Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 541: The Invisible Shift, Chipper vs. Jeter, and Other Listener Emails

Episode Date: September 24, 2014

Ben and Sam discuss the shift and answer listener emails about instant replay, wild cards, prospect promotions, Chipper vs. Jeter, and more.

This is how I thought I'd start my song And it seems a little silly when I think of it But now I'm so far along And no one really wants to know that he's wrong That his ears can't really hear or he's blind a bit Or that he's blind a bit. Oh, that he's really weak. Good morning, and welcome to episode 541 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectives,

presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg of Grantland.com, joined by Sam Miller of Baseball Perspectives. Hello. Hi, Ben. Have you any banter before we get to emails? I just wanted to note that I finished your Hang Up and Listen appearance. Did I screw it up in the last two minutes? Well, I just wanted to ask you about one thing.

When you were talking about all the advantages that Clayton Kershaw has over Pedro Martinez as far as pitching environment, you mentioned a few things that just generally make it easier to be a pitcher these days and harder to be a hitter. And I'll quote, the PEDs are out of the game, heat maps, sophisticated

advanced scouting, defensive shifts, and I got stuck on heat maps. Heat maps? Yeah. You really think on heat maps. Heat maps? Yeah. You really think that heat maps are the big advance for pitching? They're an advance, right? There was a Joe Maddon quote yesterday, I think it was,

about how just all the analytics advances have favored pitching and defense more so than offense. I mean, heat maps are just a way of presenting that information to people. And who knows if they're even paying that much attention. So no, I would not put heat maps up there with the other. With a degree of steroids and having shifts on every third play. Not quite on the same level. Fair enough.

It's one of them. Fair enough. All right. That's all my banter. Okay. So then we will dive right into the emails. So this question comes from Kyle, who says, I wanted to ask a broader question based on your discussion of umpiring and replays in episode 539.

Baseball has inadvertently introduced a change in the philosophy of umpiring with added replay. Baseball used to follow a formalism thought, much like the legal philosophy, where the truth itself does not matter, but only the following of established principles and rules. For example, not all evidence is admissible in court and people will get off on procedural technicalities. In baseball, not all evidence has historically been used to make calls. As umpire Bill Clem famously put it, it ain't nothing till I call it. Now with the introduction of replay, MLB is theoretically interested less in a formalism philosophy but more in obtaining the truth.

Therefore, they should be using every tool at their disposal to achieve this, but as mentioned in the earlier podcast, they still are not, as umpires are not allowed to view the stadium scoreboards for replay. MLB seems to be stuck in between philosophies, not understanding what direction they are headed. My question then is, which do you think baseball should be more concerned with, the traditional formalism method of umpiring or a newer method of using every tool available to discover the true outcome of a play. That's a very well put email. It is. I feel like that's one of our... Write a whole article out of that.

Yeah, it's one of our more nicely written emails. We've had some very nice ones. Many. I don't want to shortchange any of the great emails we have. That's a very good one. I had my dad, when I was growing up, this was this big linguistic argument in my household when we would watch a play and then I would watch the replay and I'd say he was out or that was a strike.

And my dad would say, no, it's not. There is no truth existent except what the umpire calls. So what the umpire calls is what it is. You can say he beat the throw. You could say that pitch caught the plate. But you cannot say it was a strike because a strike exists even if there is a rulebook definition. guide and that the umpire is the final arbiter, which is why I, for instance, have argued that if they're not going to try to get the strike zone right, there should be no strike zone. Umpires should merely call what they think is an appropriate pitch a strike.

I haven't really seen that argument catch on. I know. It is interesting, and I'm not being sarcastic when I say this. I actually think that's maybe my strongest argument. I think I stand by that more than any other weird thing I've ever written or said on this podcast I think it's I I think it's a it would make the game better it's a great argument but I don't need to rehash that but so Kyle Kyle I think quite correctly gets to the problem which is that it's it's in the in-between if you think that we're in this forever if we're going to be in the in-between forever, then you would say it's a flaw. If you

think, though, that change comes in stages and that it requires compromise from different interests and that this whole replay system might not have gone as well if it hadn't been done in a spirit of semi-compromise and in a kind of gradual stage-based advance. Then I forget how I started the sentence, but that's probably why it's working so well, because it didn't seem quite so radical. It seemed like it was being led by conservative people who were proceeding cautiously and were not going to dictate every single thing had to change immediately, but that they would see how these things worked, starting with the home runs, and then see how other things worked while keeping some limits in place. And I think that probably it's very safe to assume that all of these things that we've identified as problems this year will not be problems in 20 years. Many of them will be problems next year. A few of them will be problems in five years, a handful maybe as far as 10 years. But certainly within 20 years, probably within 10, all of the things, all the inconsistencies, all the things that seem weird

will have been sorted out. It is very clear which direction this is moving. And expecting it to be exactly right and 100% on the first move is probably a bit greedy. Yes, I completely agree. But there's no going back. And any changes from here on out will probably be to push the system closer to the objective truth existing independent of the umpire position. Yeah. recording from Eric Hartman, who says, how big a disadvantage does the winner of the wildcard game have in the rest of the playoffs? Very small sample size, but I don't believe they've ever won a series. How many years of data would we need before we could be reasonably confident in any claim? So this is the suggestion that the team in the wildcard game maybe had to use its best pitcher or would have tried to use its best

pitcher if at all possible and that pitcher would not be able to go until a few games into the division series maybe they've cleaned out their bullpen to get through that game maybe they're tired because they haven't had the day off probably not that though there's a day off before and a day off after right true but they would have had to travel perhaps back and forth across the country during that time when the other teams were using that time however they would have liked to use it. So how many years would we need before we could be confident in any observed tendency toward a wildcard team doing worse than we would expect in the division series? Before we answer that, the initial question was how much of a disadvantage is it?

And the travel was definitely a thing. The fact that they're already probably an inferior team is a disadvantage, of course, not related to the structure of the playoffs, but just related to them being worse. But basically, we're talking about the starting pitcher, right? Yeah. I mean, when we talk about the disadvantage, that's probably 90% of what we talk about. And it maybe should be 95% of what we talk about. And so to answer that question, though, it's not just how much of a disadvantage is it to go to Clayton Kershaw once instead of twice in a postseason series.

Because, for starters, as we've talked about, only about half of the teams in that coin flip game are going to be able to use their ace. Otherwise, they might have used them on Sunday or Saturday and not be able to use them anyway. Otherwise, they might have used him on Sunday or Saturday and not be able to use him anyway. And so you figure, well, okay, so for maybe roughly half the teams, we're not even talking about losing their ace. We're talking about them losing their number two starter, maybe their number three starter. And those guys wouldn't have intended to go twice in a five-game series anyway. So already you would cut the disadvantage for half the teams. So then you have the other half, the other half who had to use Clayton Kershaw to get to the full series. And so then you have to think, well, what percentage of division series go get five games?

Because in any series that's determined in four games or fewer, you're either only going to use your ace once, as it is, or you're going to pitch him on short rest in game four which the position of this podcast is generally that's no advantage at all so I don't know how many division series go five games I was trying to frantically find it in an easily scannable format and I didn't

what would you guess 60% yeah sounds reasonable so you're talking about we'll say 60% of teams go to a five game series 60% of the time, so 36%. So you basically have one in three times this will matter to your team. And then you're talking about a difference of probably a run and a half between your, well, maybe. run and a half between your well maybe you're going to go two three uh in this format you'll

go two three one four two instead of one two three four one so what the difference between your ace and your number two is maybe on average a half a run maybe three quarters of a run at the maybe so we'll say three quarters of a run to be generous so we're talking about three quarters of a run at the maybe so we'll say three quarters of a run to be generous so we're talking about three quarters of a run one third of the time how often does three quarters of a run determine a game less than half the time uh so it's probably not that much of a disadvantage it's i don't know five percent so we'd need we'd need a century or so it And of course, if you do go five games and you find that you don't have your ace available and you have to go with your number two, well, even if you win that game, which you're going to win it a lot of the time, you now have your ace ready to go in game one of the LCS.

Instead of having to use your ace in game five, and then he can't maybe come back until game three of the LCS. instead of having to use your ace in game five, and then he can't maybe come back until game three of the LCS. So if you make it, it could actually give you back some percentage of the 5% that you've already given up. So as far as your World Series odds, it could end up being a couple percent at most. I would guess, though, that your chances are,

that the effect is actually rather small, less small than the world gives attention to it, less small than maybe teams give attention to it, and less small than this very podcast has in the past assigned to it. I think in the past we've made too big a deal out of it and walking through that has made me see the error. It's the playoffs. This is when we make a big deal out of tiny, tiny things because we've got to talk about something. This question comes from Ricky, who says,

Hi, Dan and Ben. Close. God, Dan and Brad. Jeez. Hi, Dan and Ben. For every organization, there are 30 different ways to develop prospects. The two main ways are AA to the majors. The other is AA to AAA and then the majors. The Marlins mainly do AA to the majors, most notably with Stanton and Yelich. Which way

is the most effective to bring up a player in your opinion? I don't have an answer to this exactly, but I have something that I wanted to mention that is related because I had thought about writing something about this earlier this month and maybe I will because there had been some speculation that teams were bringing up players faster or that they weren't as prepared when they made the majors which seemed to be completely not the case heading into this season and there does seem to have been a change in how double a and triple a are regarded at least people talk about double a more often now i think as as a prospect rich league that some top prospects skip on the way to the majors as ricky suggests and triple a is kind of this depressing place where guys who have already

washed out of the majors go and they're bitter because they're not in the majors. And some teams like to leapfrog the prospects past that atmosphere entirely. But I was interested in whether the relative strength of those leagues has changed significantly over the past few years. And I sort of suspected that maybe it had. But I emailed Dan Szyborski of ESPN, the creator of the Zips projection system, and he has league strengths for the various minor league levels and major league level going back to the mid-70s or so. And I asked him whether there had been a change, AA relative to AAA and both of them relative to the majors. And according to his numbers, which are based on league changers, guys who go from one league to the next and how they do after being promoted and how much of their stats, their production level at the lower league,

they retain at the higher league, he found that there hasn't really been any recent decline or any recent change, that all of the change that he has kind of comes from a seven to eight year period starting in 1996 or so, that before that time from the mid 70s to say the mid 90s, AAA was about 86% of the majors in terms of difficulty level. And then over this seven to eight year period from the mid 90s to early 2000s, it declined to about 80%. And AA is in the mid 70s. So it's actually close. AA and AAA are close. They've gotten closer since, you know, two decades ago, but it seems like they haven't actually gotten closer in recent years. But Dan speculated that maybe that decline at that point, and I will quote his

working theory, is that teams are doing a better job of giving minor league performers chances, and that the increased viability of Japan as a home for some of those first tier double layers that don't end up in the majors has weakened that top level of triple a play which seems possible so the takeaway i suppose is that double a and triple a are not actually all that different one of them has one more a but other than that as as a percentage of the majors triple a is about 80 and and AA is in the mid-70s somewhere. So if you do skip AAA for whatever reason, whether it's the attitude of your AAA team, or maybe you don't feel that your AAA coaching staff is well-suited to that particular player, or maybe the environment, the atmosphere, maybe it's a harsh pitcher's park or pitter's park and you want the prospect

to avoid that for some reason, it doesn't seem like you're really sabotaging the prospect either way, at least based on the relative leak strength. Very interesting. Yeah. Maybe I will write about it. I probably should write about it. If you do, you should mention that even if the difference isn't that different in terms of overall quality, the conventional wisdom is that the difference in style is different,

that you see a lot more kind of advanced veteran pitchers who have a plan of what to do, and they don't have the same stuff or velocity, and they might suck, generally speaking, but it's a different kind of a challenge. Yes, that is probably worth mentioning. Okay, this question comes from Stephen, who says, I was intrigued by Jake Arrieta's quotation in this article, and he links to Rocco DiMaro's recent article for BP, where he interviewed a bunch of players

about what the second hardest thing to do is in baseball. And Arias said that moving to the NL and having to hit has influenced his pitch selection while pitching. The conventional wisdom with which Steven agrees is that pitching in the NL is easier because you get the pitcher instead of the DH. Is it possible that a pitcher can learn enough from his own plate appearances that he can improve his approach on the mound? It seems like something that I would want to ask actual pitchers, but I would think that most pitchers are probably so overwhelmed at the plate that everything works against them. So I don't know that they would even have the capacity to tell what would

get an actual major league hitter out. I mean, when you're a pitcher and you have a hard time hitting a fastball down the middle, I don't know that you get that great a feel from your own struggles that would inform how to pitch an actual professional hitter, but I could be wrong. Yeah, the challenge that most of us face if we tried to hit a major league pitcher would be very, it'd be like trying to compare, I don't know, I mean, major league hitters you think are sort of kind of seeing baseballs like Neo sees things, right? I mean, compared to mere mortals,

they're seeing things in such a different sort of slowed down way that none of us can even really compare to. So if you weren't a hitter, it does seem like it would be difficult to draw a lot of lessons. And you're also not going to be worked in the same way that a hitter would be worked and would get used to being worked. I will, though, say that Sean Doolittle, I'm trying to find it, when I wrote about Sean Doolittle for ESPN the magazine many years ago, he talked about how he thought he had an advantage over other pitchers because he knew from being a legitimate hitting prospect and having batted hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times against high-level pitching, he knew how hard it was.

He knew how simple a lot of times, how effective a simple plan could be against those guys because he was one of those guys. And I'm trying to, oh yeah, here's his quote. I'm not sure pitchers understand how difficult hitting is when you really can put together a two or three pitch sequence and execute it they don't have a chance he spoke more about that that's the quote that i used from him but the difference is that doolittle was a hitter doolittle uh talking about the advantage that he got from having actually lived in the world of hitters as a hitter and having had that perspective i don't know that just walking into the world of hitters makes you live as a hitter

anchored okay play index yeah sure so i have a question for you and i don't know your answer to this i'm hoping that your answer will will help drive the narrative of this play index but it has been noted ben has it not that uh despite the increase of shifts which seem to really do a lot to suppress um to suppress uh offense and to catch baseballs that are hit it has been noted that nonetheless, BABIP league-wide is not down. BABIP, in fact, is relatively high for modern times and seems to be inching even higher. It's $2.99 this year, which is up from $2.97 last year, up from $2.95 in 2011. And so what is your hypothesis for why this is? It's perplexing. I remember seeing some tweets from Mike Fast, formerly of BP and currently of the Astros,

talking about how big an effect it would need to produce for us even to see it in the league-wide numbers. And he seemed to be suggesting that it would just have to be even bigger than it is. There would have to be more shifts than there are currently. A higher percentage of plays would have to involve shifts, and more balls would have to be hit to that side of the field, or there'd have to be an even bigger difference between shift BABIP and non-shift BABIP for it to show up in the league numbers, which are based on many, many thousands of batted balls. And I guess that's persuasive, or at least that other factors could be hiding it somehow, that there could be some

corresponding factor that is acting to increase BABIP that would counteract the decreased BABIP. And I don't know what that would be, but I assume that that would be it. I'm also open to the idea that maybe teams aren't shifting as well as they think they are. It's possible. When you look at the league-wide numbers from the stat providers like BIS and Inside Edge, there's almost always a pretty big gap

between shift BABIP and non-shift BABIP for all of the, either when they show it on a team level or when they just show individual players who get shifted a lot. There certainly seems to be an effect there. It's possible that teams are shifting a suboptimal rate, right? That some of them are shifting too much or that they're shifting in an inefficient way

and that they are therefore allowing some hits that they're not accounting for somehow. So that's possible. But I don't have a concrete answer that I am confident in. You did not give the answer I was hoping you would give and that I was expecting you would give. I thought the answer you would give is that baseball players, hitters, hit the ball harder these days. That particularly because strikeouts, high strikeout rates tend to correlate to high BABIPs because you're really putting a lot more into the swing and maybe waiting for your pitch a lot more. That when you do hit the ball, it goes a lot harder. Even because pitchers are presumably pitching harder.

Yeah, and pitchers are also pitching harder, exactly. So yeah, that's a good example of what I suggested, that there could be some other factor, and that one makes sense. Sure, you said that. So if this were true, this hypothesis would suggest that, in fact, the shift is working to keep Babbitz down. Babbitz would otherwise be out of control. Yeah. Okay. So play index.

Okay. So play index. A couple years ago, two years ago in fact, I wrote a piece about Ryan Howard and whether Ryan Howard is actually clutch and whether the whole narrative of him driving in runs because he's so clutchy clutch is actually true, not because he's got a great heart, but because when runners are on base defenses can't shift against him and when they can't shift against him he's a monster he's incredible and it's when they can shift that he becomes very poor at hitting and so what i did is i looked at every single base state uh base runner state how many outs and how many runners were on. I looked to see whether the defense was shifting on him in that plate appearance. And then I concluded that that was a good, if I found an example of a shift or a non-shift, I went ahead and assumed that that was consistent across the league. This was two years ago. I don't know if it was consistent across the league, but that gave me a general idea of whether teams shifted him in that situation.

And so then I broke those up into three categories. Runners on with a shift, runners on without a shift, and then no runners on in which there is a shift. And then I looked to see whether that explained the difference. And it basically did. When nobody's on, his BABF sucks. And when runners are on base and there's no shift,

his BABF is incredible. When runners are on base and there is a shift, because in some cases they can shift. If there's a runner on first, for instance, they still shift. In the runners on base examples with a shift, his BABF was not very good. So it seemed that the shift explained all.

Or almost all. So I seemed that the shift explained all, or almost all. So I wanted to apply that to the league and see whether that's the reason that BABIP's not going up. If, in fact, you broke it down to these base-out states where a shift can't be done, whether you would see BABIP go way, way up. Pretty good play index, huh? Very good.

Should have written about it. Yeah. Wasting it. Yeah, we're both giving away good material for free here. So I'm going to give you a baseline. Babbitt overall this year is 299. Going back to 1988, there are 27 seasons. That is the 10th highest.

So 10th highest Bbitt out of 27 that is our baseline 10th of 27 okay so first off very uh so i went to play index i went to the team splits section of play index one of the options you can do is all mlB teams grouped together. So then that gives you the league split for any split. And I did each year, I grouped them by year since 1988. And I just looked at BABF, nothing else, BABF, in each of these base out states. So BABF overall, 10th out of 27. Now, simple ones first.

Nobody on, 11th out of 27. And runners on, 10th out of 27. So that's completely unchanged. So having runners on does not change our math at all or does not change our results at all. So then if I use the Ryan Howard experience to look at when teams are more prone to shift and when they're not, I looked at the cases where they can not do a shift with runners on base. So these are the instances basically where there's no shift.

So runners on first and second, there's hardly ever a shift so runners on first and second there's hardly ever a shift with runners on first and second uh 293 10th out of 27 huh runners on second and third hardly ever a shift 13th out of 27 very very i mean that's nothing bases loaded seventh out of 27. So those two, you might as well just cancel them out. And runners on first and third with none out, third out of 27. So that sounds interesting, but it's only 800 batted balls. So then I looked at first and third with one out, and it's 21st out of 27. Basically, if there's runners on first and third and two outs, you'll usually see a shift, or you often will see a shift. You can see a shift. But when there's runners on first and third and two outs, you'll usually see a shift. Sorry, you often will see a shift. You can see a shift.

But when there's runners on first and third with less than one out, you might not. And so with runners on first and third and less than two out, it's essentially no different. So that hypothesis completely sputtered. That hypothesis completely sputtered. Even in situations when there is no shift on, the league's BABIP is essentially not higher or lower than it is overall. So now I'm going to— We had a great hypothesis. I'm going to retract my attempt to claim that that was my theory. Oh.

Yeah. So we're back to the drawing board. We're going to have to figure out why. But next time, you will hear this. You will probably hear this, this theory that Ben and I both proposed at some point. And you can tell that person they Play Indexed it and it didn't work. Debunked.

They can debunk it themselves if they use the coupon code bp to sign up for the play index and get the discounted price of 30 on a one-year subscription michael k citing the play index on air on yes did not drop a coupon code reference but he still mentioned the play index uh-huh yeah i really wanted to end that play index with it's a wrap you just did i guess remember it's a wrap sure do you we never said it's a wrap but it has been said but you remember the brandon phillips oh Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, forgot that one. Anyway, I couldn't remember it. I had to Google it.

So I couldn't end the playing decks with it's a wrap. Uh-huh. Well. Okay, this question comes from Zach in Los Angeles. This question is particularly relevant to him. He says the two teams in L.A. seem to be opposites of sorts, especially their pitching. The Angels have made changes to their bullpen and now have one of the best bullpens in the game, He says, done for the season. On the other hand, the Dodgers have a good rotation, assuming they get healthier. Kershaw, Granke, maybe Ryu, Heron.

But their bullpen is bad and seems to be getting worse. So my question is, going into the playoffs, would you rather have the Angels pitching or the Dodgers pitching, and why? I mean, the answer, I know what your answer is going to be. You know what my answer is going to be. But the answer is going to be you take the starting because we don't actually. I mean, bullpen over the course of a short series is very unreliable. It's too small a sample.

Who knows what kind of bullpen you're going to get from your bullpen, right? That would have been your answer. Sure, probably. Okay, but let's rephrase, though. Let's assume you get a great performance out of your starters and a slightly below average, we'll call it a 40th percentile performance from your bullpen, or you get a 40th percentile performance from your rotation but a great performance from your bullpen, which team do you think is more likely to win? Well, I hate to say it depends, but it depends on how willing the manager is to go to the bullpen

right if if he's gonna stick with the underperforming starters as opposed to just having a quick hook and going to the bullpen guys then then that's not making the most of that advantage if you have a manager who's willing to yank starters early and do the bullpen thing that we're always talking about when the playoffs roll around and minimizing the times through the order effect and getting the fresh arm in their inning after inning, then I think I would probably go with that one. Well, they certainly have a shorter hook in the postseason. Managers generally have a much shorter hook in the postseason, it seems to me. The question is whether it's short enough. Yeah. I don't know if it is, but I could see the case for either one.

I think at this point I'd rather have the Dodgers. Yeah, I'd rather have the Dodgers. Yes, I would too. But it'll be interesting to see what the Angels do with their pitching. Yeah, and I'm not saying i would rather be the dodgers because i would rather have the angels right offense okay we will answer this question from nicholas who says i wanted to know if you had to choose between drafting chipper chipper jones and drafting jeter knowing everything about their career and numbers ahead of time which would

you choose assume that they would stay in the organization their entire career and numbers ahead of time, which would you choose? Assume that they would stay in the organization their entire career and you could build your club around them. Replacement variables aside, i.e. depth in that particular position and replacement variety in the particular position. And that's the question. So Chipper or Jeter? This is tough. Yeah. I find this to be a very challenging question.

Because of off-the-field considerations? If we were talking about purely as players, would that make it an easier decision or an easy decision? Or still tough? I think it's conceivable that Jeter's ability to play shortstop badly is both an underrated aspect of his value, that it doesn't quite capture his value to a team. I mean, I don't have any evidence of this, but it does seem conceivable that the Yankees are glad that they had shortstop locked up for all those years, even if they had to put up with bad defense. And if you go back and look at, I think it was Gary Huckabay, I was reading some very old pieces on the site recently about Jeter's defense. pieces on the site recently about Jeter's defense. And this was very early on in his career, and Huckabay seems to have really been one of the earliest voices putting pretty advanced analysis on Jeter's defense. And he would always say in it that Jeter is terrible, he's the worst, everybody hates

him for saying it, but it's true. Jeter is terrible, he's the worst, everybody hates him for saying it, but it's true. But also, that that's not to say that the Yankees should move him, that he's still worth playing there. And I don't know, maybe the years since we've learned enough about positional adjustments that maybe we no longer think that's true. But it does seem conceivable that there are a few extra wins in Jeter's career, simply from a team-building perspective, because, as everybody always says first thing when you ask that who do you start a franchise with question, they always say, well, you've got to start with somebody at the middle. You've got to start with a shortstop or a center fielder,

but probably a shortstop. And Jeter is a shortstop or a center fielder but probably a shortstop and jeter is a shortstop so you there are there is a there is a line of thinking that says you start with the shortstop now you could also make the case that jeter's uh the fact that you're stuck with jeter at shortstop for all those years is actually like terrible that they just having just having a guy who was blocking A-Rod from shortstop, not only does Jeter's war fail to live up to Chipper's because he was adding all these negative runs. Right, and if you look at the...

He hurt A-Rod's war. Uh-huh, possible. And if you look at the career wars and warps, Chipper outpaces Jeter by somewhere between 10 and 20 wins above replacement, depending on the stat, career-wise. Yes, yes. There's also, though, there's also the postseason thing. True. The gap between them, Jeter was better.

I think Jeter was better in the postseason than in the regular season. close Jeter was better I think Jeter was better in the postseason than in the regular season Chipper was worse in the postseason than the regular season which everybody in history is because they're facing harder competition except for Jeter Jeter's like the only guy whose OPS went up in the postseason um so it closes the gap and so then that closed the gap as hitters and then you might argue that Jeter's ability to play shortstop and run the bases made him a better player in the postseason. I would argue, I don't know, we don't have postseason wars, but I would guess that Jeter's war per X number of games was higher than Chipper's was. And so how much, I mean, the postseason is significantly, significantly more valuable than the regular season.

So that might close a decent portion of the gap there. I don't think either one necessarily gets any benefit. We don't know enough to say either one gets any benefit for clubhouse stuff. They both had very good reputations for that. And so I would call that a wash i don't know about the marketing value of either one yeah especially if you took jeter out of new york or right chipper in new york yes then who really who knows what that would do to each of them yeah if it's neutral site and neutral team and you assume that a lot of jeter's marquee value comes from playing on great teams

and being on a dynasty and obviously he was part of that but there was there were many other parts of that and he was in the biggest media market at the time so yeah if you moved if you moved him to atlanta during the years when chipper was in atlanta maybe he doesn't have a significantly higher profile than Chipper did. Jeter also, this can go either way, but Jeter played a lot more games. He was available. Chipper had the sort of injury years. And so you could say, oh, well, it just puts his war lead in even starker contrast, because on a rate basis,

he was even that much better than Jeter, or you could say, well, if nothing else, I mean, Jeter was there every day for, you know, with the 2003 exception, he was there every day for like 16 years, and that has a certain amount of value in building a roster. I think I'd take Chipper by an invisible margin.

Yeah, and we might even be overselling the playing time angle. I mean, if you look at just games played, I mean, Jeter played 20 seasons, Chipper played 19. The games played gap between them is about 250, not even quite 250. And Chipper played one season less. And, I mean, he had those injury years toward the end, but in his prime and really until he was in his early 30s, he was playing 150-plus games every year. year so cheater a bit more durable i suppose but not not a huge amount i guess i guess i would probably side with you it's it's close i don't think the gap is as big as the career wars or warps would suggest but i think i'd probably still give chipper the edge.

Yeah, it really comes down to how much you credit Jeter with the postseason success. And if you think that there's not a huge difference between what each of them offers and did in the postseason, then yeah, I don't think Jeter can close that gap. Mm-hmm. Okay, so that's it for today. and did in the postseason. And yeah, I don't think Cheater can close that gap. Okay, so that's it for today. We have already told you to subscribe to the Play Index, but please do so. Coupon code BP.

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