Yanks' Jeter dissected

Yankees' captain Derek Jeter is under the microscope, again. Here's a few links of interest:

• "Davey Johnson, the manager in the Futures Game and in the upcoming Olympics, joked Sunday that he taught A's general manager Billy Beane "everything he knows" about statistical analysis. Johnson, who was Beane's manager with the Mets in 1984 and '85, first saw the value in numbers when he was playing for the Orioles and writing out lineups for Earl Weaver. "It's not rocket science," Johnson says ."--FOX Sports. Davey's been out of the game for a while, today's plethora of stats would make a rocket scientist proud.
• "Stat-heads and forward-thinking team executives now have several advanced fielding metrics to parse: fielding win shares, fielding runs, fielding runs above replacement, zone rating, range factor, probabilistic model of range, the Wharton guy's SAFE method (that's "special aggregate fielding evaluation"), and many more. There are so many fielding stats now because the sabermetric community has worked together on the scrivenerlike grunt work of generating useful data. Private-sector companies like Baseball Info Solutions and Stats Inc. have done most of the heavy lifting. They watch every play of every major league game and record the things (trajectory, speed, whether a ball was bobbled or fielded cleanly) that go into defense, then package the numbers and license them to baseball front offices and a few dedicated, independent stat guys. The cost of this proprietary data has not necessarily kept the stat masses from making important contributions to fielding knowledge. It has meant, however, that the best systems are the ones that are most dependent on crunching complicated numbers that don't get updated every day."--Slate (Hat tip Baseball Musings) The bottom line? "There's just one small blot on his résumé: When it comes to playing defense, Jeter sucks." Got it.
• Derek's future is also of interest, "Now fast-forward to October 2010, with the newly signed LeBron James taking his first wind sprints in Knicks camp and fixing to hurdle A-Rod and claim Jeter's vacated place as the market's reigning sports prince. Listen to Cashman and Hank Steinbrenner explain how the Yankees need to get younger and more athletic. Listen to the executives tell the public why the 10-year, $189 million contract ol' No. 2 signed in February 2001 represents the last nickel the Yanks ever will pay him." I saw an interview with Jeter a few years ago, he was asked what he would be doing at 40 his immediate response, "playing shortstop for the New York Yankees." (Somewhere, somebody just dropped a pencil.) Sports Illustrated ran a section titled "A sure sign the apocalypse is upon us." If Brian Cashman, is still making decisions for the Bombers in 2010, apocalypse will be an understatement.