Where Does Derek Jeter’s Hall of Fame Career Stand Among His Peers?
September 28, 2014 · Zachary D. Rymer · Jump to comments
Article Source: Bleacher Report - New York Yankees
This is it, you guys. The day has finally come. It’s time to bid Derek Jeter his final farewell.
After the longtime New York Yankees shortstop plays one last game Sunday against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park, he’ll start making his way from the diamond to Cooperstown with a .309 career average, the sixth-most hits in history, 14 All-Star selections and five World Series rings.
And boy, was it fun to watch him accumulate these things. From the Jeffrey Maier home run to his famous flip play to him becoming “Mr. November” to him ending his last game at Yankee Stadium in the most Derek Jeter way imaginable, memorable moments define Jeter’s career just as much as great achievements.
So yeah, it should suffice it to say that the book is about to be closed on a hell of a career.
But of course, it doesn’t suffice to leave it at that. That’s boring. What’s fun is determining how great Jeter’s career was. And for that, we need to put it in some kind of context.
Sort of like ESPN’s Keith Olbermann did recently, save for two differences: I’m not interested in being that snarky, nor am I interested in figuring out where Jeter stands next to fellow Yankee and shortstop greats.
Let’s pursue a more relevant question: Where’s the best place for Jeter’s career relative to the era in which he played? Where oh where does he stand among his peers?
Better strap yourselves in. This is a tough one.
I figure there are two ways of defining the “era” we’re after. One is to consider Jeter’s career in the context of the last quarter century (1990-2014) of baseball, and the other is to look at it in the contact of his own prime years (1996-2009).
Now, you’d think that focusing on Jeter’s offense is the best way to make him shine bright among his peers, but you’d be surprised. He collected more hits than anyone else both in the last 25 years and in his prime, but his standing in other statistics amounts to a couple of mixed bags:
Note: There’s a minimum of 5,000 plate appearances for the rate stats.
It’s not all bad. In the last 25 years and in the window of his prime, Jeter fares well in runs scored and average. On the whole, though, he really wasn’t one of the elite offensive players of either era.
We need something else. We need a stat that recognizes how Jeter was at least a good offensive player for a long time and that, even if he wasn’t a good defender, there’s value in how he stuck at shortstop.
In other words: Yeah, we need to consult Wins Above Replacement.
We have to be mindful of which WAR we pick, though. Choosing between Baseball-Reference.com WAR and FanGraphs WAR means choosing between Defensive Runs Saved (Baseball-Reference.com) or Ultimate Zone Rating (FanGraphs) as a defensive measuring stick.
And there is indeed a difference. According to FanGraphs, DRS says Jeter’s defense has cost the Yankees 159 runs since 2002 while UZR says it’s more like 74 runs. The latter agrees he was a bad defender but posits he wasn’t that bad.
That’s the opinion we should side with.
Why? Because Grantland’s Jonah Keri had a point when he argued that Jeter’s various “high-leverage” defensive plays like the flip, his dive into the stands in 2004 and his clutch relay throw in the 2000 World Series should negate “a handful of squibbers through the infield during random April games in Cleveland, even if they left him as a net-negative defender on the leaderboards.”
On this note, here’s what we get if we use FanGraphs WAR to find Jeter’s place among the top position players and pitchers since 1990:
Note: I’m using FanGraphs’ typical FIP-based WAR for the pitchers.
Seeing Jeter as just the No. 14 player of the last 25 years might not seem like much of a compliment. But relative to how several notable offensive stats didn’t even place him as one of the 14 best hitters of the last 25 years, it’s actually a fine compliment.
Also, we should note that WAR works best as a discussion starter rather than a discussion ender. That’s our excuse to loop Jeter’s postseason heroics into the equation.
Like so:
Former Yankees manager Joe Torre once told Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated in 2000 that “the tougher the situation, the more fire [Jeter] gets in his eyes.”
This is obviously confirmed by Jeter’s reputation. More importantly, it’s confirmed by how his career .838 postseason OPS outpaces his career .817 regular-season OPS. That and the large sample size are arguably a good enough excuse to nudge him over Ken Griffey Jr. and his small-sample-size .947 postseason OPS.
If you’re so inclined, you can also choose to ignore the accomplishments of Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez and Roger Clemens as punishment for their ties to performance-enhancing drugs. Do that, and a reasonable case has been made for Jeter as one of the top 10 players of the last quarter century.
If we shift the focus to Jeter’s 1996-2009 prime, however, he doesn’t need help to squeeze into the top 10.
In those 14 years, Jeter hit .318 with an .848 OPS and a 162-game average of 18 homers and 24 stolen bases. As far as UZR is concerned, he even had some solid defensive seasons along the way.
Not surprisingly, fWAR says he had few equals during his prime:
Only seven players were better than Jeter between 1996 and 2009. Disqualify A-Rod and Bonds, and only five were. If we grant that Jeter’s outstanding postseason performance holds more weight than Curt Schilling’s own outstanding postseason performance, only four were.
Long story short: Depending on your definition of his era, there are reasonable objective arguments for Jeter as somewhere between a top-15 and top-five player of his time.
Exactly where Jeter really belongs among his peers, mind you, requires considering everything we just talked about—eras, WAR, postseason heroics, PED finger-wagging—and molding them together to form a subjective viewpoint of Jeter’s place in recent history.
Or, you know, an opinion. Mine is that Jeter can be fairly placed smack in the middle of the range we narrowed things down to:
- Barry Bonds
- Randy Johnson
- Albert Pujols
- Greg Maddux
- Pedro Martinez
- Chipper Jones
- Roger Clemens
- Derek Jeter
- Alex Rodriguez
- Ken Griffey Jr.
At the least, I can’t put Jeter ahead of Randy Johnson, Albert Pujols, Greg Maddux, Pedro Martinez or Chipper Jones. They are the most dominant players of recent baseball history if the scope is limited to players without PED ties, and each owns his share of success in October.
And while I’m fine with dinging A-Rod for only putting together a short run of excellence before venturing down a dark hole in 2001, I can’t ignore Bonds’ domination of the 1990s. I’m also more on the fence over Clemens being a true contemporary of Jeter’s than I am over his (somewhat questionable) ties to PEDs.
I’m not sure I’d give the exact same top 10 if you were to ask me each and every day from now until eternity. One thing I’m pretty sure of, however, is that Jeter would have to be in there somewhere.
There are ways to downplay what Jeter did between the lines, but there’s a limit to how much we can do that. He was outstanding during his prime. He was outstanding in a lot of October games. And yes, it’s admirable how he was clean when so many others were dirty.
And lest you think that even viewing Jeter as a top-10 player of his time isn’t good enough, I urge you to consider the following. “His time” happened in an era that saw expansion lift the number of players in the majors from 650 to 750. Along the way, Major League Baseball’s population became more and more a collection of the world’s best players rather than mainly America’s best players.
As such, it can be argued that Jeter played at a time when there was more talent in Major League Baseball than at any other time. Achieving greatness is more of an accomplishment in his era than in any other.
In that sense, it’s safe to say it: We’re about to wave goodbye to one of the greatest there ever was.
Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked.
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