Between Jeter breaking the record for most hits for a shortstop and Jeff posting about how he's one of the best ever, I figured I'd take a quick glance at the all time greats.
To do that let's take a look at Rally's Historical WAR for shortstops.
Honus Wagner - 134.7
Alex Rodriguez - 95.2
George Davis - 90.7
Cal Ripken - 89.8
Robin Yount - 76.8
Arky Vaughn - 75.6
Luke Appling - 68.9
Barry Larkin - 68.8
Alan Trammel - 66.8
Pee Wee Reese - 66.4
Ozzie Smith - 64.7
Joe Cronin - 62.6
Derek Jeter - 62.2
First thoughts are that Larkin and Trammel should be in the Hall, they are top 5-10 shortstops of all time.
Back to Jeter. It's important to know that Rally's Historical WAR takes defense into account, so you can't whine about Jeter's defense hurting his value because it already has. Anyways, as you can see Derek Jeter is already one of the best shortstops of all time, not that anyone thought otherwise but it's cool to see. The question then is exactly how good is he or will he be in the world of shortstops?
Alex Rodriguez is more of a 3b, Robin Yount played half a career in CF, and George Davis basically played a different game (starting his career in 1890) so you can more or less take them off the list. So with those subtractions, Jeter would become a top 10 shortstop. And that's without accounting for playoffs, championships, and all the other intangibles that come along with Jeter, he's not deserving of all the praise he gets but some of it is at least somewhat warranted.
That list doesn't count this season too, which has been a great one for the Jeter. Fangraphs WAR has jeter at 5.3, probably safe to say he gets to 5.5 or so on a conservative estimate. Fangraphs and Rally have different versions of WAR but for this sake let's just add on Fangraphs 2009 total to Jeter's career. That would put Jeter at 67.7 WAR which if you take out Arod and Yount, places him 6th all time. The thing is Jeter's career isn't over, and if this season is any indication it isn't necessarily close to being older. We can't expect the resurgent 2009 Jeter to repeat this performance for the next couple of years, but even if Jeter just does his "lousy" 2008 in the future (~3 WAR) he'll still rise to third on the list.
Honus Wagner is untouchable, he's a top 10 player of all time, Jeter won't touch him. Cal Ripken is also unlikely, Jeter is 22.1 WAR behind him. To reach Ripken he'll need to play until he's 41 at the same level he is playing at this season. But, Ripken also played a lot of games at 3b, more than I thought with over 28% of Ripken's career being played there. This could get kind of tricky but if Jeter is able to finish his career at SS (and this new found positive defender Jeter could make that possible) you can make the case Jeter is/will be the 2nd best shortstop of all time. Everyone always inherently knew that Jeter was one of the best, but that he could reasonably be the 2nd best isn't something I figured would happen.
UPDATE 12:00 PM: I did this list just using Rally's WAR to make it more simple. However, in reality it's much more complicated. Arky Vaughn had to fight in WWII losing 4 years off his career which kills his WAR but his rate stats are still excellent. Cal Ripken Jr. also hung around forever without being much of a player, which still helps his career WAR. From 1992-2001 his OPS+ was 96. That's to say that for basically half of his career he was a below average hitter playing mostly 3b. It's hard to say what Vaughn would have done if there wasn't a draft, but if Jeter keeps up a similar pace even looking at it through other angles he's still likely looking at being the 2nd best SS to play this game, nice job Cap'n.
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