8th
J-Roll’s D and America’s Pastime
Traditionalist baseball folks like to talk about “intangibles,” those little things that don’t show up in the box score or on the highlight reel, and we got a real example of that in Team USA’s thrilling 6-5 World Baseball Classic victory over Canada in front of a boisterous crowd of over 40,000 in Toronto’s Rogers Centre. I’m not talking about Derek Jeter’s leadership, either — though that was certainly evident to anyone who watched the game or listened to the announcers. No, I’m talking about the play in the 9th inning that likely saved the game for the US, one that occurred after manager Davey Johnson decided to take The Captain out of the game.
Removing your leader from a tense game in an amped-up, partisan environment may seem like a suspect move until we consider a simple truth about baseball: the most important thing that doesn’t show up in the box score isn’t leadership, but defense — and not the absence of soul-shattering errors or the presence jaw-dropping web gems, but the basic ability to turn batted balls into outs. Jeter’s long been one of the more sure-handed shortstops, but as Brian Cartwright points out:
making outs on the balls you get to is not nearly the total measure of an infielder’s range. While it is easy to remember the booted grounder, it seems that we don’t mentally catalogue how many extra grounders make their way to the outfield for a hit. This is where Jeter falls down…
The player with the highest rate of grounders kept in the infield is Adam Everett at 83.5%, while the worst is Ramon Vazquez at 76.5%. Jeter is next to last at 77.3%. No other shortstop today has such a wide divergence of the highly visible “hands” and the nearly invisible “range” as Jeter.
Let’s say we are designing a table top baseball game (that’s what we played before PCs were invented), and then let’s rate the shortstops on their range. 76.5% of groundballs to short are always outs, 16.5% are always hits. That leaves 7.0% to be contested. For those, we have to roll a 20-sided die. Vazquez is a 0, Everett is a 20, Jeter is a 2. If we roll a 1 or a 2, Jeter gets to the ball - anything from 3 to 20, it goes to the outfield. The difference from best to worst, over a full season, is about 40 hits.
The man Jeter was lifted in favor of is not just better than The Captain; he’s a truly fantastic defensive shortstop. Since 2002, Jimmy Rollins has a 34.7 UZR, while Jeter’s is at -39.8 — a difference of almost 75 runs, or about seven and a half wins. And J-Roll’s superior glovework provided the margin of victory yesterday afternoon.
Canada’s lineup is fat in the middle and thin around the edges. Russell Martin, Joey Votto, Justin Morneau, and Jason Bay could cuff around even the best major league pitchers — and they did just that earlier in the game, leaving Jake Peavy with a headache and two runs to his name after an uncharacteristically shaky three innings. All four of them would get an at-bat in the 9th with Canada trailing by two, but first, USA closer JJ Putz had to face a light-hitting 29-year-old career minor leaguer named Adam Stern. Stern rapped a hard grounder that seemed even harder thanks to the smooth artificial turf of the Rogers Centre. But no matter: J-Roll smoothly ranged far to his right and made a seemingly pedestrian backhanded stab that kept his weight evenly distributed, then used that weight to fire a rocket across the diamond and nab the speedy Stern by maybe an eighth of a step.
It’s a good thing, too, because Stern wasn’t the only one Putz couldn’t fool yesterday: Martin followed with a towering fly off the left-center field wall that missed being a home run by maybe two feet; Votto muscled a broken-bat double to right-center that brought Canada within one and would have tied the game had Stern been on base; Morneau hit one on the nose that luckily went right to Rollins; and, finally, Bay worked a tough eight-pitch at-bat that ended with a lazy fly to right.
The US won, but it only did so because of Jimmy Rollins’ defense. It’s amazing to watch stand-out defensive players like J-Roll, the way they move so fluidly and easily, so in control of their bodies, making plays that almost no one else could in a way that makes it seem like everyone else should. That’s always been the charm of baseball, really: the normal human body — fat, lean, or bulky, it doesn’t matter — making extraordinary physical feats seem within the grasp of us ordinary observers.
J-Roll’s play isn’t the kind that shows up in the box score or on the highlight reel, but it’s also not the kind of play that shortstops like Derek Jeter can make. I really hope traditionalists can learn to appreciate all the things that don’t show up in a standard box score yet still add so much to the game of baseball, but I’m not holding my breath that it’ll happen any time soon. So for now, I just hope Davey Johnson gives a little more playing time to Jimmy Rollins — starting tonight, when the boys take the field against Venezuela. It would be a fitting way to display our nation’s great game to the world.
