THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Thursday, February 21, 2008

Derek Jeter is a robot?

Kevin Kernan quotes and comments on Jeter’s view of fielding stats:

“Every [shortstop] doesn’t stay in the same spot, everyone doesn’t have the same pitching. Everyone doesn’t have the same hitters running, it’s impossible to do that.” Jeter, 33, pointed out you can get the exact same ground ball off the exact same pitcher and there could be an average runner or there could be Ichiro running. “How can you compute that?” he asked. You can’t.

Wow.  I mean, that is virtually the same quote that Derek Jeter gave to Jack Curry of the NY Times last April.  Don’t believe me?  Here it is:

‘’They think they have a mathematical equation that figures everything out,’’ Jeter said. ‘’Like every single person is out there with the same runner and the same pitcher and the ball is hit in the same exact place. It seems like once somebody says one thing about you, people tend to run with it and we never hear the end of it.’’

Forget about those “we’ll take it one game at a time” type of crappy Crash Davis approved quotes that players rehearse.  Derek Jeter has taken to repeating the same thing about fielding systems to a whole new level. 

Anyway, I wrote to Kernan, and asked him to read my article in THT08 (in light of his proclamation that “You can’t” measure Jeter’s objections), and get some feedback from Jeter.  I’d like to see that response.