No one loves a good debate quite like baseball fans, and with that in mind, we asked each of our beat reporters to rank the top five players by position in the history of their franchise, based on their career while playing for that club. These rankings are for fun and debate purposes only
Guess What? Top on the list was Derek Jeter (1995-2014)
Key fact: Played the equivalent of another full year in the postseason, batting .308/.374/.465 with 200 hits in 158 games
Five years after Jeter walked off a winner in his final Yankee Stadium at-bat, concluding a storybook run representing the franchise for which he cheered as a boy, The Captain claimed his well-deserved place in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in January. Jeter earned the highest vote percentage (99.75 percent) ever credited to a position player, one vote shy of matching longtime teammate Mariano Rivera’s feat of unanimous selection.
Jeter’s career featured five World Series championships, seven American League pennants, 14 All-Star selections, five Gold Glove Awards and 3,465 regular-season hits, the sixth-most total of all time. A career .310/.377/.440 hitter, Jeter collected 544 doubles, 260 homers, 1,923 runs, 1,311 RBIs and 358 steals in the regular season.
In addition to his numerous highlight-reel moments – his lead off homer in Game 4 of the 2000 World Series, the 2001 Flip Play against the Athletics, a bloody dive into the seats against the Red Sox in 2004, a homer for his 3,000th hit in 2011 – Jeter was the 1996 AL Rookie of the Year, and earned both the All-Star Game and World Series Most Valuable Player Awards in 2000.
“It’s the same game, whether it’s Spring Training or it’s Game 7 of the World Series,” Jeter said in January. “It’s still baseball. A lot of times, I think the moment gets pretty big for people, but I prided myself on being prepared. I felt as though when I was in those situations, I was prepared. Therefore, it was just the same game and the game slowed down.”
To many fans Jeter remains the all time best jet
