Quote Originally Posted by Olympic Fan View Post
As a Yankee fan, it's been fun to watching Derek Jeter get off to one of the best starts of his career. Coming after two very slow starts, this has been refreshing.

I thought it was worth mentioning that Jeter has passed a couple of pretty famous names this week on his climb up the all-time hit list. His single last night game him a baseball-best of 55 this year and 3,143 for his career. In the last few days, he's passed Tony Gwyn (3,141) and Robin Yount (3,142) to climb to 17th place on the all-time list. Next up is No. 16 Paul Waner (3,152), then No. 15 George Brett (3,154).

Jeter should wind up 11th-to-13th by the end of this season, depending on his health and sustaining his current level of play. Even if he drops a little, he'll enter the all-time top 10 early next season.

Can he make a run at Pete Rose's record? He's ahead of Pete's pace for both game's player and age. Too early to get excited and with Jeter's dropoff in 2010 and early in 2011, it looked impossible. But since midseason last year, Jeter has been his old self ... suddenly the chase of Rose appears to be be possible again.
Thanks for bringing this up Oly. Love stuff like this.

But when I'm looking at the numbers, I'm not seeing that Derek is ahead of Rose's pace. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying.

Jeter is 37 years old now, and will turn 38 in June. He's in his 18th season. If you remove his rookie year where he only played 15 games and had 12 hits, and just focus on his full seasons, he's averaged 192.25 hits per year prior to this year. At the outset of this year, he needed 1168 hits to tie Rose, which at the rate of 192.25 per year, would mean it would take him 6.07 years to tie him. This would take Derek to age 43 or 44.

But that's if Jeter can continue to bang out almost 200 hits per year all the way to age 43 or 44. Rose, who averaged 183 hits per year not counting his last, abbreviated year (1986), had the following number of hits in his 40's years:

At age 41 he had 172 hits
age 42: 121 hits
age 43: 107 hits
age 44: 107 hits
age 45: 52 hits

So Rose, not surprisingly, really started to decline as he got into his early 40's. Modern training methods and good genes (who knows?) may help Derek push his decline out a bit, but continuing to average 192 hits a year until age 44, as would be required, seems pretty unlikely to me, and I'm not sure how you'd say he's ahead of Pete's pace at this point.

Did I misunderstand you or am I missing something?