Yeah, Hitchcock, made him look like a Cy Young pitcher. Screw him, and Kevin Brown, and Chipper Jones, and Scott Posednick (or whoever that White Sox was who never hit homers yet hit one against us in the WS), and Jim Edmonds... ugh, just thinking about them makes me ill.
Defensive advanced stats have to be taken with a grain of salt. There have been some really good defensive shortstops. I prefer the ones that make every routine play. The best I have personally seen are Rodriguez, Ozzie Smith, Barry Larkin, Adam Everett, Omar Vizquel, Rey Ordonez, Deivi Cruz and Cal Ripken. I am sure I am missing some. Alan Trammel was really good too. Derek Jeter was one of the worst long term defensive short stops I can think of.
Jeter did make the routine plays, if he got there you were out. His problem was that there were so many balls he didn't get to that others did, which is why you need the advanced metrics to demonstrate just how bad he was.
That's true unless he did one of those stupid jump throws and you beat the ball to the bag. So many of those would be routine and easy outs if he just got there a second earlier and set before throwing.
Jeter didn't make the routine plays, he wasn't in position to make routine plays often. Advanced stats are important, I always consider them, however defensively speaking they are limited. If you mean Jeter didn't make errors in the traditional sense, I agree with that. However his shortcomings were very apparent. He had poor footwork, he had poor range, but couldn't position himself too deep because of his arm strength and slow feet. He failed to turn a number of double plays that turned into force outs.
Which is more about his sub-par range than his glove. The jump throw is one of the worst illusions in baseball, they did look like great plays, which a good SS wouldn't have even needed.
Guys I have breaking news coming directly from my multiple sources! Derek Jeter has decided to retire at the end of the year! Yeah I agree that all this Jeter talk has been very annoying. He had a great career, but come on...
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