That being said, the news that Derek Jeter has won his fifth Gold Glove today is an outrage. Gold Gloves might have been trending toward meaningless, but giving Jeter one seals the deal. It's a joke, and the worst part is that many people will see that Jeter won the Gold Glove and believe that he had a great defensive season.
Unfortunately, that's just not the case. In fact, using one of the main fielding metrics, Total Zone (A statistic very similar to UZR), Jeter was the WORST shortstop in MLB. Jeter also ranked sixth from last among shortstops with a -4.7 UZR (which I mentioned in my baseball statistics post). That -4.7 means that the Yankees would have been much better with almost any other shortstop in baseball.
My theory is that the coaches are trying to make the Yankees pay even more to keep Jeter, and this served as a great opportunity to inflate his value.
Since other writers have covered every angle of the this development, I decided to post links to their articles. These are all great reads
http://espn.go.com/blog/SweetSpot/post/_/id/6238/gold-glove-results-mixed-as-usual
http://blogs.thescore.com/mlb/2010/11/09/and-the-winners-are/
http://buzztap.com/link.jsp?id=2739630&cid=110&source=feed
http://espn.go.com/blog/statsinfo/post/_/id/11693/metrics-shed-light-jeter-gold-glove-awards
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/blog/big_league_stew/post/Yankees-Jeter-plays-bad-defense-wins-undeserve?urn=mlb-283888
Lastly, this is a screenshot of the Baseball-Reference.com (The biggest MLB stats website) homepage when the awards were announced. Be sure to focus on the addition to the right of Jeter's name.
http://yfrog.com/f/goqg1p/
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