Transcending the Numbers

In my family we often like to laugh at the idea people sometimes express that Derek Jeter "transcends the numbers." In others words, these people claim, Jeter isn't just a sure-fire Hall of Famer who plays great in the postseason and has been an integral part of a wildly successful team for a decade and a half. No, he transcends that, and is, in fact, The Best Player Ever. Or something like that. I don't know. And we tend to laugh at it. At the same time, I have often expressed the view that Jose Reyes contributes something to the Mets beyond what his front-line stats show, even though those are pretty good anyway. Which, when you think about it, is kind of a claim that Jose transcends the numbers. So maybe, just maybe, I should think twice before laughing so easily at the same claim made of Jeter.

Or maybe not.
Sort of by definition it's hard to measure transcendence of the numbers, but I think I've come up with a decent way to do it. The Mets broadcasts frequently present stats about just how much better Reyes does in games the Mets win than ones they lose, but of course that's looking at it backwards: we should ask how well the Mets do when Reyes does well, or when he does poorly. So what I've done, for both Reyes and Jeter (and also David Wright, just for comparison), is take the team's winning percentage on their careers in games where they get no hits, one hit, two hits, or more than two hits. It makes sense to me that if a player really is contributing something, in terms of their performance on the field, that transcends the main numbers, we would expect to see that it's especially valuable to have that person doing well. That is to say, you don't just get any three-hit game when so-and-so has three hits, you get something extra. So here are the figures.
David Wright: 0 hits, .418; 1 hit, .486; 2 hits, .617; >2 hits, .686
Derek Jeter: 0 hits, .488; 1 hit, .577; 2 hits, .675; >2 hits, .762
Jose Reyes: 0 hits, .388; 1 hit, .503; 2 hits, .646; >2 hits, .713

Now, obviously, Jeter has higher winning percentages in absolute terms for each category. He tends to have a better team around him than Reyes and Wright have had. But let's look at the difference between a 0-hit game and a 3-or-more-hit game for these three players. For Wright it's a boost of .268 to his team's winning percentage. For Jeter it's very similar, .274. I'll grant you that I think Jeter does a slightly better job of transcending his numbers than Wright does, in part because on his career David averages 1.69 bases per hit while Jeter averages just 1.44, and ceteris paribus you'd expect bigger hits to make more of a different, and they don't. But anyway, for Jose the extra three hits increase the Mets' winning percentage by .325, substantially higher than the same numbers for Wright or Jeter. And Reyes gets just 1.52 bases per hit, closer to Jeter's mark than Wright's. So I think it's clear that, by this metric at least, Reyes does a better job of transcending the numbers than Derek Jeter does.

Also, for what it's worth, in games since the start of their various careers the teams these guys play for have the following records in games where the player does not appear: Jose Reyes, .438; David Wright, .480; Derek Jeter, .588. So if I change my baseline from "games in which this player got 0 hits despite playing" to "games since the start of this player's career that did not feature a hit by them," then our no hits to more than two hits differentials change to: Wright .245; Jeter .242; Reyes .293. Reyes leads Jeter by the exact same amount he leads him by before I made this adjustment, though Wright moves a smidgen ahead of Jeter.

So, to recap: by having a 3-hit day or better, Jose Reyes improves his chance of winning the game by 5 percentage points more than Derek Jeter does. I should note that you can plausibly claim some sort of "leadership" that Jeter displays that makes his teammates better. It's literally impossible to find any objective support for this, since by definition a player only plays with Jeter if they're on the Yankees and it's impossible to tease out that confounding variable. But by the same token I could claim that Reyes' energy makes the players around him better, or even that he makes the people behind him in the lineup better by distracting pitchers etc. Equally impossible to prove or disprove. As far as we can demonstrate with actual data, the success of Jose Reyes, when it happens, contributes more to his team than the success of Derek Jeter. Jose Reyes, transcending the numbers since 2003.