Jeter: Where Does He Rank Among All-Time Greats?

Mods, please allow us the opportunity to have this discussion about Jeter's legacy as his playing career comes to an end.

1) Where does he rank among greatest shortstops in MLB history?

2) Where would you place him on the list of greatest players ever?

He still has a couple more milestones left - his next run scored moves him past ARod for 9th all-time, and he has an outside shot of ending up in the Top 5 All-Time in hits (only 61 behind Tris Speaker).

I would also like to see Girardi let him pitch an inning or two before he retires.

 

He is to baseball what Jon Saraceno is to ugly beards.

 

Jeter is going to get 62 hits in last 10 regular-season games?

 

He's done it before.

 

62 hits in 10 games. Easy!

 

When?

 

I'll take Ripken over him.

There are others who would probably rank ahead of him, but they're mostly old-timers.

He's probably top 30-40 on the all-time list.

I'd put him in the same group with Ripken, Brett, Gwynn and I consider that to be VERY high praise.

 

The problem is, some people (esp. In the media) think he was good defensively. One set of metrics say he was bad, but not devastatingly so. Another group of metrics says he was historically bad. How one views his defense makes a big difference in his standing. There is a massive difference between a solid SS for 20 years and a pathetic one for 20 years. If one chose to use WAR as a measuring stick, the difference is enough for Jeter to go from 3rd to 13th (or so). Hence all of the bickering.

It is all about how people view his defense. Well mostly.

And of course people will pick whichever of the three justify their preconceived notions.

 

A lot of the argument for him being one of the greats is intangible. Leadership, he's a winner, etc. And I'm not going to discount that. But there have been better offensive shortstops. And there have been much better defensive shortstops.

 

Baseball reference rates him 58th overall among position players in WAR.

They have Larry Walker, Lou Whitaker, Ozzie Smith, Robin Yount, Wade Boggs, George Brett, A-Rod, Albert Pujols, Rod Carew, Pete Rose, Adrian Beltre, Paul Molitor all ahead of him. He's ahead of Gwynn and Larkin.

 

Very true, and that's deserved.

Amazing that he never won a MVP.

 

He was ordinary more often than people want to remember. Baseball Reference considers anything over a 5 WAR an All-Star. Ripken dipped at the end, but Jeter had more than one dip.

Sub-5 WARs from 2002 to 2005, in 2007, 2008 and terrible numbers in his final five years (1.7, 1.1, 2.2, -0.7, 0.1). The Yankees would have been better off - as far as production goes, not in regards to profit and marketing - over the last five years with Alcides Escobar.

Also, Jeter had only three positive defensive WAR figures in 20 years. Ripken never had a negative defensive WAR, but also moved over to third late in his career.