The consistent story line surrounding the Yankees so far this season has been that the team needs to tread water until the injured superstars, Mark Teixeira, Curtis Granderson and Derek Jeter, can return. Last week we found out that Jeter has suffered a set back and won’t be able to play until July. Without question, this harms the team. Much has been made of Jeter’s recent decline, specifically his sub-par 2010 and 2011 seasons, but even that weakened Jeter gave the Yankees above average offense at shortstop. Furthermore, Derek bounced back in 2012. The .347 wOBA Jeter posted in 2012 was far from his .365 career average, or the production he’s put up in his signature seasons, such as 2009, but it was a welcomed return to form, and evidence that maybe Derek had one more .340 plus wOBA season in him.
As frustrating as it is to watch the Yankees play Mariano Rivera‘s final season without Jeter in the lineup every day, Derek will come back. He’s still under contract and too competitive an athlete to go out this way. The real question is therefore how much damage his extended absence will wreak on the team. Given that Derek will miss half the season, we can measure the production this will cost the Yankees as a whole.
According to Fangraphs, Derek has averaged just under 2.6 fWAR over the past three seasons (Baseball Reference puts the figure at 2.3 bWAR). Taking that as a baseline, its safe to suggest that over the course of half a season, even an aging Derek Jeter will be responsible for between one and two victories for the Yankees. It may not sound like much, but that’s a hefty contribution.
Unfortunately, Jeter’s contribution isn’t zero sum. The Yankees have to put nine players on the field. Less Derek Jeter usually means more of Eduardo Nunez or Jayson Nix. Nunez is off to a terrible start. Fangraphs suggests he’s been a net negative on the team, with an fWAR of -0.2. Last season he managed only 0.5 fWAR in limited playing time, which means at best Nunez is a slightly above replacement level player. Jayson Nix isn’t any better. He clocks in at -0.2 fWAR on the season already, and managed 0.3 over all of 2012.
Taking it all together, assuming Nix and Nunez actually cost the Yankees games, Jeter’s absence over the first half of the season will probably take two games off the Yankees win total during that time. That may not sound like much, but the AL East will be tight all season long and there is no guarantee that both Wild Card teams will come from the AL East when Texas, Oakland and Anaheim all have post season plans in the AL West. Jeter’s absence will most certainly be felt.
The Yankees, their fans, and even Derek Jeter himself have known that his days as the team’s starting shortstop were numbered. That discussion was surely had with Jeter behind closed doors during his last contract negotiation and is more than likely the reason the final year of his deal became an optional one. That timeline got sped up some when Jeter suffered his season-ending ankle injury last October and now appears to be speeding up again after last week’s announcement that Jeter had re-injured his ankle, suffering a crack in the area of the original break that will put him on the shelf until at least the All-Star break. That revelation fell into the “disappointing but not surprising” category for many of us who questioned Jeter’s progress after the initial setback and cortisone shot, and now we, like the Yankees, have to figure out the best way to move forward without The Captain’s familiar #2 anywhere on the lineup card.
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Evening, all. Hope your work days weren’t too torturous. Anyway, here are a few links to help you along in your commute.
Starting with the not-so-great, there’s the news you probably already know: Jeter is going to miss more time than expected. Sigh.
Speaking of Derek Jeter, though, here’s something cool from Twitter yesterday. Baseball HOF president Jeff Idleson posted a pre-draft scouting report the Rockies did on Jeter:
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(Syndicated from An A-Blog for A-Rod)
Derek Jeter said he was going to be ready to start this season. Both he and the Yankees did everything in their power to try to make that happen. When his ankle started to act up earlier in spring camp, both he and the team passed it off as a blip on the radar. Now, on the day he was supposed to be eligible to come off the DL and return to the lineup, Jeter finds himself no closer to coming back than he was when he first went on the DL.
There hasn’t been much progress in Jeter’s latest attempt to come back, as evidenced by this latest report from Bryan Hoch today on Saturday. What Jeter is doing now is the same thing he was doing two months ago when he first really started to get back to baseball activities, and this second go-round with these incredibly watered-down activities is happening at a slower pace than two months ago. Jeter still isn’t taking batting practice, he still isn’t taking real fielding practice, and he still can’t run the bases. Those are the three fundamental activities for any baseball player at any position, and the plain fact of the matter is that there’s no timetable for when he’s going to start doing them again. I’ve heard early May thrown around as the new possible return date, but even that looks like a stretch presently.
I said way back in November that I didn’t think Jeter was going to be able to make it back in time for Opening Day, and my preference was that he and the team didn’t attempt to rush his comeback to make that happen. They did, it didn’t work, and now we don’t know when he’s going to be back on the field. Normally I like to puff out my chest and sing my own praises on one of the rare occasions when I’m right. In this instance, however, I really don’t want to.
(Photo courtesy of J. Conrad Williams, Jr./Newsday)
Happy Friday, all. I hope your week hasn’t been too stressful. Anyway, let’s get down to business. We’re all aware of Derek Jeter‘s injury situation. Opening Day has long been Jeter’s goal, but that now appears in jeopardy. Yesterday, GM Brian Cashman announced that Jeter would no longer participate in Major League Spring Training games; however, he’ll continue to play in Minor League games. As we’ve all heard by now, this is essentially a clerical “just in case.” It allows Jeter to get game action, but also allows the Yankees to retroactively place Jeter on the 15-day Disabled List in case he isn’t ready to go for Opening Day. This all makes me think that they should just place Jeter on the DL now.
The Derek Jeter we’ve all come to know and love is the guy who “shows up to work every day” and just “does his job” (and does it exceedingly well most of the time). Like any successful worker, Jeter is goal-oriented, and in this case, Opening Day readiness is the goal and he’s been steadfast in his determination to reach that goal. That effort is certainly laudable, but is this “toughness” actually a good thing? Being in the lineup on Opening Day is certainly admirable, but if Jeter isn’t field-ready by then, can’t we argue that it hurts the team just as much as–if not more than–it would if he just sat out for the first few games and returned on April 6th? Granted, Eduardo Nunez isn’t going to be any great shakes at short for those few games, but how effective would an injured Derek Jeter be? His range is already limited and now he’s got another year to his name as well as an ankle plate and some screws to match. Wouldn’t it be better to get the DL stint out of the way now rather than in May or June when he’s an absolute statue in the field and possibly unbalanced at the plate?
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As we wind down Spring Training and approach Opening Day, we’re really just going through motions. At this point, we’re just hoping that no one else gets hurt. And, of course, there is a chance that Derek Jeter will miss Opening Day. Great. Let’s officially start the rambling there.
If Jeter is out for Opening Day, that is going to be one hell of a lineup in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad way. What could it look like? Let’s assume they’re facing Boston’s lefty, Jon Lester.
1. Kevin Youkilis, 3B
2. Eduardo Nunez, SS
3. Melky Mesa, CF/LF (justification here)
4. Robinson Cano, 2B
5. Juan Rivera, 1B
6. Ben Francisco, DH
7. Ichiro Suzuki, RF
8. Francisco Cervelli
9. Brett Gardner, LF/CF
Um….yikes? That is…not desirable. It could shake out differently and we could end up with Ronnier Mustelier in the fold, likely at third. If that happens, the lineup could be:
1. Kevin Youkilis, 1B
2. Eduardo Nunez, SS
3. Ronnier Mustelier, 3B
4. Robinson Cano, 2B
5. Juan Rivera, DH
6. Melky Mesa, CF/LF
7. Ichiro Suzuki, RF
8. Francisco Cervelli, C
9. Brett Gardner, CF/LF
Honestly, I can’t tell which one is better/less worse. Your thoughts?
Earlier yesterday, I read this piece from the New York Times about Hal Steinbrenner and the “new course” he’s plotting for the Yanks. In defense of Plan 189, Hal broke out one of his favorite justifications:
“My firmly held belief is that you don’t have to have a $200 million payroll to be world champion,” he said last week in the team’s plush conference room at the spring training complex here. “And the historical data that led me to that conclusion is rock solid.”
We all held our collective breath this afternoon when Derek Jeter was scratched from the Yankees’ spring training game against the Phillies. In light of that, Jeter had precautionary X-Rays and an MRI done by Dr. Daniel Murphy. The X-Rays came back negative, though the MRI showed “mild inflammation” in his injured ankle. He’s now listed at day-to-day, which is a lot better than it could’ve been, but I don’t think anyone’d blame us if we were more than a wee bit concerned about this.
(Syndicated from An A-Blog for A-Rod)
After watching player after player go down with injuries this spring, the Yankees finally got to see a few come back from injuries yesterday when Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter played in their first ST games. Mo struck out two in a scoreless 5th inning and Jeter went 1-2 at the plate as the leadoff DH, and both used their performances to answer the question about whether they’ll be ready in time for the start of the season. For Mo, that question wasn’t as big a deal. He’s been throwing bullpen sessions, going through everything he would in a normal spring, just not in an actual game setting. For Jeter, the question has hung over him all spring as he’s been limited to light fielding drills, light running drills, and batting cage sessions. He still has to play a few games in the field, which sounds like it might happen this coming week, but if Jeter can at least hit three weeks before the start of the season, that’s a pretty good sign that he’ll be ready.
So now that Jeter has answered the first big question, we can move to asking the second one. What kind of production can we reasonably expect from The Captain this year? The offense has already taken a lot of damage in the past four months and change, and a 39-year-old shorstop coming off major ankle surgery isn’t going to be the savior, but without any reliable backup options in sight the Yankees need something good from Jeter this year.
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As much as everybody likes to talk about the Yankees’ failures when it comes to developing young pitching, a conversation that’s not as failure-filled as some people like to think, there’s another area on the roster where they haven’t exactly been churning out winners recently and that’s at shortstop. They’ve had the benefit of Derek Jeter being a fixture at the position for the last 17 years, but Jeter’s time is winding down and the Yankees are nowhere closer to finding his replacement than they were when talks of Jeter retiring first started.
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