Did Somebody Say "Forgotten MVP Season"?

MLB.com currently features a link to this piece, dedicated to the proposition that Derek Jeter is underrated (or at least that he once was). How, you might wonder, do they defend this remarkable assertion? Because in 1999, when Jeter narrowly led all American League position players in bWAR and trailed Manny Ramirez by a tenth of a point in fWAR, he didn't win the Most Valuable Player award, or even finish in the top-5 in voting. Instead, Texas Rangers catcher Ivan Rodriguez won the award, while Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez, who had one of the best pitching seasons of all time (and then followed it up with a similarly-dominant one the next year), finished second. Proof positive!, says this piece, that Jeter gets no respect.

Now, I could try to construct some arguments for why Jeter's low finish that year was deserved. He tailed off significantly in the second half, his OPS dropping from a ridiculous 1.065 to .903 (which is admittedly still great, but less absurdly great, particularly for 1999). His team had the best record in the American League, and would've needed to finish twelve games worse than it did to miss the post-season, so while it's true, as the article says, that Jeter was the best player on a winning team, it's also true that he didn't make much of a marginal difference in that team's regular-season outcome. (Obviously that form of that argument is a bit ludicrous, and I don't know if the same great-team penalty that Dave Cameron found in Manager of the Year voting has historically applied to MVP voting, but it's a logical extension of the things people said about why Mike Trout shouldn't win his awards.) Then there's the fact that, if we're talking about value as value, there's no plausible argument that anyone not named Pedro should've won that award.

And then there's the fact that WAR likely understates, perhaps significantly, the impact of a great defensive catcher like Ivan Rodriguez. I don't have any pitch-framing numbers from 1999, but I bet he was pretty good at it, and there's reason to think that the best pitch framers add a ton of value that way. The idea that catchers should get extra credit is a remarkably venerable one; Roy Campanella won three MVP awards while having only one league lead in any one major stat in those three years, while Yogi Berra won his three MVP awards without leading the league in anything the whole time. Neither was anywhere near the league lead in WAR. Pudge Rodriguez was way closer to the league WAR lead in 1999 than either Campanella or Berra were in any of their MVP seasons. So if Rodriguez was an undeserving winner that year, the Yankees should give back some hardware of their own.

But that's not what I'm here to talk about, not in the main. No, I'd like to talk about a different league and a different New York team, and a few different players who got a lot less MVP respect than they deserved. In 1998, John Olerud hit .354/.447/.551 and put up 8.1 fWAR/7.6 bWAR. That put him third in the National League per Fangraphs, behind Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire by half a win, and second per Baseball-Reference, half a win behind Bonds. But he only hit 22 home runs, not being part of the insane record chase of McGwire and Sosa, and his blend of pure hitting and great first base defense got so little respect that he finished a whopping 12th in the voting. Oh, and did I mention that, while the Mets didn't make the post-season that year, they did win 88 games, climbing out of a slump that had consumed the first two-thirds of that decade, finishing a game out of the Wild Card tie, and launching one of the best eras the team had ever seen? Sosa won the award, and it's tough to complain about that, but Olerud at least should've been near the top of the ballot.

Or how about eight years later, when Carlos Beltran hit 41 home runs and hit .275/.388/.594 while playing Gold Glove defense in center field? His 8.2 bWAR were second in the league, barely behind Albert Pujols, and his 7.6 fWAR was likely second behind Albert, though by a bigger margin. Oh, and the Mets made the post-season. In fact they dominated, winning 97 games and leading the entire league by nine victories. Beltran finished fourth in the voting. The next season, which the Mets spent in the thick of contention, Beltran's teammate David Wright hit .325/.416/.546, had a 30/30 season (30 home runs, 34 stolen bases), and also won a Gold Glove, deservingly. His 8.3 bWAR was second behind Pujols, while Fangraphs thought his 8.4 WAR led the league by half a win. And while it's true that the Mets suffered an ignominious collapse to miss the playoffs, Wright was no part of that: he hit .352/.432/.602 in September, and .397/.451/.575 during the 17-game collapse itself. He did an almost inhuman job of trying to carry his team, and it's hardly his fault that it wasn't quite enough. He likewise finished fourth in the voting. Who won these MVPs? Ryan Howard and Jimmy Rollins of the Phillies. Wright led Rollins by about 2 WAR by either metric, and Beltran led Howard by something like two or three wins. But Howard put up goofy home run and RBI numbers, and Rollins hit 20 triples and 30 homers while playing a good shortstop--and for the team that snuck past the Mets. So despite having the best position player (modulo Pujols) in the league two consecutive years, the Mets didn't even get a top-3 MVP finish out of things.

And then there's the curiosity that is Bernard Gilkey, 1996. In his first season with the Mets, the left fielder hit 30 home runs and 44 doubles en route to a .317/.393/.562 slash line, and also (so say the metrics) fantastic defense. He was right around the league lead in WAR by a position player not named Barry Bonds, with Baseball-Reference putting him a tenth of a point ahead of Ellis Burks and Fangraphs putting him the same distance behind Jeff Bagwell. Now I'm not saying he should've won the MVP. I mean, Bonds should've, and other than that, Mike Piazza should've. It's absurd that Ken Caminiti in fact did. But perhaps the guy who had one of the most productive seasons in the league should've finished a bit higher up than 14th?

That's four times that a Met has been either arguably the best position player in the National League or arguably the best position player in the National League who wasn't Bonds or Pujols (and we all know guys like that get held to a higher standard for winning MVPs). The best any of them did was fourth place in the voting. One of them finished outside the top-10 despite his team's having been in the thick of playoff contention, out of nowhere, all season long. So if we want to talk about "forgotten MVP seasons," let's not talk about Derek Jeter. The other side of that "most saturated media market in the country" can boast not one, not two, not three, but four MVP-caliber years that were already forgotten while they were happening over the span of barely more than a decade.

And none of those four players possess a single absurdist Gold Glove either, let alone five.

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.

I'm Sorry, Did Someone Say Reyes Has Character Issues?

I just read an article (while procrastinating from editing my philosophy essay due in 158 minutes) arguing that Jose Reyes' character issues (which, of course, compare unfavorably to the God of Intangibles Derek Jeter) are a price worth paying for his on-field production. Never mind that that's absolutely right, Reyes' pure production on the baseball diamond would be worth just about any amount of unpleasant character. He was on pace for a 9-win season this year, prior to injury. But since when did Jose Reyes become someone with character issues?

Yankee Arrogance, Part N

Eighty-four players were selected for the 2011 Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Including those players who are, because of injury or because of having started a game this past Sunday, ineligible to play in the game, seventy-nine of those eighty-four are in attendance. Two of the five who are not there, Chipper Jones of the Braves and Alex Rodriguez of the Yankees, recently had major surgery. The other three are C.C. Sabathia, Mariano Rivera, and Derek Jeter. Those three have something in common: they are all New York Yankees. This is not a coincidence.

Among other things the Yankees like to say about themselves, I think there's an idea that being a Yankee is the only honor one needs. Sure, they'll go play in the All-Star game: I've never ever heard of someone just saying, nah, I don't feel like doing that, except due to an injury.* But if they can't play anyway, why bother showing up? Who cares about the praise and acclamation of the country's baseball fans?* They're Yankees, so they don't need any of that. All they need is wins and rings, blah blah blah. Being who I am, I can't help but compare that attitude to Jose Reyes, who has (strangely) been injured at the time of three of the four All-Star games he's been selected to in his career. But he's shown up every time, because it's a tremendous experience and a great honor and, hell, he's just plain excited and enthusiastic about playing baseball. Even if he can't play, he wants to show up and support his (temporary) team. But for a Yankee, that's beneath you. Show up just to support a bunch of people who aren't trying to help you win the World Series this year? Eh.

I think it's interesting to look at what two of the American League All-Stars said in the little montage on the subject of what it means to be an All-Star. Curtis Granderson said that it's about "repping these pinstripes on the big stage." David Ortiz, speaking immediately after him, said it was about "being teammates, if just for one day, with guys wearing pinstripes. Ughhhh." I think that's kind of emblematic of the Yankees' view of this game: it's about being a Yankee. It's about representing the Yankees, and demonstrating how amazing the Yankees are. If you can't play, if you can't go out and demonstrate your superiority, why bother?

*Derek Jeter is not injured. I seem to recall he played rather well in a game just recently, something like 5-5 with a home run, and he's planning on playing the first game back from the All-Star Break. No, he's not injured, he's just worried he might get injured if he played the All-Star Game. Likewise, I think Rivera's not properly injured either, as he pitched on Saturday, though I'm not as certain of that. Now, personally I think it's a perfectly reasonable decision to beg out of an exhibition contest to avoid the possibility of re-aggravating an injury, but still, let's not pretend that Jeter (or possibly also Rivera) are missing this game due to injury. They're missing this game due to caution.
*Okay, so it's also true that about two-thirds of the country's baseball fans hate the Yankees, and they would probably hear more boos than cheers. But I think Chase Utley has a word or two for the Yankees about how to handle the prospect of being booed, ne?

DJ3K!!!!1!!1!!!

My dad and I just went to Modell's Sporting Goods store to purchase some extra-long golf tees, and on our way through the front door we were bombarded by signs imploring us to "celebrate" Derek Jeter's 3000th hit by purchasing commemorative bracelets. Uh, no. But it did kind of drive home for me how big a deal people are making of this: a really big deal. And I think that's very telling. In 2009, Jeter played in 153 games, posting a .334 batting average while notching 212 base hits and finishing third in the MVP voting, behind Joe Mauer and Mark Teixeira. That was, obviously, a really great season. And I remember that at the time people were talking about the possibility that he would break the all-time hits record. That had been his age-35 season, and he had 2747 hits through that point; to get the 1509 hits he would need to match Pete rose, he would've needed just 7.5 more seasons of the caliber of his '09 showing. Unlikely? Sure. But not impossible, if he played at a very high level on a good offensive team until he was 45 or so.

Now people aren't talking about Jeter setting the all-time hits record. Now people are making a big effing deal out of his getting to 3000. This is not being treated as one more step in the long march of his career, this is being treated as the summation of his career, the valediction. What people will say of Derek Jeter decades from now is that he was a member of the 3000-hits club. That's it. And I think the fact that people are making such a fuss about this number demonstrates that people understand that now, after a year and a half of pure mediocrity from him.

Two quick asides: he went 5-5 today, with the second hit (a home run) being the 3000th. Whatever, good for him, it's his day, he might as well go crazy. Also, yes, those posters used the phrase "DJ3K" to denote this occurrence. I kid you not...

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.

More on Transcending the Numbers

Because hits aren't the only thing that matters, what I've done today is calculate the differential in each player's team winning percentage between games in which the player records at least one hit, walk, or hit-by-pitch, and games where they don't, since the player's Major League debut. Note that the second category includes games they didn't play in. Here are the numbers: Derek Jeter, +.117; David Wright, +.095; Jose Reyes, +.156; Albert Pujols, .188 (for comparison). None of this is to say that, perhaps, Jeter's numbers are better than Reyes. But excluding any utterly intangible things like clubhouse leadership qualities, it looks like Reyes contributes more to his team when he is successful than Jeter does. (Though less than Pujols does; the Cardinals are utterly dependent on him and they should consider that when thinking about signing him or not signing him. The Mets should think about this when considering whether to sign Reyes, too.) My instinct that Reyes transcends his numbers better than Jeter does is definitely born out by the evidence.

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.