Derek Jeter has appeared in the most wins by a Yankees player
Posted by Andy on December 8, 2010
| Rk | Player | #Matching |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Derek Jeter | 1379 |
| 2 | Mickey Mantle | 1376 |
| 3 | Lou Gehrig | 1323 |
| 4 | Babe Ruth | 1277 |
| 5 | Yogi Berra | 1275 |
| 6 | Bernie Williams | 1211 |
| 7 | Joe DiMaggio | 1100 |
| 8 | Bill Dickey | 1085 |
| 9 | Phil Rizzuto | 1039 |
| 10 | Frankie Crosetti | 1029 |
So there you have it. Jeter just passed Mantle for most wins by a Yankee. The above list is for 1920-present, but the Elias Sports Bureau's list for the all-time leaders is the same.
Click through for more info.
I found this bit of info in a post at the LoHud Yankees Blog, which contained the text of a press release the Yankees made about Jeter. At first I thought it was pretty silly, until I saw how Jeter had just passed Mantle.
Here is the list of most losses by a Yankee player since 1920:
| Rk | Player | #Matching |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Mickey Mantle | 1016 |
| 2 | Derek Jeter | 914 |
| 3 | Roy White | 891 |
| 4 | Bernie Williams | 862 |
| 5 | Don Mattingly | 844 |
| 6 | Yogi Berra | 836 |
| 7 | Lou Gehrig | 822 |
| 8 | Babe Ruth | 801 |
| 9 | Willie Randolph | 720 |
| 10 | Jorge Posada | 720 |
So Mantle and Jeter are 1-2 on this one too, and Jeter will move into first place within two years.
Here are some thoughts about these two lists:
- Jeter benefits tremendously from joining the majors' winningest franchise during one if its greatest periods. He started with them in 1996 just as they won their first championship in a while and has been along for the wild ride since that includes a winning record every season, playoff appearances every season but one, and a total of 5 World Series championships. Jeter, of course, deserves some credit for being a central part of the franchise's success over that time.
- It's pretty telling to see how many more wins the leaders have than losses. That speaks to the overall success of the Yankees. For example, I see Jorge Posada makes the list of most losses with 720 but doesn't make the top 10 in wins. His 994wins with the Yankees doesn't make the top 10. This phenomenon may also select for players who play for a team during winning periods, when there might be less player turnover, meaning that players for one team tend to accumulate for wins than losses.
- For comparison, the all-time wins leader for the Phillies is Mike Schmidt with 1,261. Schmidt is also the all-time leader in losses. Among the top 10 overall, the totals are more similar than for the Yankees' two top 10 lists. I think these numbers pretty much confirm what I said above. Schmidt himself has more wins than losses by virtue of sticking with the team through its biggest period of success (before present, at least) but in general the leading players have about as many losses as wins, unlike the discrepancy on the Yanks' lists.
December 8th, 2010 at 10:10 am
Both guys started their careers during very successful seasons and won many games throughout their carreers. Obviously the problem for Mantle is the 1965-1968 Yankee teams. The way the Yanks spend money now, it is unlikely that Jeter will have to suffer through similar second division finishes.
December 8th, 2010 at 10:28 am
I'd expect the teams win leaders to generally be more than the loss leaders for the reason you mentioned in your comments - more turnover in losing years.
The fact that the lists were similar for a franchise as historically poor as the Phillies says to me that it's more likely that most teams are in between the Yankees and Phillies. Generally more wins among the win leaders than losses among loss leaders.
December 8th, 2010 at 10:33 am
[...] original here: Derek Jeter has appeared in the most wins by a Yankees player Tags: game finders, press-release, world-series Posted in: [...]
December 8th, 2010 at 10:36 am
The Yankees are amazing at marketing their franchise. Its not the fans and message boards either... the team itself is really good at it. It seems like there is always some press release about player X passing player Y on the all-time franchise list. I wish more teams would do that.
Schmidt is 75th and Jeter is 105th on the all-time "games" list with many single-franchise (or near-single-franchise) players ahead of them on the list. Yastrzemski, Musial, Ripken, BRobinson, Yount, Biggio & Kaline only played for one franchise. Cobb, Aaron, Mays only played a small amount for a second franchise. Rose played 2700+ games for the Reds. None of them can match Jeter's winning percentage, but several of them consistently played for upper-division teams.
December 8th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Jeter is overrated. He makes ARod money but he's never been that type of MVP/dominating player like an ARod or Manny or Pujols.
December 8th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Woah! Jeter's almost 3 times better than Cy Young! He makes Greg Maddux's 355 wins look pithetic! He's got to be the greatest player ever. I mean com'on, 1379 W's!
Funny thing is, I can see all the people arguing for pitcher wins as a super telling stat, as also arguing that Jeter's 1379 win appearances don't mean much 'cause he didn't win them by himself. Which would be a hilarious read.
Seriously though, this is pretty cool. There's a tool over at Baseball Musings that'll tell you a team's record when a player is in the game and I love playing with that. Checking on the Yankees from 8/1/2006 thru the end of '10, we see Cano has played in 4 more wins than Jeter. It really doesn't tell much without knowing details like... how many times did each one hit a 9th inning HR, or did one of them make a crucial error?
But, now that I think about it, this could be cited by "win junkies" as proof that Jeter's on the downside of his career.
December 8th, 2010 at 11:32 am
Interesting stuff, Andy.
And since you mentioned Posada, here's something that piques my curiosity:
Jeter: 1379 wins, 914 losses, .601 W%
--Posada: 994 wins, 720 losses, .580 W%
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Difference: 385 wins, 194 losses, .665 W%
It's a big difference. Is it meaningful?
Their careers basically overlap, with 2 exceptions: Jeter was an everyday player for 2 years before Posada (1996-97), and Posada missed most of the 2008 season. Other than that, the difference in their playing time is just the normal yearly difference between a shortstop and a catcher.
We won't find an explanation of their disparate W%'s in those gap years; the Yanks' combined W% in 1996-97 and 2008 was just .570, which would have the exact opposite effect of what we're looking for.
I'm simplifying just a bit; Jeter missed 20 games total in those 3 years, while Posada played in 119 games total. Also, it's not as though the difference between Jeter's and Posada's wins and losses represents exactly the games that Jeter played but Posada missed.
I'm not going to chase this thing any farther, because it's not interesting or important enough to do the grunt work. My hunch is that it's not a meaningful difference. I'd guess that most of the difference comes from 2 sources which are not directly related to the players' actual game impact:
(1) Posada has appeared in far more games as a pinch-hitter (152 to 7), and since a PH is most often used when the team is trailing, this would be a drag on Posada's W%.
(2) In many years, one or two of New York's top starting pitchers preferred working with the club's #2 catcher. For example, in 1998, Joe Girardi was behind the plate for all but 1 of David Cone's starts; Cone went 20-7. Posada caught the bulk of starts by Hideki Irabu, whose 13-9 record was the worst on the staff. This pattern would also tend to depress Posada's W%.
December 8th, 2010 at 11:34 am
Do all the pre-expansion teams have a 1,000 win guy in their history? Also, do any of the expansion teams? It would seem unlikely but I guess a few of the teams from the 60's could possibly have one...
December 8th, 2010 at 11:38 am
@7 you got me interested... so I took a quick look. Games in which Posada entered as a PH or PR the team was 55-97.
December 8th, 2010 at 11:39 am
Sorry, hit post too quickly...
Jeter is 2-6 in those same games....
December 8th, 2010 at 11:53 am
Personally, I'd like to see Jeter pass Mickey on the losses list THIS year. 🙂
December 8th, 2010 at 11:59 am
@9/10, Thomas -- Well done. If we take out each player's games as a substitute, the difference in W% dwindles away to a couple of points.
December 8th, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Just for laughs ....
Tino Martinez's .607 W% with the Yankees is even better than Jeter's.
(581 Wins, 388 Losses.)
December 8th, 2010 at 12:48 pm
@ 8: George Brett played in 1452 Royal wins.
December 8th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Good stuff, John and Thomas.
It would be interesting to see the Yankees' record over the years in games Jeter (or Posada, or whoever) has missed. Obviously in any single season, a team could play well in games its star sits out, but over a career some of the noise would be filtered out.
December 8th, 2010 at 1:05 pm
I think there is an issue with the "Finish" column on the team history & encyclopedia pages (the Yankees is wrong at least).
This thread had me interested in looking at the various winning pct of the Yankee teams. I was looking at the Yanks team history and encyclopedia page and saw some of the "Finish" column entries look incorrect.
Examples:
2002 - "1st of 8"
1988 - "5th of 10"
1968 - "5th of 5"
December 8th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
@15, Johnny Twisto --
Treating just the games that the players started or didn't start:
Jeter:
-- Yanks with Jeter in the lineup, .602 (1374-908)
-- Yanks without Jeter, .597 (86-58)
Posada:
-- Yanks with Posada in the lineup, .602 (932-617)
-- Yanks without Posada, .602 (528-349)
Before we conclude that Jeter and Posada have had little impact on the Yankee fortunes, we must remember that there's likely some selection bias in the samples -- e.g., star players are more likely to get a day off against a weaker opponent.
December 8th, 2010 at 1:34 pm
Tmck, you should submit that through the bug report page. In my experience, problems listed here don't get noticed by the powers that be, but they respond to every bug report. http://www.baseball-reference.com/feedback/
December 8th, 2010 at 2:29 pm
ok JT, Thanks.
December 8th, 2010 at 5:43 pm
In your post you refer to Elias to conclude that the Yankees top 10 in wins is correct even for the pre-1920 era. But you don't need Elias -- PI can confirm that for you:.
Number 10 on your post-1920 wins list is Frankie Crosetti, who played in 1,029 Yankee wins. Using the PI Season Finder (which goes back pre-1920) you can't search for wins a guy played in but you can search for total games he played in, and you can see that only three Yankees franchise players who played part or all of their career with the franchise before 1920 played over 1,000 games for the franchise: Wally Pipp, Roger Peckinpaugh and Hal Chase. Obviously these are the only three guys we need to worry about because unless a guy played in 1,000 games for the franchise he certainly couldn't have played in 1,000 wins for the franchise.
Pipp played for the Yankees from 1915 through 1925. B-ref's Situational Records tool tells us that the Yankees franchise won 903 games over those years. So even if Pipp played in every single win the Yankees achieved throughout Pipp's career with the team (of course we know he didn't, being the victim of perhaps the most famous benching in the history of pro sports, but even supposing he had), he could not have played in more than 903 wins, well short of Crosetti's 1,029 number. The same exercise shows that the absolute maximum number of Yankee wins Peckinpaugh could theoretically have played in over his seasons with the team is only 680 and for Hal Chase the number is 627. So even without Elias, your top 10 can be confirmed as accurate just relying on b-ref resources.
December 8th, 2010 at 8:23 pm
If the season wasn't longer, Jeter wouldn't be up there. Mickey played in 154 game seasons for the first nine years of his career. That would be 72 fewer games. If the Yankees had just won half of the hypothetical 72 games, and Mickey had played in most of them, he would have at least 30 more wins on this. Not to mention what the others in the list would have.
#14--Being a Royals fan since 1972, I'm glad you looked that up about Brett. However, he is also an expansion player. After all the Royals were an expansion team. Pre-expansion would be 1960 for the AL and 1961 for the NL.
December 9th, 2010 at 8:10 am
@15: Re "Obviously in any single season, a team could play well in games its star sits out...", to cite a recent example, in 2010 A-Rod missed 25 games, and the Yankees went 21-4 in those games (including 12-0 to start).
December 9th, 2010 at 9:19 am
"Deserves some credit". I would say so, Andy. It's hard to think of anyone who would deserve more as an individual.
December 9th, 2010 at 1:45 pm
I just like that it looks like 23 Honus Wagners are having a conversation
December 9th, 2010 at 7:54 pm
@8: The Mets have no 1,000 game winner, not even a 750 game winner, but Ed Kranepool played in more than 1,100 Mets losses. Over 400 more than any other Met. Awesome.
December 9th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
Mantle's totals were skewed by the fact that during his last three years {1966 to 1968}, the Yanks basically sucked canal water. Several decent players -- Mantle, White, Bobby Murcer and Mel Stottlemyre come quickly to mind -- were denied quite a bit of respect because they were Yankees during that period'
December 9th, 2010 at 11:44 pm
Frank, I'm sorry but you are penalized 10 points for not referring to that as "the Horace Clarke Era." Without our cliches, what are we?
Actually, the Yankee decline is overstated. They did fall off hard in '65, but they were only really bad in '66-'67. (And not horrible, they still won 70 games.) From that point on they were a pretty decent team until breaking through again and taking the '76 pennant.