Word from Yankee spring training camp is that Joe Girardi will flip Derek Jeter and Johnny Damon in the lineup, moving his shortstop up to leadoff. Jeter's response was that he doesn't care, telling the Associated Press, "You hit 60 seconds earlier than you normally do."
One of the things that great players often demonstrate is an intuitive feel for the game that had never been borne out by the numbers, or even by conventional wisdom. I'm reminded of Greg Maddux and Roger Clemens, both correctly attributing statistical declines in their mid-career performance to bad luck and weak defense respectively. Each went on to win subsequent Cy Youngs.
Jeter's flippancy about his place in the batting order demonstrates that he understands how irrelevant it is. Batting order is largely immaterial beyond a few rudimentary concepts. As long as your best hitters bat at the top of the order, and you maximize the effects of handedness, there's little to be gained by sweating the exact order. About the only egregious error that managers regularly commit is to bat a weak-hitting speedster in the leadoff spot. Simply put, that strategy gives a weak hitter 50 extra plate appearances a year.
Being similar kinds of hitters, either Jeter or Damon would be a reasonable choice to lead off. Both get on base and around the bases, but are unlikely to waste a lot of home runs to start the game.
So why bother? My guess is that Girardi exploited Damon's .375 OBP last year and expects him to regress closer to his career average of .354 this year, while recognizing that Jeter's .363 OBP in 2008 was the second lowest of his career and is more like to edge closer to his lifetime .383 pace this year. If so, it demonstrates that Girardi also understands something about baseball.
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