The Benefits of Lowered Expectations

There’s this guy in my office who really knows how to look busy.  Whenever he walks around to have a smoke or grab some coffee he always carries a clipboard with him and never looks any of his superiors directly in the eye when he’s walking through the hall.  He’s mastered the art of looking like he’s solving complex problems in his head simply by maintaining this expression on his face which looks like he’s trying hold in a fart.  If he knows I’m staying late he’ll leave a pair of old glasses on his keyboard and leave his lamp on and bail early.  By leaving his desk like that it looks like he just stepped out and will be right back, that way if anyone pops their head in looking for him, they’ll think he’s also burning the midnight oil.  I, of course, turn out the light for him when I leave.

He’s also good at doing enough work for the right people to make it look like he’s getting a lot done.  His favorite projects are the ones that are long with ambiguous results that aren’t easily quantified.  And he’s great at corporate speak to the point where he can hold one of those long conversations that mean nothing but last hours.  When it comes time to make layoffs, his name never gets mentioned, that’s how valuable people think he is despite his complete and total lack of ability.

I bring all this up because Derek Jeter just won another Gold Glove award yesterday.

It sorta makes sense.  I mean he plays for the Yankees and had a great year with his bat.  He committed the fewest errors with his glove among all qualifying shortstops and had the best fielding percentage.  He looks like he’s a valuable defensive shortstop if you just glance at him in the hallways or watch him from across the office as he writes emails to his friends about his upcoming Fantasy Football Draft.  And every now and again he’ll range to his right and make a jumping throw that narrowly beats a fat guy to first and everyone will ooh and ahh the same way my bosses did when my buddy submitted his work a day early for a big deadline because he got his dates mixed up.  But what the bosses don’t see is how balls get passed him so easily.  How all those grounders up the middle are never even considered playable when Jetes is playing short.

Let’s consider the obvious flaw in relying solely on errors and fielding percentage.  If you’ve ever watched a good defensive shortstop, someone like Adam Everett or Elvis Andrus, then you’ll realize how many balls those guys with speed get to that Jeter doesn’t have a shot at.

To really understand how average he is, let’s have a quick and realistic thought exercise: Let’s say that Andrus and Everett are able to get to 1 more ball up the middle per game that Cap’n Jetes doesn’t get anywhere near.  This is a realistic number because each of them has a Range Factor per Game which is about 1 point higher than Derek’s. [Ed--Range Factor measures how many put outs and assists a player has in a season...thus how many more outs they are recording]  Now having a RF/G which is 1 point higher implies that these players are able to get to the toughest of the tough balls, the ones that have a lot of zip on them.  So if these guys can get to these extra 130 or so hits up the middle in a single season, the ones that are the hardest balls to field, the odds are that from time to time they’re going to make an error on some of them.  But that doesn’t really matter because they’re still making outs that Jeter just watches go by.

It is not surprising then that Andrus was responsible for 122 more outs than the Cap’n despite playing 23 fewer innings.  Yes, in spite of his 14 extra errors, Andrus was responsible for recording more outs.  That’s not too difficult to understand because he’s recording outs on all those balls that don’t get past him.  He’s able to knock down about 100 balls that Jetes can’t get anywhere near so who cares if he makes errors on 14 of them.  He’s still doing a far better job than that overrated pinstriped hack, no?