ESPN.com - Most overrated -- from Zito to Suppan

The ten most overrated players in baseball -- from Zito to Suppan

I agree with a lot of what he's saying, but the problem with measuring "overrated" is that one needs first to measure "how high is he rated, and by whom" and then to measure "how good is he"? This article does neither, although it is possible to construct models to do both. Once you determine "overrated by WHOM," you might measure a player's "rating" by some combination of his salary, his all-star votes, and his MVP votes, for example. You can measure how good he actually is in any number of reasonable ways. If you were to construct those two measurements and compare them, would it result in this list? I doubt it. Maybe some of these players would be on the list (perhaps Brian Giles), but I think the list would be populated by players who aren't as good as they used to be, in cases where perception has not yet caught up to reality.

Mike Piazza and Ivan Rodriguez just missed being voted into the all-star game last year. Pudge may be the greatest defensive catcher in history, and was once a terrific hitter. Piazza in his prime was the greatest offensive catcher in baseball history by a very wide margin. But that was THEN.

Craig Biggio started last year's all-star game at second base, in a season in which he batted .246 and had the fourth worst range factor among all regular second basemen in MLB.

Among players who are still great, I suppose the most overrated is Derek Jeter, but only in certain ways: (1) he's always been at or near the bottom of major league shortstops in terms of the number of balls he gets to, and the Fielding Bible shows that he is below average among major league shortstops in general, although he is considered to be a good fielder by many casual fans and the less analytical sportswriters; (2) he has consistently performed FAR worse in the late innings of close games than in other situations, although he has a reputation as a clutch player. But, as I wrote above, Jeter is a genuinely great player, so I'm not sure if we need to get bent out of shape about the fact that the "halo effect" makes people seem to think his talents are more comprehensive than they really are. Overall, he probably is about as good as people think he is, and I would not include him on an overrated list unless it was specifically restricted to those two specialty categories.