The Pete Rose-ification of Derek Jeter

Derek Jeter's 2013 season is done. It was terrible. He appeared in all of 17 games for the Yankees, during which he hit .190. Yeah, .190. As in, twelve hits in 63 at-bats. Overall slash line of .190/.288/.254, and while the on-base gap is nice, it's not remotely enough to make up for the awful. As if that weren't enough, according to both Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference Jeter managed to put up impressively terrible defensive numbers in those 17 games, costing something like 4 or 5 runs below average. The result is -0.6 fWAR, plus the fact that his replacements have been named Jayson Nix, Luis Cruz, Alberto Gonzalez, Reid Brignac, and Eduardo Nunez. My god Eduardo Nunez is bad. Overall Yankee shortstops not named Derek Jeter have accrued -1.5 fWAR. That's -2.1 fWAR overall when you add Jeter to the mix. And this on a team that's a game or two away from contention. Or, to put it another way, add anything resembling Derek Jeter-as-was to the 2013 Yankees and they would be a playoff team, easily.

Tee hee.

The point here isn't exactly to gloat about how Derek Jeter is awful now, or how it's entirely his fault that the Yankees are going to miss the post-season this year. Those things are true, and they're fun. The point is to make a comparison with another player. Because Jeter, you see, has not been a league-average player in quite a few years. 2009, in fact, was his last year of being actually good. Through the end of that year he had 2747 hits over 9809 plate appearances, a career .317/.388/.459 batting line, a 121 OPS+, and 67.4 bWAR, of which 35.2 were in fact Wins Above Average, despite being a terrible, terrible, terrible defensive shortstop (-187 Defensive Runs Saved). Since then, even including his year-and-a-half resurgence after getting his 3000th hit, he has 569 hits in 2159 plate appearances and a .291/.350/.392 batting line. That's not terrible. In fact, it gives him an OPS+ of 99. Usually being a league-average hitter who plays shortstop is a really good player. But there's that pesky "plays shortstop" thing; DRS pegs Jeter at -47 fielding runs over these four years, during which time Jeter's been in slightly less than three full seasons' worth of games. Combine that with average offense and you're looking at three wins below average, and enough playing time to turn that into 4.2 WAR. The turning-point for Jeter came at age 35, his last actual good season, the last time his offensive production was enough to make up for his legendarily awful defense.

Let's consider another player, a pure hitter type of guy known for "playing the game the right way" or whatever. A guy who spent most of his career as an infielder, though unlike Jeter he moved around the three non-shortstop spots. Like Jeter, however, he wasn't a very good defensive player. Through age 38, his batting line was .312/.381/.432, which (once you account for Yankee Stadium's power boost) is almost identical to Jeter's line through age 35; in fact, his OPS+ was better, at 126. This guy played more than Jeter had, though, getting 12196 plate appearances, so he managed a whopping 3372 hits over those years. He also accrued 80.7 bWAR including 42.5 WAA, and was an above-average player every year except his first two in the big leagues. Then, however, he stopped being very good. For the rest of his career he hit .274/.354/.333, good for just a 92 OPS+ (which was, incidentally, a 99 for the first three of those years, during which he played nearly as much as Jeter has over the last four). Over the rest of his career, this guy was, well, awful. He played first base, and played it badly, so tossing in the mediocre hitting we get -1.3 bWAR. Yeah, that's wins below replacement. So, -13.6 wins above average. That changed his career totals from the sparkling numbers presented above to 79.4 WAR and just 28.9 WAA, which is a little worse than marginal for the Hall of Fame.

Of course, all that playing time means that he had another 884 hits over those seven years, giving him 4256 for his career, the most all-time. This is Pete Rose we're talking about, obviously. The parallels to Jeter are interesting. (No, I'm not saying Jeter has bet on baseball, although I did just read the Rose v. Giamatti case for my Procedure class and I do think Jeter's not the shining white knight he's often portrayed as.) They have both had long careers being genuinely very good hitters, and receiving a kind of worship disproportional to their actual production. Rose parlayed his legendary status into an extension of his career way beyond what he deserved so that he could pass Ty Cobb's hits record. In fact, for much of that time he was player-manager, giving himself those extra opportunities. Jeter has already used his legend status to get something he should have relinquished a long time ago, namely his position. In 2004 the Yankees acquired Alex Rodriguez, meaning that they had two All-Star-level shortstops on their roster. One of those guys was a pretty good fielder. One of them was not. One of them moved to third base to accommodate the other. It wasn't the guy with the good glove. Now, Rodriguez has been a relatively poor third baseman with the Yankees, so maybe he would've been even worse continuing as a shortstop, but it's not like Jeter hasn't gotten worse with age, too.

So now the question is, how much will Jeter continue to do the Pete Rose thing, and stick around long after he's lost the ability to be actually good just to pad his career stats? He's got a player option for $9.5 million for 2014, and I've got to think he'll take it. Will the Yankees play him? DH him? Whatever they do, it seems likely he'll be a drag on their team, until they can convince him to ride into the sunset. That will quite likely be the '14 off-season, but it would be nice to see him stick around longer like Pete Rose did, hemorrhaging wins from his career stat-line and letting his reputation and his ego turn into a massive problem and a barrier to competitiveness for the team he's become famous with. It should be a lot of fun, especially on top of the problems gathered around that other shortstop they got in '04.

Tee hee.