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September 18, 2006

Prospectus Today

The Question

by Joe Sheehan

When is playing for your own stats acceptable?

One of the tenets about sports that gets beaten into our heads from a very young age is that you play for the team, not for yourself. We celebrate the players who we perceive as ignoring their personal gain for the team--the guy who advances the runner or lays down a sacrifice or throws innings at the expense of his ERA--while sneering at the guys who put up numbers for losing squads. The endless debates between statheads and insiders can be reduced to this difference, one side measuring value and the other insisting that the numbers don’t tell you what a player really does to help his team win, because statistics aren’t really connected to success.

I’m thinking about this today because of what we saw last night. With his team holding a 4-2 lead in the seventh inning, the Yankees’ Derek Jeter came to the plate, runner of second, one out. Jeter entered the game with a 25-game hitting streak, but had yet to connect on this night. Craig Hansen quickly ran the count to 3-0, opening the possibility that Jeter would draw a free pass and, given the score and inning, not get another chance to extend the streak.

Jeter would have none of that, though. Even though Hansen’s 3-0 pitch was likely ball four, outside and possibly low, he took a swing at it and grounded weakly to first base. The runner ended up stranded, and the Yankee bullpen eventually gave up three runs in a 5-4 loss. The play was a fairly crtical one in the game; the difference between first-and-second with one out against runner on third with two out is more than half a run, and a walk there might well have stoked a rally that would have put away the game.

Let's be very clear about this: Jeter was swinging to extend the hitting streak. He took an 0-2 hack on a 3-0 pitch that was likely ball four. This isn’t Jeff Francoeur or Angel Berroa here; this is a disciplined hitter who might well be the most valuable player in the American League this year. In fact, Joe Morgan and Jon Miller had spent a couple of innings at the start of the game discussing that possibility in the context of a larger discussion of what constitutes "value," going so far as to read the voting guidelines for the award. As there is in any Yankees telecast, there was praise for Jeter as a player who is a winner, who does the little things, etc.; what there wasn’t was any discussion, at all, as to the merits of his chasing ball four on a 3-0 count for no reason other than personal advancement. I couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened had another player, a less popular one, one not anointed by the baseball press, taken the same tack in trying to extend his hitting streak.

It was hard for me to not think about Mike Cameron. Back in 2002, Cameron hit four home runs in his first four at-bats in a game against the White Sox. He was hit by a pitch his fifth time up, and then went to 3-0 in his final AB. Despite it being a 15-4 game, and despite his chance at immortality hanging in the balance, Cameron took the 3-0 pitch. I gained a lot of respect for Cameron in that moment, and I think it’s an interesting contrast to Jeter’s seventh-inning hack last night.