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Jeter Lovers Unite
markj111
Posts: 2,921 ✭✭✭
in Sports Talk
The last two years Jeter has ranked as the 31st best defensive SS per Bill James online. This year, though, he has shown massive improvement and is up to 20th. He is a lock for another Gold Glove!
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"The answer was in the Patriots eyes. Gone were the swagger and c0ck sure smirks, replaced by downcast eyes and heads in hands. For his poise and leadership Eli Manning was named the game's MVP. The 2007 Giants were never perfect nor meant to be. They were fighters, scrappers....now they could be called something else, World Champions."
Steve
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
Please stop by and return my 2006 Gold Glove the next time we play the Mets.
Sincerely,
Alex Gonzalez
Coincidence? I think not.
<< <i>It is interesting that terms like "slobbing on his knob" and "copious amounts of goo" are mentioned in the same breath as Derek Jeter.
Coincidence? I think not.
he only forgot A-rod's purple lips for the tri-fecta
As a Sox fan, initially I HATED Jeter because a lot of people thought he was better than Nomar, when Nomar was clearly the better player. Up to 2003, I'd take Nomar in a heartbeat. Now, I've come to respect Jeter, although I think he is slightly overrated, especially defensively.
<< <i>Gold Glove awards may be a joke but there is not one player who wouldn't like to have it.
The thing I never understand about this forum is all of the Derek Jeter bashing going on when I see so many posters who would come here and throw out Pete Rose's name on many of the all time best discussions. Those people know nothing about baseball as far as I'm concerned. >>
I've never understood the hatred for Derek Jeter. He seems like a decent guy, and I think he cares about his team. Sure, the press go ga-ga over him, but that's going to happen when you're the captain on a team that wins four World Series' in five years and appear to be a strong candidate to finish your career with 3500+ hits.
<< <i><<I've never understood the hatred for Derek Jeter. He seems like a decent guy, and I think he cares about his team. Sure, the press go ga-ga over him, but that's going to happen when you're the captain on a team that wins four World Series' in five years and appear to be a strong candidate to finish your career with 3500+ hits. >>
Well that's precisely the perspective I wish most fans would take. If you don't like the Yankees or Jeter, then fine, but no need to constantly find ways to try and besmirch the man. He plays the game the way it should be played, and treats reporters and fans with due respect. That he gets SO much attention goes with exactly what Boopotts said and I'll add to it the fact that Jeter plays in the biggest media market in the WORLD, and plays for the most storied franchise in baseball history. I don't think I'm being an arrogant Yankee fan is stating such. There's absolutely no mystery why the guy gets so much attention considering the circumstances. >>
All great points. I'd also like to add that Derek Jeter passes what I call the 'Dad Test' with flying colors, and as the father of a 4 1/2 year old boy I no longer consider this insignificant. The 'Dad Test', as I call it, is basically this: If your son (or daughter, as the case may be) comes up to you one day and tells you that he's become a devoted fan of player 'X', how do you feel about it? Some athletes (Mike Tyson springs to mind) flunk the Dad Test, while others (like Jeter) clearly score quite high. Jeter, unlike A-Rod, is not an adulterer, his peformance doesn't appear to have been enhanced by steroids. He''s probably a little narcissistic, but then I'd be to if I was sacking the kind of broads that Jeter appears to rope in nightly. On the balance he seems like a reasonable guy who's lived a charmed life. I don't see what's not to like about that.
As I stated in another thread, it is a natural reflex for Yankee haters and Red Sox fans to pee all over a standup guy and a great player if he is wearing a Yankee uniform. I don't even try to defend Jeter like I used to. There is no reason to. Derek Jeter is a great baseball player. Sorry haters
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240
By Nate DiMeo
Posted Monday, July 14, 2008, at 7:24 AM ET
Derek Jeter is quite good at playing baseball. As such, he'll earn north of $30 million this year in salary and endorsements. Despite a poor offensive season by his standards, fans voted Jeter to his ninth All-Star team, where he will start at shortstop for the American League on Tuesday night. Add to that his four World Series rings and dalliances with actresses and beauty queens, and there is a lot to recommend the Yankees star. There's just one small blot on his résumé: When it comes to playing defense, Jeter sucks.
In February, Shane T. Jensen of the Wharton School unveiled a paper on a new method for evaluating defense in baseball. The take-away from the study, which was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was that Mr. Jeter (despite his three Gold Gloves and balletic leaping throws) is the worst-fielding shortstop in the game. The reaction in the New York media was predictably apoplectic. The New York Post's headline: "You've Got to Be Kidding!" The reaction from baseball's vast community of statistical analysts: a collective yawn.
One reason why baseball statisticians didn't get too excited about the study is that Jensen's methods ("for each grounder ball-in-play—g-bip—we have the—x,y—coordinates in the field where the g-bip was fielded" and on and on) are grounded in the familiar language of the sabermetric literature. Mostly, though, the paper didn't provoke much intrigue because Jeter's badness is already an axiom of said literature. In fact, debunking the conventional wisdom about the Yankee captain's fielding prowess has become a standard method of proving the validity of a new fielding statistic. That places Derek Jeter at the frontier of new baseball research.
Articles in the "Jeter sucks" canon include: James Click's "Did Derek Jeter Deserve the Gold Glove?" from the book Baseball Between the Numbers, Tom Tango's "With or Without Derek Jeter" from the Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2008, Bill James' "Jeter vs. [Adam] Everett" from John Dewan's The Fielding Bible, and Mike Emeigh's "Derek Jeter and the State of Fielding Analysis in Sabermetrics, Parts 1 Through 8" (really). The gist of all these articles is that Jeter generally makes the plays he gets to (in fact, it turns out he's slightly better than most shortstops at charging slow ground balls and handling balls hit right at him), but he gets to many, many fewer than he should. As fielding-stat pioneer Michael Humphreys* explained it to me, "Basically, he's OK at easy plays and terrible on all others, in other words, all the plays that matter." That patented jumping, twisting throw to first? Probably just a byproduct of his limited range. As the Onion once declared, "Experts: Jeter Probably Didn't Need To Jump To Throw That Guy Out."
If the sabermetric case against Jeter's glove has long been closed, why do the sabermetricians keep opening it? In an e-mail, Tom Tango joked that Jeter comes up again and again "because he gets far more girls than his fielding talents should allow." And there's probably something to that: The stat guys want to kick a little sand back at the press-box bullies—all of whom seem to have Word macros for phrases like "nerd writing in his mother's basement"—who lazily swallow the myth of Jeter's fielding prowess.
But the better answer is that Jeter's defense is at the heart of the conflict between sabermetrics and traditional baseball fandom. A recent article by Baseball Prospectus' Dan Fox poses the age-old question, "[W]hat would Sir Francis Bacon, the English philosopher and statesman, have thought of Jeter's defense?" Fox, who recently announced his departure from the blog world to join the front office of the Pittsburgh Pirates, looks back to Bacon's notion that people tend to think that memorable incidents define the whole. So we see Jeter flip the ball to Posada or emerge bloodied after leaping into the stands to catch a Trot Nixon foul ball and think "great fielder." Bacon, like today's statistical innovators, would seek out objective scientific data to understand the larger truth about Mr. Jeter. These data show that—yes, Sox fans—Jeter totally sucks.
Derek Jeter has the (small) misfortune of playing in the first era when there are objective data about fielding. In the introduction to The Fielding Bible, Bill James points out that your standard array of batting and pitching statistics gives a decent sense of a player's skill level. That's not the case with defensive stats. Anyone who's ever yelled "You call that a hit?!?" understands the subjective nature of error rulings. Besides, the game's standard defensive statistic, fielding percentage, only tells us how a fielder deals with the balls he ends up reaching. They tell us nothing about how well a player moves through space—how he tracks fly balls, how good he is at charging bunts, whether he dives a lot because he has great range or because he doesn't react quickly enough to the ball off the bat. More sophisticated defensive statistics will not only give fans a better understanding of how the game is played. In the age of Moneyball, the teams that figure out how defense works will have seized one of the game's best remaining arbitrage opportunities.
Stat-heads and forward-thinking team executives now have several advanced fielding metrics to parse: fielding win shares, fielding runs, fielding runs above replacement, zone rating, range factor, probabilistic model of range, the Wharton guy's SAFE method (that's "special aggregate fielding evaluation"), and many more. There are so many fielding stats now because the sabermetric community has worked together on the scrivenerlike grunt work of generating useful data. Private-sector companies like Baseball Info Solutions and Stats Inc. have done most of the heavy lifting. They watch every play of every major league game and record the things (trajectory, speed, whether a ball was bobbled or fielded cleanly) that go into defense, then package the numbers and license them to baseball front offices and a few dedicated, independent stat guys. The cost of this proprietary data has not necessarily kept the stat masses from making important contributions to fielding knowledge. It has meant, however, that the best systems are the ones that are most dependent on crunching complicated numbers that don't get updated every day. We're nowhere near being able to check the box score after a game to see how a bad day in the field affects, say, Julio Lugo's ultimate zone rating.
But that day will come. The question is, does it matter to Derek Jeter? Yes and no. There's a better chance that long-deceased Hall of Fame second baseman Nap Lajoie will catch for the Arizona Diamondbacks than that Joe Morgan will cite Jeter's probabilistic model of range stats when explaining how a play unfolded. Until defensive numbers have the same score-at-home simplicity of ERA or batting average, Jeter's reputation is probably safe (as long as he keeps his error totals down). Yankee fans, sponsors, Hall of Fame voters, the ladies, etc., will continue to love him and vote him on to the All-Star team. He will continue to win games, big paychecks, and maybe rings with his bat and despite his glove. But one would hope that the era in which a Derek Jeter can win a Gold Glove will end, and soon, even if it does look cool when he makes those jumping throws to first base.
Who cares, he is a instant Hall of Famer and will undoubtably be near unaminous. Great leader by example on and off the field, a base hit machine who will end up with at least 3,500 hits.
ISO 1978 Topps Baseball in NM-MT High Grade Raw 3, 100, 103, 302, 347, 376, 416, 466, 481, 487, 509, 534, 540, 554, 579, 580, 622, 642, 673, 724__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ISO 1978 O-Pee-Chee in NM-MT High Grade Raw12, 21, 29, 38, 49, 65, 69, 73, 74, 81, 95, 100, 104, 110, 115, 122, 132, 133, 135, 140, 142, 151, 153, 155, 160, 161, 167, 168, 172, 179, 181, 196, 200, 204, 210, 224, 231, 240