Jeter vs. Ozzie, et al.

After hearing countless arguments about the merits of Jeter as a baseball fan living in New York, this is an objective attempt to compare him to the greats of recent generations.

Growing up in southern Indiana, the Wiz was and is naturally a hero of mine.  I was a valiant defender of him as the greatest SS ever, and didn't meet much resistance given my geographic location.  After college, though, I moved out here to NYC and my views have been adamantly ridiculed, with many people making the case that Oz isn't even the best SS of my lifetime, citing Yount, Ripken, and Jeter as more valuable. 

I thought that Yount and Ripken at least had a defensible case, but was convinced that the Jeter argument had to be completely biased.  Everyday someone is praising Jeter's calm eyes and clutch ability and cute butt or whatever else that doesn't matter, and there was no way he could stack up to the Wiz in actual value in my mind.  So like any robot making an argument in a bar, I crunched some data from baseballprojection.com and tried to objectively compare them.

I had read a piece by Sky Kalkman a few weeks back that graded Boggs (the good one), Gwynn, and Ripken, and his methodology is shamelessly stolen here.

First, I looked at WAR for each of their seasons (more applicable than VORP because defense is clearly the deciding factor here, given the amount of times someone on the YES network says "Past a diving Jeter"):

(sorry if the graphs are a little fuzzy, click on them for a clearer view)

As you can see, Jeter is pretty much in line or better than these guys for most of his career.  He definitely outperformed Ozzie at the beginning as a youngster, with Oz outperforming him as the two aged.  This makes sense as it is probable that defensive skills diminish less quickly than offense in a PED-free scenario.

It also makes sense to compare the two via a perspective of dominance vs. longevity, so I sorted this data by each player's best season:

So what have I learned from all this?  First, Cal Ripken was good.  Really good.  Playing in all those games inflated his WAR stats (since it's counting), and "The Streak" really shows its value here.

With respect to Jeter though, the case can definitely be made that he is as valuable as Oz thus far; with Jeter's WAR numbers basically in line with Ozzie's through similar points in their careers.  As much as I hate to put someone on that level, these numbers speak for themselves without counting any World Series titles or personal accolades (albeit often frivolous or at least biased in nature) that Yankees fans weigh so heavily.

Jeter looks to be showing signs of age, however, so the ultimate judgment will hinge on whether he can maintain his offensive production to overcome his liability on defense.  The jury is still out, but this exercise has proven that Jeter has value not just in intangibles.

Of course, if anyone has any unique perspectives or other metrics on which to judge the two, please share.