More on Transcendence

A while back I wrote some posts about a certain metric I had come up with to measure "transcending the numbers," concluding that Jose Reyes transcends the numbers better than Derek Jeter. My sister points out to me that, whereas my metrics measured the importance of a player's success to their team, "transcending the numbers" is kind of more supposed to be about things like "little things like making pitchers work and getting runners over and putting the ball in play and hustling and stuff like that." It's a fair enough critique, but let's see if it changes the result. Each of these, I think, has an actually pretty direct way to measure it: respectively, pitches per at-bat, productive out percentage, strikeout rate, and infield hit rate. The last of these is the most questionable, since you add in the component of speed, but I still think it's the best possible one. We could add in double-play rate, though that also has lots of confounding elements. In any event, how do the two New York shortstops stack up? Answer: Jeter still doesn't win.

On his career, Jose Reyes sees 3.64 pitches per at-bat, just less than 3.74 for Jeter. Neither of them is above average for the league, though. Jeter's productive-out rate is 34%, while Reyes' is 35%. Jose only strikes out once in every 8.4 at-bats, while Jeter strikes out every 5.9 at-bats.  16.3% of Reyes' career hits are infield hits, compared to 13.6% of Jeters; Reyes gets infield hits in 4.3% of his plate appearances, compared to 3.8% for Jeter. And Reyes grounds into double-plays in just 7% of his opportunities, compared to Jeter's above-league-average 12%, leading Reyes to average just 7 GDP's per year compared to 17 for Jeter. Obviously, in large part that's cause Jeter's slow. But still, I think it's hard to claim from these numbers that Derek Jeter does a palpably better job of "playing the game the right way" than Jose does. I guess that if the whole "looking like you're having fun" thing is what strikes you as playing the game the wrong way, or if you just have some sort of desire to claim that Derek Jeter is the Best Player Ever, as opposed to what he is, namely a very good pure hitter who's never really been a true shortstop or leadoff hitter but gets away with it because people like him and he can routinely hit .320 with inflated power numbers from his home field, then you might reach this conclusion. But I still don't see anything remotely resembling objective justification for it.