Shortstop of the Decade
As you can probably imagine, the two finalists here are Derek Jeter and Miguel Tejada. Comparing them will be relatively easy, since they have both been playing SS for the entire decade.
| WARP3 | |||
| Derek Jeter | Miguel Tejada | Hanley Ramirez | |
| 2000 | 4.3 | 4 | |
| 2001 | 4.1 | 3.7 | |
| 2002 | 3.2 | 6.6 | |
| 2003 | 1.9 | 3.8 | |
| 2004 | 4.5 | 8.9 | |
| 2005 | 6.3 | 6.1 | |
| 2006 | 6.3 | 6 | 5.5 |
| 2007 | 3.7 | 3 | 8.3 |
| 2008 | 3.3 | 3.9 | 9.3 |
| 2009 | 6.5 | 6.4 | 7.8 |
I threw Hanley in there not because I plan on considering him (4 years isn’t long enough), but just to demonstrate how superior he is to the other two guys.
Jeter’s average WARP for the decade was 4.41, and Tejada’s was 5.24. This might raise your eyebrows, but remember that WARP3 includes defense, and the defensive metrics used by Baseball Prospectus do not show Captain Intangibles in a favorable light at all. From eyeballing the above numbers in isolation, I think we know who would win. Let’s go ahead and look at a Fangraphs comparison (I like their defensive metrics a bit more than BP’s):
| Derek Jeter | Miguel Tejada | |||
| wRC | UZR/150 | wRC | UZR/150 | |
| 2000 | 123.7 | 99.9 | ||
| 2001 | 114.6 | 92.4 | ||
| 2002 | 108.6 | -0.3 | 112.9 | -12.9 |
| 2003 | 86.4 | -3.8 | 97.8 | -12.7 |
| 2004 | 108.2 | -0.4 | 118.3 | 7.1 |
| 2005 | 117.4 | -12.6 | 108.6 | -7.4 |
| 2006 | 131.3 | -7.2 | 114.8 | 0.1 |
| 2007 | 111.1 | -16.7 | 77.1 | -8.4 |
| 2008 | 88.8 | -0.7 | 72 | 9.4 |
| 2009 | 122.4 | 5.3 | 89.3 | -8.3 |
Fangraphs tells a slightly different story, favoring Jeter a bit (Jeter runs away with the offense, but is only slightly behind Tejada on defense). At this point, it’s a total coin flip.
The one tie-breaker we have is post-season performance. Miguel Tejada has hit.212/.242/.329 in the post-season since 2000, whereas Jeter has been much better than that in a considerably greater amount of plate appearances. I’m enjoying this as much as an encounter with the Jigsaw Killer, but…
Ah, Nomie, we hardly knew ye. What could’ve been.
At his peak, he had both of the above guys beat. He was closer to where Hanley is today (and arguably ahead of him, given his defense and Hanley’s lack thereof). Alas…the guy just looooved lifting weights.