This article originally ran in February, and is now being re-posted on account of Derek Jeter.

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Run a Google search for “Derek Jeter” and “defense” and you get almost 700,000 results. Run a Google search for “Chipper Jones” and you get fewer than 450,000 results. I suppose now you can bump each of those up by one. The matter of Jeter’s defense is a tired, tired topic, and it was a tired, tired topic years ago. Personally, I try to avoid tired topics. But in this instance, I think there’s something; something not enough attention has been paid to on account of the raging argument elsewhere. People have argued about only part of the story.

You all should be familiar with the position of the advanced defensive metrics like DRS and UZR. It’s because of those metrics that an argument exists in the first place. Jeter loyalists have continued to insist he was at least a solid defensive shortstop in the past. UZR has disagreed, and DRS has more extremely disagreed, as they’ve both evaluated Jeter as subpar for the position. On the occasion of Jeter’s retirement announcement, there were people who couldn’t help but make fun of his defensive ability, and he’s been the butt of such jokes for much of his career. Jeter’s often been described as an awful defensive shortstop, or as something along those lines. While there’s been some basis for this, though, one of the key words in that description is “shortstop.”

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Yasmany Tomas, LF

Hit: 40/45+, Game Power: 55/65, Raw Power: 70/70, Speed: 45/45+, Field: 45/50, Arm: 45/45+

Upside: .275/.350/.480 with 25-30 homers, fringy defense & baserunning value in left field

Note: The “upside” line is basically a 75 percentile projection as explained here, while the tool grades are a 50 percentile projection. See the scale here to convert the hit/power tool grades into production.

Tomas is the latest Cuban defector to hit the market: he should be declared a free agent shortly and is holding private workouts in the Dominican this week after a big open workout for over 100 scouts from all 30 clubs on Sunday at the Giants Dominican complex. The above video is from last summer when the Cuban national team faced college Team USA in Durham, North Carolina. The Cuban team had a lot of trouble making contact against a loaded USA pitching staff (five pitchers from the staff went in the first round last June) and Tomas in particular struggled, going 3-for-19 with 3 singles, 1 walk and 8 punch outs over the 5 game set. Tomas was in bad shape and looked lost at the plate at times when I saw him, but he has shown big league ability in other international tournaments and as a professional in Cuba.

The carrying tool here is raw power, which draws anywhere from 60 to 70 grades on the 20-80 scale from scouts, but the question mark is how much he will hit.  Tomas has a short bat path for a power hitter and quick hands that move through the zone quickly.  The tools are here for at least an average hitter, but Tomas’ plate discipline has been questioned and he can sometimes sell out for pull power in games (here’s video of a particularly long homer in the WBC).  Some scouts think it’s more of a 40-45 bat (.240 to .250 average) that may keep Tomas from getting to all of his raw power in games, while others see a soon-to-be-24-year-old with the tools to hit and think the hot streak of Cuban hitters in the big leagues will continue with him.

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The Yankees haven’t had a very good season. They’re 81-75, and are likely going to finish 10+ games out of first place for the second year in a row; the first time that has happened since 1992. Fun piece of trivia unrelated to the rest of this post: their manager in 1992 was Buck Showalter, whose team is the reason they’re so far out of first place this year.

But this isn’t a post about Buck Showalter, or even about the Yankees lousy season. This is a post about the thing the Yankees did this year that went really well. At the trade deadline, they weren’t so close to the race that they could justify making big moves to add star players, but they’re also the Yankees, so they weren’t going to punt the season in July. This left them in the position of wanting to upgrade their roster without borrowing significantly from their future to do so, which meant that they had to go dumpster diving. Or, maybe phrased more politely, they had to target buy-low players in the midst of down years and hope that their early struggles weren’t predictive of future performance.

This low-cost upgrade plan began in earnest on July 6th, when the acquired Brandon McCarthy from the D’Backs. On July 22nd, they got Chase Headley from the Padres. On July 24th, they bought Chris Capuano from the Rockies. On July 31st, they acquired Martin Prado from the D’Backs, Stephen Drew from the Red Sox, and claimed Esmil Rogers off waivers from the Blue Jays. And then on August 28th, they signed Chris Young after the Mets cut him loose.

Over the course of a couple of months, they brought in eight new players, and the total cost was a couple of non-elite prospects and some cash. How has it worked out?

Here are the players PA/IP totals and WAR totals for their seasons before joining NYY, and then after. Since we’re focusing heavily on players who were regression candidates, we’ll use RA9-WAR instead of FIP-WAR, since a high runs allowed total is what allowed these pitchers to be available in the first place.

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When the Yankees traded for Michael Pineda, they didn’t know he’d need surgery on his shoulder labrum. Had they known that, they certainly wouldn’t have agreed to the move. See, that’s because labral tears are big deals, the sorts of things that can end careers before they really get started. Anyhow, Pineda underwent the operation, and on the other end, the Yankees weren’t sure what they’d be left with. They didn’t know what a post-op Michael Pineda might turn into. If 2014’s any indication, he’s turned into Michael Pineda, only even more aggressive than before. He’s turned into the kind of guy the Yankees are thrilled to have on their payroll.

This easily could’ve been a disaster of a season. In the very early going, Pineda had that humiliating incident with the pine tar. Shortly thereafter, he dealt with an injury that knocked him out for months. Between April 23 and August 3, Pineda didn’t pitch in an official game, and it seemed like the whole year could be a wash. But Pineda was able to move back to the Yankees quickly from there, and a dominant outing Monday night only underscored the fact that Pineda’s re-established himself as a building block for the present and for the future.

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Because this is an internet baseball column in the year 2014, Derek Jeter was its original subject. The world doesn’t really need another Jeter column, especially one that smugly notes the uncanny similarities between Jeter’s season as a 40-year old shortstop and the 2007 season of Omar Vizquel, the last man to qualify for the batting title as a quadragenarian in the middle of the diamond.

Nobody needs to read that column. The Jeter farewell tour is almost over, and those who want it go to away will be happy and those who appreciate the generation of superlative play Jeter provided will be sad. My opinion on the matter doesn’t really matter. The exercise did bear fruit in one way, however. Looking that the Yankee Captain’s age-40 season (poor, even by 40-year old infielder standards) got me thinking about Jeter’s age-35 season, which was truly one for the ages.

It was 2009 and the Yankees won the World Series, thanks to Jeter’s heroics and a host of very pricey teammates all contributing in significant ways. But Jeter was incredible that year, posting a 130 wRC+ and just under 7 WAR* – it works out to be one of the ten best age-35 seasons since World War II.

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Numbers are the easy part, so let’s start with some numbers. David Price got thrashed by the Yankees, ending with twice as many hits allowed as outs recorded. He was charged with eight runs, all of them scoring in the top of the third, which Price began, but which Price was removed from without getting an out. That third inning saw Price allow nine consecutive hits, the first time that’s happened to a pitcher since 1989. The all-time record for consecutive hits in an inning by a team is 11, and that was in Colorado. Never before had Price allowed nine hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed eight hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed seven hits in an inning. Never before had he allowed six hits in an inning. In Price’s previous game, he one-hit the Rays.

Price on Wednesday got one swinging strike. His previous season low was six. In his regular-season career before Wednesday, he’d allowed at least nine hits just 20 times. He’d allowed at least eight runs just four times. Price set a new career Game Score low, of 2. In Price’s own words: “That was probably the worst game I’ve ever had in my life.” It was an awful game, but really, it was an awful inning. And, technically, it was an awful fraction of an inning. David Price is one of the best known pitchers in the universe.

Maybe it’s enough to just say what’s happened. A nine-hit disaster happened, to an excellent pitcher. Maybe now we ought to just move on. But it seems like we should reflect at least a little deeper. It isn’t often a terrific pitcher gets lit up like this. It isn’t often a team manages to string a bunch of hits together, and nine is extreme. We should go past just the numbers. What in the hell was that top of the third? Can the video show us anything?

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The August waiver period can be an interesting time, because it gives you a little bit of insight into how teams around the bigs value certain players. For example, it came as absolutely no surprise that the overpriced and under-performing Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier made it through waivers, or that Cole Hamels, Bryce Harper and Stephen Strasburg did not. It came as a bit of a surprise that Jon Niese did get through, which maybe tells you something about how other teams view his shoulder and that he’s perhaps not as valuable as Mets fans seemed to think; if the worst-case scenario is that the Mets stick you with the $16 million he has left after this year and still nobody was interested, that’s not a great sign.

For guys like Crawford, Ethier and others, their contracts were signed years ago, and obviously much has changed since then, so it’s most interesting to see how the industry reacts to players who were popular free agents just last winter, a mere eight months or so ago. While obviously not every roster move or claim is public, we know of at least one: Curtis Granderson, who signed for four years and $60 million with the Mets. Even with the desperate need for offense around the majors, Granderson, on pace for only a two-win season despite a rebound from a slow start, went unclaimed. At 33, two years off his last good season and three years away from his last great one, the risk wasn’t worth it.

This isn’t about Granderson, though; it’s about one of the other major New York signings from last winter who is off to an atrocious start in his new home and has a considerable amount of money still coming: Brian McCann, who returned from a stay on the concussion list yesterday. We don’t know if McCann has been put on waivers or if anyone would put in a claim — you imagine a rich team with catching issues like the Dodgers would at least think about it, though not necessarily do it — but isn’t it fascinating to think that if someone did claim him, the Yankees might be best off just letting him go?

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Chris Capuano and Shane Greene have not given up an earned run in the last two Yankee games, and it’s just like Brian Cashman must have drawn it up. A veteran lefty who hadn’t started all year and a sinker-slider righty that put up an ERA in the high fours in Triple-A this year — of course it’s working out.

Capuano has a track record that suggests he’s not too far from his true talent level, but Greene’s rest-of-season ERA projections (by ZiPs at least) are two runs higher than what he’s showing right now. Given his minor league numbers, we know why that is. But given what he’s doing now, is there a chance he might beat those projections?

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Note: We’re thrilled to have Drew Fairservice join the FanGraphs team of writers. He’ll be contributing here on a regular basis, and we think you’ll like him a lot.

In the run-up to the trade deadline, we read countless reports of team X sending scouts to watch player Y’s next start, a standard baseball practice which seems weird because it isn’t as though Jon Lester, David Price, et al are unknown commodities. Why go watch them? What could scouts possibly see in a handful of July starts that might sway any decision to acquire such proven big league talent, especially on a rental basis?

Our projection systems provide a snapshot of the potential gains grabbing such a player delivers between the deadline and the end of the season. Using the available means, we roughly figure the Tigers can expect a couple wins from Price in the regular season over Drew Smyly.

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Several weeks ago, Drew Fairservice talked to Marcus Stroman about a pretty lousy start. There’s a lot in there that’s stuck with me, but in particular it was interesting to see what Stroman said about facing Brett Gardner. An excerpt:

A guy like Gardner, he battles. He’ll battle whatever pitch you’re throwing in there, he’ll foul off. He’s almost the guy you want to force him to put the ball in the play and whatever happens, happens.
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You don’t want to be too “nitpicky” with him. He’s a great hitter but he’s not a guy you want to pitch around. If he gets a hit, he gets a hit. You don’t want to waste pitches.

The numbers have always suggested as much, but Stroman confirmed it from a pitcher’s perspective: the idea with Gardner is to make him put the ball in play early, because he’s only so much of a threat. He’s not a guy you want to be too careful with. He was just ranked the second-best bunter in the American League, and he didn’t get that good by chance. Gardner’s perceived as a pesky, disciplined slap hitter, and pitchers always try to be aggressive around the zone so as to not get unnecessarily fatigued.

As I write this, Gardner’s tied in home runs with Carlos Gomez and Adrian Beltre. He’s ahead of Yasiel Puig and Buster Posey. Gardner’s hit as many home runs as he hit in the majors between 2008 – 2012 combined. For years, Gardner was pitched to like he was one thing. That much remains true, but he’s not that one thing any longer.

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