Where have all the shortstops gone?

By Joe Schackman

Shortstop was a star-studded position in 90's and early 2000's. What happened?

Every little league team has that one kid who lives, eats, and breathes baseball. That kid who is a natural-born ballplayer: he is more athletic, works harder, and simply cares more about the game.

That kid is not playing first base. He’s not catching, and he’s not out in right field. That kid is, without a doubt, lining up between second and third, playing the most difficult position on the field: shortstop. And right before the pitch, when he settles down into his crouch, he is not dreaming of becoming a Jose Reyes or an Elvis Andrus; rather, he’s striving to be one of the big-hitting Hall-of-Fame shortstops that took the league by storm just a few years ago.

The golden age of shortstops has come and gone. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Major League Baseball hosted some of the most complete players to trot out to the position. Shortstops were traditionally slick-fielding, slash-hitting speed demons who excelled defensively and hit at the top of the order. But starting in 1991, the position added some serious offensive threats, hitters made for the middle of the order.

Since the Most Valuable Player Award was awarded for the first time in 1931, shortstops have won 15 times (though these were not 15 different players). Four of those wins came in during a 12-year stretch from '91 to '03: Ripken in ‘91, Larkin in ‘95, Miguel Tejada in ‘02 and Alex Rodriquez in ‘03.¹ They put up monster offensive stats, highlighted by Ripken’s 34 home runs and 11 WAR in 1991, which qualified as one of the top-80 seasons in the history of baseball.²

Even those teams without an MVP candidate at short seemed to have a premier player, guys like Omar Vizquel, Nomar Garciaparra, and late-career Ozzie Smith.

Today, however, the pool of elite shortstops is much, much smaller. Troy Tulowitzki is one of the best players in the game right now, but the list thins out after that. Hanley Ramirez’s shift over to third base to make room for Jose Reyes only emphasizes this point. Reyes is a high-quality shortstop, but cut from the traditional slash-hitting mold and injury prone.

The question we must ask ourselves now is, Why? Why did those 12 years produce talented players at a position that has never seen that type of production? The answer is not exactly clear.

The first thought would be that teams today have shifted their focus back to defensive-minded shortstops. With the concept of sabermetrics having permeated the league, it appears that defense is really the last fully unexplored frontier. Billy Beane and his Moneyball disciples can no longer find discounted offensive players, so they've tried to exploit the markets in other ways.

But the stats don't support that theory. In fact, if you compare Total Zone (TZ) data for 1996-2003 against data for 2004-10, you’ll find that the league’s shortstops played better overall defense from ‘96-’03 than '04-'10. Over the two periods, the average TZ was 1.17 compared with .55, respectively. Meaning shortstops on average saved their team one more run over the course of a season. Guys like Vizquel and Rey Ordonez might not have lit it up at the plate, but they were some of the best defenders the position has ever seen. They helped to balance out guys like Derek Jeter who, while they excelled at the plate, were below-average defenders.³

So why were the ‘90s the Gilded Age of shortstops? Well, it seems to simply be a matter of the stars aligning. For 12 years, most major shortstop prospects were able to stay healthy and reach the majors, and once there, they played to the best of their ability as a group.

Compare this to latest era of shortstop prosepcts and you’ll see guys who have serious talent but never quite lived up the the billing. Players like Stephen Drew, J.J. Hardy and Khalil Green had all the potential you could want, but have never managed to put it all together. There are also a number of prospects who started at shortstop, like B.J. Upton, Ian Kinsler and Brandon Phillips, that ended up playing elsewhere by the time they hit the MLB.

The cynic in us might look at the monster numbers from those 12 years and immediately jump to steroids. A-Rod and Tejada both testing positive during their careers may even make you feel as though you’re justified. PED use is the elephant in the room and it cannot be ignored. Yet while it may account for some of the increased production on an absolute level, don’t forget these guys were competing against other players doing steroids, from pitchers to other hitters. They racked up the MVP because they took their level of play above and beyond the league, not because they outproduced Honus Wagner’s 1908 season.

So while that kid on the little league field might not want to emulate Asdrubal Cabrera, he can still dream of guys like Larkin and Ripken. And when he strides to that plate, he can settle into the patented Jeter stance, hands high, ready to explode on the next pitch and bring the shortstop position back to the golden age.

Joe Schackman is a co-founder and editor at Began in '96.

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1) Since then, the MVP award has only been won once by a shortstop, Jimmy Rollins in 2006. A-Rod has since won it twice but as a third baseman.

2) To put this in perspective, Derek Jeter does not have a single season in the top 500. That's not a shot at Jeter, it just tells you how good Ripken was in 1991.

3) This is an argument for another day, but just so we are clear, Jeter is not a good defender. TZ basically measures how many runs a players defense saved his team. A TZ over the course of the season of 0 means a player did not save his team any runs nor did he cost them any runs. Only twice in his career has Jeter put up a TZ above 0, and even then it was a measly 2 and 5 respectively. The best season over that stretch was 40 runs in 2006 by Adam Everett.