Nevertheless it's very very easy to argue that Jeter is overrated if you stop evaluating with your eyes and dive into the metrics. He's got the lowest defensive WAR (-9.4) of any shortstop in the modern era – the objective outcomes of him playing in that position are quite literally worse than average, and worse than any other shortstop who played under Steinbrenner or in that media market (Didi Gregorius gets far less attention, but is a far better SS).

People rate him highly based on watching his spectacular, dramatic diving catches – forgetting that those dives are the product of him being badly positioned on the hit, and that a correctly-positioned player would simply make an unremarkable routine catch on the same hit.

Jeter's the baseball equivalent of the programmer who an Org is in love with for constantly spending nights and weekends fighting fires, failing to notice that it's the same person who's accidentally starting all of the fires to begin with.