Here's where Derek Jeter really ranks among MLB's all-time greatest shortstops

Bradford DoolittleJan 22, 2020, 07:30 AM ET
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For years on the internet, there was a sizable cottage industry built on the claim that Derek Jeter was overrated. In the five years since Jeter retired, new takes in that vein have grown sparse. And don't we miss them? This week, with Jeter falling just short of becoming the second player to win unanimous selection to the Hall of Fame, we've seen a minor revival of this old genre. Maybe one of those old pieces caused the lone holdout among the voters to lose his or her grip on reality.

Maybe the no-Jeter voter was right. He clearly would have been the most overrated unanimous Hall of Famer. There was an overwhelming consensus last year that Jeter's former teammate Mariano Rivera was the game's best relief pitcher ever. The few detractors about Rivera's Hall candidacy were those who believe relief pitchers have no place in Cooperstown. But if you are going to include relievers, there's no argument against Rivera being enshrined. He was the best ever at what he did. No one ever credibly referred to Rivera as overrated.

Few claim that Jeter is the best shortstop ever, but there are some who make that argument -- loudly. When the analysis and think pieces about Jeter's defense began to spread during the early part of this century, he crossed that rare threshold through which someone is so commonly referred to as overrated that he ends up underrated, and that too leads to a kind of counter-backlash. Few would deny Jeter's overall greatness, but the discussion was always about how much of that greatness was rubbed out by his defense.

Let's begin with this set of rankings of the top 25 career shortstops. Keep in mind the word "career." The rankings reflect our analysis last week, when we published our annual piece that slots Hall of Famers into tiers. There are some additional names introduced here, which we'll get to. This list is our starting point:

With Jeter's Hall of Fame election made official with Tuesday's announcement, let's admit that we can't solve the old disconnect between "overrated or underrated," but we can try to put Jeter's greatness into some sort of context.

Jeter ended up in Tier III -- not far off Tier II -- in those ratings. That's heady company. The only Hall shortstops rated above him by that methodology were Wagner, Ripken, Vaughan and Davis. That roughly jibes with the results of Bill James' latest method of rating players historically, in which he slots Jeter third behind Wagner and Rodriguez.

Clarity about Jeter's historical standing is tough to reach, especially because complaints about his fielding were driven by defensive metrics that -- for understandable reasons -- the masses didn't wholly grasp or believe. They saw him time and again executing that signature jump throw when making a backhanded stop at short. They saw The Flip and Jeter going head over heels into the stands in pursuit of a foul pop. They saw his five Gold Gloves, so, really, how bad of a fielder could he be? In a sense, insofar as a backlash against advanced metrics still exists, you have to think the stathead vilification of Jeter's defense played a part in fueling the criticism.

We can't go back and fix Jeter's defensive metrics -- and they are bad. The defensive runs component of Baseball-Reference's WAR rates Jeter as 243 runs below average for a career during which every defensive inning he logged was at shortstop. That ranks last -- dead last -- among all players ever. Second-to-last is Gary Sheffield at minus-195. Among career shortstops, the next worst is Michael Young at minus-152.

At the same time, we know that even the best of the old-guard defensive metrics fall well short of certainty. We're making progress. Sports Info Solutions recently unveiled a revamped version of defensive runs saved that looks promising. The geniuses behind Statcast-generated metrics introduced an infield version of outs above average that, with a little more evolution, could prove to be the standard in the field.

None of that can be retro-applied to Jeter. If he was magically good at coming in on balls or his positioning consistently worked against him, we'll never know in a way we can measure. Instead, we have what we have: a player who statistically cost his teams more runs on defense than any other player ever, yet who was recognized five times by his peers as the best defender in his league at one of the most crucial positions on the field.

The other thing about positional rankings, including those you see above, is that they assign players' overall careers to the positions at which they made the most impact. That makes sense; it's the same basis the Hall uses for listing a player's position on his plaque or deciding which team logo will be featured on his hat. Yet there is one thing about doing it that way that is unsatisfying. We rate the players as shortstops by their career numbers, even if a significant portion of those numbers were compiled at other positions.

Let's try to tweak the above rankings with this in mind: How do the numbers change if we consider shortstops to be shortstops only while they were playing shortstop? In Jeter's case, this is significant because he, Omar Vizquel, Alan Trammell and Luke Appling are the only shortstops to log at least 20 seasons with that as their primary position. Jeter is the only player to log at least 18 seasons with at least 115 games played at that spot.

Two clarifications:

1. We're going to consider only seasons in which a player's primary position was shortstop. All through history, players have been moved from more difficult positions to less difficult ones as they aged. It happened to Yount, Ripken, Rodriguez (though Jeter's proclivities had something to do with that), Banks, Sewell and many others. But some never moved. Jeter, Ozzie Smith, Larkin and Aparicio were among those who either played their entire defensive careers at shortstop or saw only brief appearances elsewhere. Let's compare the shortstops only while they were shortstops. We've also considered only seasons since 1893, the first campaign in which the pitching rubber was moved to its current distance of 60 feet, 6 inches.

2. Who is being ranked? Well, there were 25 players listed by the Hall of Fame as having shortstop as their primary position; Jeter makes 26. Three of those aren't included in these comparisons: Willie Wells and Pop Lloyd, two greats from the Negro Leagues, don't have the statistical records we need to include them. It's not fair, but we can't make up numbers for them. Also, we've left out John Ward, whose career played out almost entirely before the pitching rubber was moved back.

To the remaining 23 Hall of Fame shortstops, we've added Vizquel, who is on the current ballot, and three retired stars from the position who will merit discussion when they become eligible in the coming years: Rodriguez, Rollins and Troy Tulowitzki. We also included early 20th-century shortstop Bill Dahlen, who isn't in the Hall of Fame but whose posthumously calculated advanced metrics rank him among the all-time greats.

Counting stats

We don't rate players by counting stats much anymore, but they're a good jumping-off point to provide context. Let's list a few major leaderboards:

Hits: 1. Jeter, 3,465; 2. Aparicio, 2,677; 3. Vizquel, 2,657; 4. Appling, 2,593

Runs: 1. Jeter, 1,923; 2. Rollins, 1,421; 3. Ripken, 1,366, 4. Vizquel, 1,361

Homers: 1. Ripken, 353; 2. Rodriguez, 345; 3. Banks, 298; 4. Jeter, 260

To reiterate, we're counting only seasons in which these players played shortstop as their primary position (at least half their games played). That's how we define a shortstop season. However, there are many instances in which a former shortstop might have gone back to his old position for a few games here and there. Those seasons aren't counted here, so if you start burrowing into splits and see a discrepancy, that's why.

When you remove those non-shortstop seasons, Jeter's counting numbers tower above everyone else's. Sure, longevity and, hence, opportunity play a huge role in that. That's why we don't rank players exclusively by these numbers any longer.

At the same time, Jeter's raw, basic numbers underscore his historical uniqueness. Unlike Aparicio or Vizquel or Smith, it was Jeter's bat that kept him at the position for so long. The other slugging shortstops -- Ripken, A-Rod, Banks -- moved to other spots at some point. Banks logged more time as a big league first baseman than he did as a shortstop.

We wouldn't change Jeter's initial ranking based on this, but it lays a foundation for doing so in the coming sections.

Percentages

We'll list just Jeter's rankings among the 28 players rated here, rather than leaderboards:

Average: .310 (fourth)
On-base: .377 (ninth)
Slugging: .440 (11th)
OPS: .817 (ninth)

These numbers are raw in that they aren't adjusted for ballpark or league factors. You might look at them and think they seem a bit underwhelming. They shouldn't. Because consider this: The entire arc of Jeter's career is contained in those numbers. For most of the others, removing the non-shortstop seasons means that their decline phases are charged to other positions. In that context, the fact that Jeter's slash stats still rate solidly in the top 10 at shortstop is really impressive.

Still, we aren't moving him up or down just yet.

Contextual stats

Here we'll get into OPS+, which makes adjustments based on league and ballpark factors.

1. Honus Wagner (153)
2. Alex Rodriguez (144)
3. Hughie Jennings (140)
4. Arky Vaughan (140)
5. Ernie Banks (138)
6. George Davis (121)
7. Joe Cronin (120)
7. Lou Boudreau (120)
9. Troy Tulowitzki (118)
10. Cal Ripken Jr. (117)
11. Barry Larkin (116)
12. Derek Jeter (115)
13. Joe Sewell (114)
14. Luke Appling (113)
15. Robin Yount (113)

Jennings can probably be discounted here. Although he made the Hall as a shortstop, he was a regular at the position for just five years -- from 1894 to 1898 -- and presumably, at least some of his Hall case was predicated on his long managerial career.

Jeter fares well here, ranking among the top dozen shortstops when time and place are accounted for. Still, based on this per-opportunity measure, you wouldn't move Jeter up from sixth. You might actually consider bumping him down a spot or two. Should we? Let's consider his section of the tier-based rankings:

There is a pretty good gap between Jeter and Yount, much less any of the others just below them. None of them rates ahead of Jeter in OPS+. Again, Jeter is partially penalized here because his decline phase can't be dismissed to another position. We're fine keeping him right where he began, at No. 6.

But, but ... the defense

No, we can't ignore Jeter's controversial glove, and we're not talking about the one that Ruben Rivera tried to swipe. But here's the thing: Jeter's defense is baked into the tier rankings. It is already there.

The tier ratings are based on a combination of the versions of WAR at both Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs, win shares, two situational ratings (win probability added and championship probability added) and things such as awards considerations and All-Star berths. The win-based metrics (bWAR, fWAR and win shares) all rate Jeter's defense, and none of them tells a happy tale.

However, you can argue that not only should we not move Jeter down because of his defense but also we actually should move him up. First, there is the unreliability of defensive metrics. Second, there are those five Gold Gloves. Whether you agree with their viability or not, he has them. Also, Jeter unquestionably had pretty good hands. It's not like he was Dave Kingman out there trying to play shortstop. His career fielding percentage of .976 ranks well historically, though it's a measure greatly impacted by league context. But among the 27 shortstops who played at least 1,000 games at the position while Jeter was active, he ranks right in the middle by fielding percentage. His issue was lateral range, particularly to his left, not poor hands.

More than any of that, though, the argument for giving Jeter credit for his defense is the fact that he was competent enough that the Yankees could play him there for two decades. All that time, the Bombers were able to put a plus, often elite, bat at the shortstop position while freeing the other spots for other hitters. That was a tremendous luxury for Joe Torre and Joe Girardi alike. It played no small part in New York's considerable overall success.

Look at it this way: Take Jeter's aforementioned minus-243 defensive runs at face value. Over the course of his career, he created 370 more runs than the average hitter -- regardless of position -- per the Complete Baseball Encyclopedia. Putting those two numbers together seems to erase a good bit of Jeter's value, but don't forget about positional norms. According to the CBE, Jeter created 540 more runs than the average shortstop over the course of his career. His figure ranks 42nd all time among all positions. Among career shortstops, it ranks fourth. Finally, when you consider only shortstop seasons, only Wagner and Vaughan had more offensive impact at the position than Jeter.

Then there is the bottom line: With Jeter manning arguably the most important position on the field (you could say catchers are more important, but regular catchers don't play as often as regular shortstops), over the course of his career, the Yankees won 63 more games than any other franchise and took home five championships. Collectively, their pitchers ranked 19th in BABIP allowed. That isn't great, but it isn't the kind of horrific rating you might expect if they had the worst shortstop ever playing behind them.

We're not going to bump Jeter up because of his defense, but we're not going to ding him more than what's already baked into his advanced metrics. Because wherever you come down on the quality of Jeter's fielding, the most important thing about it is probably that the Yankees thought it was at least good enough to keep his bat at the position for so long.

Playoffs? Yes, playoffs

Just as Mariano Rivera's Hall résumé was completed by a postseason record that might be the most dominant of any player at any position, Jeter's reputation for clutch play was sharpened in October, with certain plays made at that time of the year embedding his image in our collective memory.

It wasn't just the highlights. Jeter was really good in the postseason, and no one has ever gotten more of a chance to shine at that time of the year. He played an extra season in the playoffs -- 158 games, by far the most of any player in history. Sure, he benefited from his team's success and the postseason format during the era in which he played. But he took advantage of those chances. No one has come close to Jeter's postseason total of 200 hits and 111 runs scored, and even though he wasn't an RBI guy, he ranks in the top five in postseason ribbies, too.

Obviously, playoff baseball means facing heightened competition. The pitching you see at that time of the year is better than what you typically see during the season. As such, it makes sense that as a group, hitters tend to perform worse in October. Not so for Jeter.

Consider the top 25 players in terms of postseason games played, though Jeter's 33-game advantage over No. 2 Jorge Posada gives him by far the biggest sample. There are five players tied for No. 24, so we're actually looking at 27 players. Among those 27, only six posted a higher career postseason OPS than they did during regular-season play. The leaderboard is a who's who of playoff heroes:

1. David Freese, .144 increase (.775 regular-season OPS to .919 postseason in 69 games)

2. Albert Pujols, .103 (.927 to 1.030 in 77 games)

3. Pete Rose, .044 (.784 to .828 in 67 games)

4. Reggie Jackson, .039 (.846 to .885 in 77 games)

5. Derek Jeter, .021 (.817 to .838 in 158 games)

Among shortstop seasons, Jeter leads the way with those 200 hits. Ranking second is Edgar Renteria ... with 61. To find another shortstop who hit better in the playoffs than in the regular season, you have to go all the way down to Dave Concepcion, who ranks 22nd with 35 career playoff games played.

In short (no pun intended), no shortstop has ever had a greater impact on October baseball than Jeter did, and it isn't even close.

Where does that leave our rankings? Well, Jeter rated just .012 points behind Davis for No. 5 and was .113 behind Vaughan. Davis played in just one postseason series, helping the White Sox beat the Cubs in the 1906 Fall Classic. He played in three of the six games, though he drove in six runs and had a key steal of home in Game 5. (He missed the first three games due to illness.) Vaughan also played in just one World Series. It was near the end of his career, in 1947, and it was a Dodgers loss to the Yankees. Vaughan was a bench player in the series, going 1-for-2 and drawing a walk in three plate appearances.

It seems fitting to bump Jeter ahead of those two based on postseason impact. To put a number on it for slotting purposes, let's give his tier rating a bonus of 0.2. Here's our revised top five:

When shortstops were shortstops

Here's where we finish. We've boiled everything down to a list of the five best career shortstops, accounting for postseason play by giving Jeter a bonus. Rodriguez famously had some struggles in the postseason, but the statistical gap he and Ripken enjoy over Jeter is too large to close with the October argument.

However, there are positional switches to consider with all three of those still ahead of Jeter.

Let's begin with Ripken. He moved to third base during the latter stage of his career but spent 16 seasons as a full-time shortstop. With him, the term "full time" takes on a literal meaning. He was a full-time shortstop from 1981 to 1996, during which time he compiled 88.8 of his 95.9 career bWAR. That 88.8 total ranks second to Wagner's 99.3 when we zero in on shortstop seasons only.

Wagner actually moved around the field frequently in the first few years of his career and at the end. He was a true shortstop from 1903 to 1916. Still, the value he produced during those years places him on an untouchable tier as the best shortstop of all time. (Please keep your time-travel-based arguments to yourself. Obviously, if Jeter were transported back to 1896, he would dominate the sport. Conversely, Wagner would not stand out as much if teleported to today. We compare players to their peers.)

But a funny thing happens when we rank the shortstops by bWAR for only shortstop seasons. A new name jets up the leaderboard: Ozzie Smith. When you look at a shortstop leaderboard such as JAWS, Smith ranks among the elite. When you sort that board by bWAR, the Wizard ranks sixth, between Yount and Dahlen. When you remove non-shortstop seasons, Smith sneaks in behind Ripken, with all of his bWAR (76.9) coming as a shortstop. Jeter comes in next, at No. 5 (72.4). Like Jeter, all of Smith's value was compiled at shortstop, but he's at the opposite end in terms of defensive runs.

Smith and Jeter were very different players, at a very comparable level of greatness, at the same position. That's the beauty of baseball. Nevertheless, bWAR is just one metric, and even if we cut out the non-shortstop seasons for everyone, Smith is not going to catch Jeter's tier rating, particularly when October baseball is considered. (That said, Smith's 1985 homer in the National League Championship Series is one of the most famous postseason home runs of all time: "Go crazy folks!")

As for A-Rod, it's a tough call. He was a shortstop for 10 seasons and a third baseman thereafter. He produced 63.6 bWAR as a shortstop and another 54.2 as a third baseman. In the shortstop-only bWAR ratings, he ranks 12th. The complicating factor is that unlike the other great shortstops who changed positions, Rodriguez moved much earlier than he otherwise would have because he was traded to the Yankees. It was Rodriguez, not Jeter, who was uprooted from his position, even though it's tough to argue that at the time Jeter was a better defender. In fact, A-Rod had won two straight Gold Gloves at short in the years before he joined the Yankees.

He did move, though, and we can't change that, so A-Rod went on to win two MVPs as a third baseman. Still, his years at shortstop rate as historically elite. In terms of wins above average, his total (44.5) ranks fourth, behind those of Wagner, Ripken and Vaughan. Ultimately, though you can make a very good case that he should remain rated ahead of Jeter, his early move to third probably drops him a slot behind Ripken.

Using his bWAR split as a guide, we'll give A-Rod 54% of his tier score for the shortstop position, again just for slotting purposes, dropping him from 1.874 to 1.012.

Where we end up

With a little bit of art and a little bit of science, we have our top five shortstops of all time.

Is that definitive? Do you believe it? Probably not. You will never convince every baseball fan of anything. There are Yankees fans right now out there throwing curse words at their screens, saying The Captain is the best shortstop ever and that's that. Others will claim East Coast bias, even though the author of this analysis has never lived outside of the Midwest. Which is all great! Jeter has been a hero to many for a long time and a worthy villain for many non-Yankees fans, and that's why we pay so much attention to him in the first place.

Still, hopefully this week will see the last of the "Jeter is overrated" bits. He was among the handful of best-ever hitters at this position. He wasn't as good on defense. He played for winners. He was the face of his sport and might still be. You don't have to stretch very far, even in the objective realm, to anoint him as one of the handful of the best to ever play the shortstop position.

No matter how you measure it, Cooperstown is a richer place because of the addition of Derek Jeter.