With Hall of Fame voting going on right now, I’ve spend some time thinking about defense, and how it impacts a players overall value. Players like Derek Jeter and Gary Sheffield have their overall value significantly impacted by poor defensive performances, while someone like Andruw Jones builds a borderline Hall-of-Fame case from exception performance.
There is no denying that defense plays a part in overall value, and obviously contributes to a team’s success or failure, and therefore can’t be dismissed from an evaluation of the player.
At what point though is this “not fair” to the player. Derek Jeter remained at shortstop for his entire career, despite poor fielding numbers. Gary Sheffield and Manny Ramirez spend most of their careers in the outfield, Bernie Williams and Jorge Posada remained at premium defensive positions long after the numbers made it clear that they had lost an edge there. These decisions, while certainly impacted by the player (directly or indirectly) were ultimately management’s decision. Joe Torre and Joe Girardi kept running Derek Jeter out to short, and they didn’t have to.
Derek Jeter almost certainly should have been moved off of shortstop years before his career ended – I remember discussing it when Alex Rodriguez first became a free agent that it was a perfect opportunity to sign the superstar, and move Jeter to the OF where his defense would have been less impactful. Similarly, after Carlos Beltran finished driving the Astros to the playoffs in 2004, I called for signing him and shifting Bernie Williams into a corner or DH slot.
In these, and other cases, the Yankees (for various reasons) did not. So again, the “fault” for the negative defensive contributions really does need to lie at least partially with the team, not the player. When it is clear someone can not do a job in the workplace, you do not keep them in the same spot – you either reassign them or replace them. The Yankees had that option, and chose to maintain the status quo for years. We can argue whether or not that was the right move, and that Jeter’s production at the plate justified it, or that moving the Captain would have been an unnecessary distraction, or a hundred other issues, but the point remains that Jeter was placed in a role ill-suited for him, and his overall stats suffered accordingly.
Now – Jeter will go into the Hall of Fame with no issue, and most of those who vote for him will either do so with firm knowledge that his bat outplayed his glove (or blind faith to the Gold Gloves he “earned” earlier in his career), so this might seem like a non-issue. But for someone like Sheffield, he is getting dinged for his defense – taking significantly away from a fantastic offensive profile, simply because his teams were slow to move him down the defensive spectrum (first off of 3rd where he was historically terrible, and eventually out of the outfield.)
Blog to be Named Later 