Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 535: Reassessing the Retirement Tour

Episode Date: September 16, 2014

Ben and Sam evaluate the Derek Jeter retirement tour as it begins to come to a close.

I'm just another tourist, checking out the slums, with my plastic visa, drinking with my chums, money, money. Good morning and welcome to episode 535 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives, presented by the Play Index at baseballreference.com. I'm Sam Miller with Ben Lindberg from Grantland. Hi, Ben. Hello. I used the Play Index today for a fun thing that I'll be writing about for Fox Sports tomorrow.

Maybe I'll mention it later. Maybe I won't. I used it today also for something that I think I'll be writing about for Thursday. What's the topic? You're not giving yours away. I'll give mine away. I just didn't, I mean, I didn't want to dive into something necessarily, but I'm happy. It's not a secret. I was looking at the best relief seasons by various measures.

It has all sorts of different ways that you can look at the best relief seasons, WPA and RE24 and any stat that you might want to use to evaluate relief seasons. So was looking to see where dell and batantes ranks and where other people rank interesting how does dell and batantes rank got to read to find out i see did you know you know i was noticing the other day on play index that uh aroldis chapman has struck out 17 and a half batters per nine and the number two is i think batantes who's at at 14 and a half 13 and a half by. It's like the gap is three strikeouts per nine. There's nobody in that gap. Yeah, that's huge.

It's incredible. I was looking at MVP voting trends through history, and I was just wondering, I was curious about how much more closely MVP voting cues to war nowadays. And I'm not saying it's because war exists. It might be partly because of that. It might just be because the things that war captures are more valued and more recognized today. But the correlation between war and MVP votes among players who get at least one vote. So this leaves out the hundreds and hundreds of players who don't get any vote. And also I'm comparing, well, I also, this is not actually, I'll just say this is not a great way to run correlations. For instance,

I ran a correlation between war and their actual rankings, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and Russell Carlton taught me long ago that you can't compare a stat to ordinal rankings like that. I don't know why, but you can't. But I did. And the correlation between last year and exactly 20 years earlier, 1993, is like double. And that was 93. It's not like 93 was before they had stats or anything like that. But it was double.

It was like a very weak correlation 20 years ago. And now it's a pretty strong one from 0.3 to 0.6. Interesting. Russell listens to this podcast. He is shaking his head in Atlanta somewhere. Well, he's not right now, but he will when he's listening to it. Anyway, it's not like I'm not selling those figures, although I might literally put them on the internet for people to consume.

How long has War been part of the quote-unquote conversation, would you say? A prominent part. I would say 2005 with Vorp and Warp. I would say 2005 it was part of the conversation. Not a huge part, but definitely a part. And probably 2008 was when it was acceptable to insult voters' families if they didn't look at these things. Right. All right. So I wanted to talk about Derek Jeter. And, you know, everybody goes into the season with an idea for what they're going to do that season.

And most of the time the idea is like, oh, I want to play really well. And you don't have much say over whether you play really well or not. But like last year we talked about the Astros, the Astros had a plan for the season that they had some actual control over and so then we talked about how that plan went, whether it went well or not. And this year Derek Jeter had a plan which was to play a year of baseball and have it end up pretty good, have a season end up pretty well while he did the farewell tour. And I thought we would see, we would just talk about how that tour went.

And so I went back and I listened to our Yankees preview. You're laughing. Yeah, how was it? It was fine. It was great. In fact, Emma Spann was the guest. That's right. And she predicted that the Yankees would win 85 games and miss the playoffs by five games or so.

They're currently on pace to win 83.5 and miss their five games out of the playoffs. Perfect. Great job. I wonder if she's got a fancy new job since then. Yeah, so we talked a little bit with her about Jeter. You asked her if there was already legend retirement fatigue after a year of Mariano Rivera and she said probably in the rest of the country but not in New York. I

asked and I'm going to just start reading. You know what I've noticed is we've never excerpted clips from previous episodes. We always just read what we said. We have the ability to get a clip but we don't do that other media do that we don't i could do it i you could feel free feel free to replace this that it could get very ugly is there is there any any level of of badness that he could reach that would make his um his uh playing time controversial or is is it a certainty that you know as long as he's healthy no matter what he does uh yankees fans will be happy to see him out there um even you know in the last game of the season trailing you you know, the Red Sox by one game?

No, I think there are limits, I mean, especially at shortstop. I mean, at a certain point, you know, I'm just not sure he's going to be able to play shortstop. If he can, they'll keep running him out there. But I do think he may end up playing, you know, I think they're going to try just for his own health to limit his playing time. I think he could turn into a part-time player this year. I think that's totally possible. I mean, it's awkward.

He doesn't want to give up shortstop. But they have Brendan Ryan there. I mean, the difference between 40-year-old injured Derek Jeter and Brendan Ryan is pretty sizable. Ryan is pretty sizable. And if there is a level of badness that it could reach where his playing time would be controversial, I think he has reached that level of badness, probably. He is currently hitting 250, 298, 298.

Yes, some people in the Facebook group are tracking his on-base percentage relative to his slugging percentage to see which one ends up higher. To put that in perspective, his second worst batting average in his career before this year was 291. He has a real shot to have an on-base percentage and a slugging percentage lower than that, which would be really incredible. So he's hitting that, and of course his defense has done him no favors. It's been roughly as bad as it has been for the last decade-ish. He is a sub-replacement player, according to Baseball References War. And in particular, he has gotten much worse as he has gone.

So let me pick an arbitrary end point. Let's say right here. Let's say since August 3rd, he is hitting, that's a month and a half, he is hitting, since August 2nd, he's hitting 180 214 207 so a 4 a 421 on base percentage for a month and a half according to baseball prospectus warp on the season negative 2.6 negative 2.6 goodness that's very Oh, that's about the worst I've ever seen. Let's see where that stands here. Derek Jeter's warp is negative 2.63.

The next lowest, next worst is Chris Johnson at negative 1.8 or negative 1.9. So he's most of a win below anyone else. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, that's really terrible. That's awful. Yes. So the question is, knowing all this, was this a bad idea? On his part or the Yankees' part? Well, I wonder whether he would do it over again,

if that's really what we're asking. If he knew that the season would go as it has, I wonder not only whether he would acquiesce to announcing his retirement ahead of time, which I gather was not entirely his idea or was something that he had to be talked into, and not only that and the extra attention and distraction perhaps that it's been, but yeah, going out this way is not, it's probably not the way that he would have gone out. Then again, I don't know what he would have done if he, if he had known, would he have just retired on the spot? I don't know. He's so, he's so competitive that until

the Yankees are mathematically eliminated, he probably believes that they have a shot. Does he, uh, does it make it worse that he's on a farewell tour uh that he's playing this bad i mean does uh just i want to make sure that you know which direction i'm going here does the farewell tour make the performance worse or does the farewell tour make the performance i mean because like does it create this like kind this pitiful spectacle? Or does it make it better? Well, he's on his farewell tour. What do you expect?

Right. He is a spectacle. It's a non-pitiful spectacle in some ways. There has been more happiness around Derek Jeter's season than there has been around most players. Even if he makes outs almost every time he comes up, there have been some good moments. He doesn't seem to be dour. The fans don't seem to be in great agony over this.

Maybe they are. I don't know. By the way, 19th worst season of all time by warp uh oh okay i was just looking that up you saved me the trouble um so and he's still got a couple weeks to pad his stats uh so i don't i don't know i mean there has been the occasional i don't even know if it qualifies as a hot take it's almost i mean it's sort of a defensible take that that he has in some sense compromised their season or that he should have that he should have volunteered to switch positions or bench himself or do something to take himself out of such a prominent role on the team in the midst of a pennant race. Not that the Yankees started the season with a wealth of infielders,

but once they acquired a bunch of them and had Brendan Ryan around and a healthy Brendan Ryan, you figure he's probably not their best option on any given day. And so you could say that if he's really serious about making the playoffs, that he would realize that he is not the best way for the Yankees to do that, but he is competitive in a way that perhaps prevents him from doing that. And, uh, I don't think the, the fact that it's a fail farewell tour has probably made the public reception better i would think if he if he were not on the way out if it had not been announced then maybe you would hear more boos

than you have which i haven't really heard any boos and great yankees have been booed before i think maybe even derrick jeter has been boo before. So I would imagine that if he were still thinking about coming back, there would be more heat on him than there has been. And you're right. I mean, this is sort of what you would expect with a farewell tour. By the time someone has achieved enough and reached the age and the status that you get a farewell tour, you wouldn't expect them to be that good anymore. And maybe Yankees fans are spoiled by Mariano Rivera, who was just about as good as he has ever been during his farewell tour. But that is probably not the norm.

Unless, I don't know, maybe being bad late in your career makes you less likely to get a farewell tour. Maybe Cheater has just attained the status that it doesn't matter. But if you're limping to the... Right, yeah, Ichiro. Ichiro definitely would have gotten a farewell tour three years ago. Yes, right. And now it seems sort of like he might...

He might get a mini farewell tour. I wish he would, but he doesn't even play every day. Yeah. How do you give a farewell tour to a part-timer? Rivera didn't play every day. Yeah, that's true, but he played as much as he ever did. Yes. Do you think, do you, I sort of, I feel like players don't make it to the pitiful stage as much anymore.

The great players. Doesn't it feel like more guys are retiring before they get to the pitiful stage as much anymore. The great players? Doesn't it feel like more guys are retiring before they get to the pitiful stage? I'm not sure. Guys are, I think, I mean, in the last decade or so, we've seen the aging curve not be so crazy with guys being productive late into their 30s, but that's not really what you're saying.

I don't know. Are you saying they're voluntarily walking away more or that teams are being more ruthless in pushing them away? I don't know, and I might be completely wrong about that. So, like, Bonds got pushed away, and I guess Kenny Lofton got pushed away. Not for production reasons? Not for production reasons, yeah.

And Kenny Lofton got pushed away. But I'm trying to think. Who else? Tomei, maybe? Yeah. I'm trying to think of recent. Manny? Oh, yeah, Manny hung on.

Yeah, you're right. He hung on, obviously, well after he was any good. Jeff Bagwell got sort of forced out by his injuries, so Bagwell didn't leave on his own terms. So Chipper is the exception, and Ricky Henderson obviously didn't get to leave on his own terms. Chipper was still excellent, though. Right, Chipper is the exception.

That's what I'm saying okay uh but let's see frank thomas uh was i mean todd helton lingered for yeah quite a while todd helton lingered yeah i guess everybody lingered i guess just i'm just remembering uh chipper jones and mariana river, yeah, but those guys don't... I mean, you're talking about whether guys are allowed to last when they're not producing anymore, and those guys were producing, so there was no question of whether they should be allowed to continue playing.

But there are some guys who wanted to play and weren't able to. Yeah, but I mean, because they weren't very good that's my point was that it seems to me that more players were leaving uh when they were still good before they got bad uh but in fact i'm looking down this list of really the sort of hall of fame caliber players biggio got bad alamar got bad ivan rodriguez got bad uh scott roland basically got bad. Yvonne Rodriguez got bad. Scott Rowland basically got bad. They all got bad. So it doesn't, in my hypothesis, is completely wrong. Bobby Abreu got bad. Piazza got bad. Guerrero got bad. Ituro got bad. They all got bad. So never mind. So it's just Chipper and Mariano Rivera. So did Jeter... Can you make the case that Jeter cost the Yankees

a real shot at the playoffs this year? And can you make the case further that that fact alone will tarnish his legacy somewhat? Well, they're five games back. If they were to reel off a little streak here, you never know. I mean, they were very games back. If they were to reel off a little streak here, you never know. I mean, they were very active at the deadline, so it's not like there was some move they would have made,

most likely, if they had been a little bit closer than they were. So this is the team that they would have had, I would think. And five wins is a lot to make up. As bad as he's been, you'd have to have an above average player replacing him at least to to make that the swing and i don't know that they could have done that they traded for steven drew and he's been bad and and brendan ryan is not a three win player so um i don't know whether they had the personnel to make the difference, depending on how close they actually finish. Brennan Ryan was not a three-win player this year. He has been, yeah.

Yeah, he was for the 2009 to 2012 period, and then he didn't play any sort of regularly this year. So I agree, he's probably not. However, it's not a total slam dunk that he wouldn't be in full-time play, but I agree, he's probably not. However, it's not a total slam dunk that he wouldn't be in full-time play. But I agree, he's probably not. We're obviously not deducting intangibles from this calculation, which we should factor in somehow. That's true.

They would probably be eight games out without... I don't think I... So wait a minute, though. If we believe 2.6, I mean, if they're five out, and let's say that if they could make up three games, I mean, with the way that bounces go here and there, if we make up three games,

I'm willing to say that they're in a virtual tie for a playoff spot at this point. Even though they're obviously five. Because you never know how things are going to go. A few bounces go here, a few bounces go there. It's not as though the entire universe would have gone exactly the same way. So if we consider their true talent to be within a two-win margin of error maybe, and you make up three games,

then you're talking about a team that's really in a pennant race, really in position for a playoff spot with two weeks to go. And as we talked about, all you need is replacement level to make up those three wins, at least by warp. Yeah, I'm going to regress the negative 2.6 warp somewhat in my mind, which is based on a negative 24 defensive rating, which is not inconceivable with a 40-year-old Derek Jeter by any means. But according to other defensive stats, he's been kind of okay right around replacement level, which is interesting. According to other stats, he's been a negative 24 defender for 15 years.

So it's not which one you really want to regress right i don't know yeah um yeah it's not inconceivable that he has been that bad so it's really not inconceivable that he's been a negative 40 defender i mean it's not right maybe not um i don't last year last year if you project out to 160 games he was a negative 45 by defensive run saved right of course he was on one leg or no legs at that point but yeah um yeah i don't i don't think i believe in the tarnish his legacy concept i don't know that that's ever actually happened in an on-field context people can t tarnish their legacies in all sorts of ways. They could commit a crime or make a comment that tarnishes their legacy.

I don't know whether the declining athlete ever really tarnishes his legacy. I have a hard time thinking of an example because people throw that term around a lot and people talk about Willie Mays stumbling in center field, which is sort of an apocryphal story anyway. But even though people think of Willie Mays in connection with that, everyone also thinks of Willie Mays as one of the best players ever. So there's no, no tarnishing going on there. There's tarnishing of ancient Willie Mays in his final season, but it doesn't reflect on prime Willie Mays. And so I don't, I don't think there's any time. In fact, when I was at Derek Jeter day, and I was in the, in the subway coming home, people were having a conversation about Michael Jordan because he was at Derek Jeter day. And the same person in the course of the same conversation over like one minute of talking called Michael Jordan the best basketball player ever and claimed that he tarnished his legacy by coming back to play for the Wizards, whatever he did, which seems completely inconsistent. You can't tarnish your legacy and still have your legacy be that you're the best basketball player ever.

So I don't think that Cheater has in any way tarnished his legacy. I guess this is part of his story now. And maybe some kids who came of age, came of baseball age in 2014 and saw Derek Jeter and formed memories of Derek Jeter only this year will not understand what all the fuss was about, which reportedly was what Joe DiMaggio was always concerned about, right? That someone would come and see him not be Joe DiMaggio anymore. But I don't think anyone really will factor this into his larger career or that it will hurt him in any way, really. Yeah, I agree with you about the tarnishing the legacy thing.

I think that generally it's nonsense and that adding three bad seasons is not worse than adding no seasons whatsoever to the end of your career. Except that if you're making the argument that if you felt like, I mean, you could imagine this case being made for a player other than Jeter. If he stayed one year too long and was so bad, but refused to sit down, refused to take a lesser role on the team, refused to retire, and his team missed by half of the negative wins above replacement that he was worth

in that sort of a scenario, you could imagine that a team's fan base would go, you know, I loved that guy. He's my favorite player of all time. That last year really sucked, and I don't have any happy memories of it. Now, is that tarnishing a legacy or not? I don't know.

It's probably not. I don't know what tarnishing a legacy or not i don't know it's probably not i don't know what what tarnishing a late how do you even tarnish a legacy what is a legacy is not made out of a silver or precious right you can't expose it to oxygen and have it oxidized yeah so uh right and well i mean people have brought up you know a rod moving to accommodate Jeter as an example of Jeter being selfish before A-Rod, clearly the superior shortstop, being pushed aside by the guy who was there already and Jeter not volunteering to do that. I don't know. The question is, what's the player's obligation to self-evaluate, I suppose? I suppose. I mean, is it Jeter's responsibility to look at his stats and say, I suck and I shouldn't play anymore? Or is it Joe Girardi's or Brian Cashman's or people who make the personnel decisions? Jeter just likes playing baseball if he wants to keep playing and can find someone to give him a job, and maybe you can extend the same principle to giving up playing time. I don't know. It's just in Jeter's case specifically,

since part of his legacy is his team-first attitude and his desire to win, then I guess that makes him especially susceptible to this accusation that he is not doing all that he could do to help the to win, then I guess that makes him especially susceptible to, to this accusation that he is not doing all that he could do to help the team win, which in this case would be sitting himself down. Yeah. I generally, I don't, I mean, I don't hold any of this against Jeter. I, I have had, I've actually had a good time watching this. I, and I, I'm one of those very few people who thought the all-star game was great and enjoyed all the focus on Jeter. I thought it was a great way of centering, um, you know, kind of centering on his career. Uh, I'm just sort of looking at it again from the idea that

before the season, he kind of had a choice. We know how it went. And in retrospect, was it a bad idea? Um, given that it went about as poorly as it possibly could have. And I can't feel like everything's gone great, but I don't know what the alternative is. They couldn't have had, I mean, you could imagine that in an ideal world, he might have felt like doing this last year, when maybe he would have been a one-win player instead of a negative one-win player, and it wouldn't have been quite so bad, and the Yankees wouldn't have made the playoffs anyway. But it was taken from him.

What's he going to do? He didn't really have a choice. And like you said, people wanted this farewell. It's not as though he's not Craig Biggio collecting hits for some somewhat self-centered accomplishment. I mean, he's just out there. He's being the celebrity. He's being the icon. It's part of, I guess, what his fans were interested in.

And the margin between what looks like a pretty bad failure and what would have been a good time is, you know, fairly small. And at what point did he realize it was a failure? I mean, it didn't seem like that big a failure in, in June,

for instance, it's really taken a dive in the last month or two. I'm sort of surprised, not surprised. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if after his farewell day at Yankee stadium, the day that you went to and you wrote about for Grantland if he had just announced it right there like that's i was kind of expecting that was going to be his last game and it wasn't but could have been yeah it was very strange

timing i don't think that was his choice either to do this living memorial sort of day at yankee stadium but in a way he has in a, what he has done is selfless, or you could at least portray it as selfless, in that I don't think he likes all of this attention particularly. I think he probably likes it less because of the season he's having, but I don't think he would necessarily welcome it anyway, because he's always been the the type to deflect any question about him and redirect it into a question about the team often in an almost

frustrating way um and yet he has done this and you could say that uh it's in part at least for fans who want to come say goodbye to him and it's also for the yankees and i made this point in my piece that this i mean this has been the perfect timing for the yankees really having rivera and jeter retire in back-to-back years without a playoff spot because as the research has shown the yankees have a lot to lose when they don't make the playoffs, more so than most teams because of the expectation that they're going to make the playoffs. There is a greater than normal drop off in attendance and revenue when the Yankees don't

make the playoffs than there is for another team. And having Rivera and Jeter just retire almost in this perfect timing to coincide with these lackluster years when they were not making the playoffs is kind of perfect from the Yankees' perspective. If you could arrange to have a beloved legend retire and do a retirement tour in any season when you're not going to make the playoffs, that would be perfect. Because I think, I don't know how to quantify how many more seats the Yankees have sold,

how many more tickets the Yankees have sold this year. And maybe in general, the idea that players put people in the seats is somewhat overblown. But in this case, I don't think it is. This is, I think he's had probably a significant impact. And if you care about the, well, no one particularly cares about the Steinbrenners making bigger profits probably, but in a way, maybe this is something that helps the Yankees on the field down the road somehow. Maybe they have more money to spend or they're more willing to spend it because they had

X number of tickets and millions of dollars sold because Derek Jeter did his retirement tour. Yeah. I do think that next year's Francisco Cervelli tour probably won't be as profitable. No. Is there anyone? I mean, they could try to do an Ichiro retirement tour next year. Ichiro is the best chance, but Ichiro doesn't belong to New York in any way whatsoever. Sabathia would be just the saddest thing in the world.

Beltran, again, non-Yankee. New York hates him, it seems to me. Hiroki Kuroda retirement tour? Yeah, you're really getting to the heart of the problem. Yeah, not really a successor, so they better make the playoffs next year. Yeah, all right. Okay. All right.

Somebody just noted that ESPN has tweeted, Kershaw has been the Dodger MVP, but don't overlook the value of super sub surprise Justin Turner. So check your team MVP bingo cards to see if you have Justin Turner on yours. I'm going to count it. I'm going to count it even if they say that Kershaw has been the MVP. I'm still counting it. Yeah, I think so.

Okay. All right. So we could use some questions for tomorrow's listener email show. Please send us some at podcast at baseball perspectives.com. Please support our sponsor baseball reference by going to baseball reference.com. Subscribing to the play index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. And we will be back tomorrow.

I've done my tour of duty. Now I'm home and I ain't going anywhere. I've done my tour of duty, now I'm home and I ain't going anywhere. I taught myself to tolerate the pain, all the loneliness and boredom and the work I did in vain, all the work we did in vain. Now I'm not the same as I was. I've done my tour duty, now I'll try to do what a civilian does.