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Thursday, January 24, 2008
The Fielding of Derek Jeter
Yapping media members love Derek Jeter’s fielding. Fans are ambivalent, as per the Fans’ Scouting Report. Analysts, like MGL, myself, John Dewan, Bill James, and now Dan Fox think he stinks. Dan nicely comments on my article in THT08:
In that article Tom uses Retrosheet data to demonstrate without a doubt (at least to me) that Jeter is among the worst fielding shortstops of his generation by showing that when Jeter is on the field, regardless of the other context which Tom does a great job of neutralizing, fewer batted balls are turned into outs. Period. And one would think that should be the bottom line when evaluating defense.
I can’t imagine anyone who would read that fairly non-technical article (no black box, no mathematical gymnastics, all completely reproducible) and come away with anything other than Jeter is a very below average fielder, over his career. I’ll have to conclude that Gammons didn’t bother reading the article.