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Saturday, December 27, 2003

The Reports of his Demise are Premature…

Derek Jeter burst onto the scene with a Rookie of the Year 1996 campaign where his GPA was .274, this was followed by GPA’s of .268, .293, and .335 in 1999. Following this were GPA’s of .307, .290, .273, and most recently .289. There seems to be a general downward trend following the 1999 season. Looking closely at all his other numbers only confirms this:

1996: .314/.370/.430 (AVG/OBP/SLG) .274 GPA
1997: .291/.370/.405 (AVG/OBP/SLG) .268 GPA
1998: .324/.384/.481 (AVG/OBP/SLG) .293 GPA
1999: .349/.438/.552 (AVG/OBP/SLG) .335 GPA
2000: .339/.416/.481 (AVG/OBP/SLG) .307 GPA
2001: .311/.377/.480 (AVG/OBP/SLG) .290 GPA
2002: .297/.373/.421 (AVG/OBP/SLG) .273 GPA
2003: .324/.393/.450 (AVG/OBP/SLG) .289 GPA

So, what have we learned by looking at even more of Jeter’s numbers? That yes, these still say he has pretty much been in decline since 1999. But wait, there’s more, otherwise I would have had no reason to give this particular thread the name I did:

101
104
126
161
123
125
113
127

The first thing that jumps out about this particular set of numbers is that the 161 is just a huge outlier in all of this. It seems rather “fluky”. What are these numbers, you may be wondering, these numbers are Jeter’s OPS+ over the course of his career. OPS+, to put it as simply as I possibly can, is a player’s OPS relative to the league average, for example a player with a 100 OPS+ would be exactly average. Now, unlike the rest of Jeter’s offensive numbers which we have already perused, these do not show the same consistent decline following 1999, in fact he has been pretty much maintaining his production, what they do show is that 1999 was completely out of line with anything Jeter ever did before or after that. From this it becomes simple to see that Jeter peaked early, while most players have their best seasons somewhere between 27 and 30, Jeter did that at 24.

Looking even further into the numbers, it actually seems that Jeter has been consistently improving since 1999. The reason for this is that starting with 2000, his OPS+ has been increasing other than the 2002 campaign. With this knowledge I think it is safe to say that Jeter should have an even more productive season in 2004, and the reports of his demise (which I once believed), are much too early…for the most part:

4.52 .816
4.45 .840
4.25 .855
4.00 .833
4.12 .811
3.81 .789
3.81 .803
3.75 .791

The numbers on the left are Derek Jeter’s range factors over the course of his career, on the right are his zone ratings, I think one could make an argument that while has remained pretty consistent offensively, he just MIGHT be slipping defensively, but Derek Jeter and his “defense” (if one so chooses to call it that) is an argument for another day.

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Wow, two posts in one day, you are all so lucky, let me know what you think about my first article about the majors: mcnallyf@taftschool.org