchman wrote here. Marchman's piece is actually dumber than what Abbott does because Abbott has not as yet at least actually talked to Bryant about it.
Derek Jeter's defensive numbers are old, old news at this point, as are the facts that Kobe Bryant misses a lot of shots and Brett Favre threw a lot of picks, and the fact that some guys in the MSM overrate these guys in terms of pure, measurable on-field/court value due to their longevity/gravitas is old news, too. Tossing in the obligatory "But Jeter/Bryant/Favre has accomplished a lot" doesn't mean the the piece is "balanced." Marchman needs to take a hit off the objective pipe and realize that taking shots at Jeter says more about him than it does about Jeter.
YMMV, but I don't detect anything in the piece more harsh than the Sheehan thread comments from AROM or BDC.
Now if Marchman had asked Jeter about switching positions with Prince Fielder, I might have reacted differently.
Didn't read the article or even the excerpt yet, just the headline alone made me think it's a malicious article and I was coming here to badmouth the article without reading anything from it yet. I'm as big of a Jeter basher as there is, (Ok, I'm not CP but still I'm up there) and think it's ridiculous for anyone to focus on the negative achievements as a counter to the positives. He's a worthy hof shortstop, who probably should have moved to third a decade ago, and would still have made the hof if he did. The fact is he's been a hof level player for a good portion of his career and has been a good player in the years he isn't putting up hof numbers. He's shown amazing durability for the position and because of his Jeterness, has never had to worry about playing for his job, which helps get him a ton of plate appearances which is going to lead to both good and bad career counting stats. He's going to retire top 20 all time in a lot of different stats.
*The runner was Paul Konerko, but still ... the "worst fielder of all-time" doesn't make plays like that.
But the worst defensive SS in MLB makes plays like that all the time. That's just one more reason why MLB is so freaking awesome.
It has gotten to the point where Jeter no longer even makes attempts at balls he knows he can't get to. It's pretty funny when you get the long range camera angle behind/over home plate and a grounder goes up the middle/or in the hole...and Jetes makes a head turn to watch it.
Humorous to me...not so much to the pitchers by their subtle reactions (another reason AJ Burnette was shipped out).
April
.389/.433/.579/1.012
May/June
.263/.317/.333/.650
July/August
.365/.392/.527/.919
[So now we know when he gets his booster shots]
As to defense, I just mentioned it briefly because while relevant, the horse is pleading for mercy. That said, I think that Humphreys' math is probably right--we're basically talking about a single per week--and that even so it's easy to underestimate the value of being able to pencil a player that smart in at shortstop for 16 years. He makes a lot of high leverage plays others wouldn't, and I think playing next to Jeter has done a lot of tangible good for Cano. There isn't an either/or here.
thanks for posting
as you may notice in another thread a fair number of folks are on the 'jeter worst shortstop who will be in the hof and ain't that some kind of something' and your article likely touched on that current nerve
not a yankee fan. just appreciating the guy whatever his limitations and thinking folks grousing about said limitations make this community look kind of petty and more than a bit stupid
but that's just me
Dead horses tell not tales. Or something.
No it's not.
Yup.
Guess somebody didn't get a gift basket...
Guesses / estimates -
C: Lombardi
1b: McCovey
2b: Hornsby or Carew
3b: Killebrew
SS: Jeter (pending) or Yount
LF: Brock, Hafey, Kiner, Stargell?
CF: Hack Wilson
RF: Klein? Slaughter? Heilmann?
P: Nolan Ryan
I thought Cowboy Popup used to be known as Jeter's #1 Fan.
I might have the wrong guy. Yankee Redneck? I'm horrible with names and remembering who believes in what. The guy who keeps claiming that Jeter isn't even a hofer because the defensive metrics regress to the mean to much and that his defense is even worse than war and all the other stats say it is.
Didn't know we were comparing this to BTF posts. Also, JE picked the only really complimentary paragraph in the piece to put up in #17, skipping the part where Marchman details the "skillful" ways that Jeter strikes out, for example. There is a tongue-in-cheek style in it, as its author notes, but it still has its share of snark.
It might be Yankee Redneck, but my dossier on him mainly notes that he likes combat sports and calls Selig Bolshevik Bud. Yes, I keep dossiers. Yours mentions your distaste for FireJoeMorgan.
That might be "Guy M.", who has suggested that a "better" defensive metric might be developed that would show Jeter to not be a HoFer. He doesn't seem to post much on any topic other than Jeter's defense - probably too busy working on his new & improved defensive metric.
Yep, that's him. Yankee Redneck is the guy obsessed with revenue sharing.
Interesting choice for my dossier. (and I don't distaste FireJoeMorgan, just thought it jumped the shark long before it finally closed down, and a little to mean spirited.)
I think he used to comment back when I had the time to keep up with The Book Blog. Not sure if he still comments there.
Why shoud that matter, RR?
That's true, but had I added that paragraph, the only thing missing from the article would have been the lede and I seem to recall some folks here get rather testy at those who reveal all of the contents from a paywall-protected piece.
Also, I don't think "snark" is synonymous with "malicious."
Actually, some folks get testy about those who reveal all of the contents of any piece, not just those behind paywalls. And for good reason.
He posts here on subjects other than Jeter. He's kind of the conduit to the Book Blog, now that MGL and Tango have abandoned us.
Wow, no kidding. I don't think GuyM would be thrilled that you mistook me for him.
Yup, just passed 15 months. Upon my one-year anniversary, I deleted one of the Harmon Killebrew threads I had bookmarked for any additional motivation. Thanks Killer.
You should have said the outfield IMO. I doubt he would be/have been much better at third but his skill set seems a perfect fit to make him a rather good outfielder, possibly even in center. He is pretty fast, strong arm and was always great with pop-ups. I always thought they should have tried him in center(is Younted him the right word?) after Williams became non-viable at the position which could have led to A-Rod staying at SS as well.
No other player has had a verb coined to lampoon the so-called "unwarranted adulation" that seems to put so many into a knicker-twist; the irony is that the man who coined that phrase may well wind up with his own disparaging "personal verb." As "Mr. Mungo" (Spalding Gray in Steven Soderbergh's criminally overlooked King of the Hill (1993) said--before he slit his wrists: "...a lesson for us all."
Marchman is fairly well-known, and he is writing under a byline, for the WSJ. Guys here are giving opinions, mostly anonymously, among scores of other guys doing the same thing, on a blog. Not the same thing at all.
Perhaps not, but on the net, they often go together like peanut butter and jelly.
As far as the paywall issue, I clicked on it and read it and didn't see anything that indicated the piece is behind a paywall, but perhaps it is.
Not seeing it, and that is just an assertion in any case. It is IMO smooth, professional snark as opposed to knucklehead snark--but snark nonetheless. Maybe Marchman didn't intend it that way, but that is how I think it comes off.
you can be snide without malice? I'd like to meet your dictionary.
Talk about malicious snark. Was that not the mot juste!? Malcolm's already called the pot calling the kettle black. I just want to say "I see what you did there" with the quote above; it's half the reason why 99% percent of the users here hate people like you (the other half being that they believe people like you "abuse" the job they want so badly, by your doing dumb #### like "writing" with stupid things like "words" when you should instead be pasting alphabet soup stats and spreadsheets). The Chinese believe it's a sin to purposely inspire envy others. I don't. Cheers to you, Mr Marchman!
Well, backatcha, Robin--we are both "asserting." Given what's out there, in both the blogosphere and in the MSM, this is pretty darned mild. For Crissakes, we've got Skip Bayless spreading HGH rumors. It's certainly not Tim's most striking prose, but he's kept things reasonably light. Perhaps someday there will be a way to quantify tonal usage and rhetoric and produce a "snark index." Every article will come pre-numbered.
What's wacky in the piece is the notion that Jeter giving away a single a week adds up to 50 points of BA over a year. That math looks to be rather strained, possibly due to some distortions in how Humphreys arrives at those fielding run values. Even assuming that Jeter really is giving away 14 runs per 162 games in the field, it looks more like a 35-point BA adjustment. That works out to a career "loss" of about 365 hits (all singles). But the figure at bbref is a lot lower than this estimate--it's only -8 per year. So the BA adjustment, assuming that it really makes sense to do it that way (a big ass-umption...), is quite probably more like 20 points. This is the place in the article where Jeter is "reverse Jeterated"--but not directly by Tim, who takes some pains not to give "advanced fielding metrics" a free pass in the essay (despite his apparent endorsement of that math further up in this thread).
The math seems straightforward. IIRC, Humphreys rates Jeter's fielding at about -19 runs/season. That's about -27 singles. Take away 27 hits from a hitter with 540 AB and he loses .050 on BA. If you assume Jeter is a 610 AB player, then it's 44 points. But that seems like a pretty small quibble....
if you became a Yankee fan in the 70s or 80s, and then, finally, Jeter comes along--well, the fact that his defense may be pretty mediocre is not in itself gonna seem like a problem.
Actually, that -19 is the math that seems strained, which was what I meant to say, and upon rereading it seems likely that what I wrote was unclear. No one else has Jeter being that bad. The figures at bbref and FanGraphs are roughly half what Humphreys is estimating. As fot the concept of adjusting BA this way, that's a whole ball of wax that begs for a knockdown-dragout that I don't have time for at present.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main