Via River Ave. Blues, Ian O’Connor reports on how Derek Jeter became a good fielder:
On the recommendation of Jeter’s agent, Casey Close, Riley pieced together a program of drills, and the shortstop started performing them in the first week of January 2008. Cone drills. Shuffle drills. Resistance drills.
Anything that would defy the laws of gravity and make Jeter a more explosive lateral force.
“I’d put a belt around his waist and have him do a full-speed sprint with resistance,” Riley said. “His goal was to cover 5 to 7 yards, but we’d be getting 20 to 30 steps in those 5 to 7 yards.
“We were re-coaching his first step, over and over. … I think he hated doing these drills at first, because it’s almost like reeducating a little kid. An accomplished athlete is like, ‘I don’t want to do this because it makes me look stupid.’ And then suddenly, Derek was killing those drills.”
I feel vindicated, and I’m sure John Dewan and MGL feel the same way. Back in 2003, Jeter didn’t buy the demise of his fielding skills. My guess is the steady stream of studies showing Derek wasn’t that good finally convinced him, but it took four years. Imagine if he had started that program before the 2004 season.
On the other hand, it took a good ten years for the sabermetric community to get OBP main stream acceptance (it started appearing on ESPN baseball broadcasts in the early 1990s). It took less than half that time to change the way a star player thought about his defense.
Update: Lyflines expands on the time it took OBP to get accepted:
It took a lot longer than 10 years for OBP to make its way into the mainstream. There certainly was a big push for acknowledging its importance made by sabremetricians in the 80s, but it wasn’t a new statistic then. Branch Rickey was preaching it (though not, apparently, by that name) in a national magazine back in the 50s. The name “on-base percentage” goes back at least to the early 60s. The earliest it appears in a game story (or at least, I haven’t found an earlier mention) in the New York Times is on May 17, 1964.
All true. However, OBP (I still prefer OBA, but no one else seems to use it) was never an official stat until a CBA called for a rating of free agents to determine compensation to the losing team. Because of that, the OBP we use does not include all plate appearances leaving out sacrifice hits (bunts) and catcher interference. The adoption of OBP as an official stat came about the time sabermetric community started pushing it hard. It took a long time for it to go from concept to stat, and then about 10 years to go from stat to something main stream. My thanks to Lyflines for clarifying that.