Steven Goldman has some cherce material in the latest edition of his Pinstriped Bible over at YES: Larry Bowa talking about Derek Jeter’s fielding:

Where Jeter can improve:

“One area we’ve talked a little bit about is playing more to his right on some ground balls. But for the most part, he follows our game plan. When we say straight away, he’s there. When we say, ‘Pull,’ he’s there. I think what happens is people, they’re used to him making every single play, and if he just misses a ball, it could be the pitch. A lot of times when you’re playing shortstop, and location’s away, you’re mentally saying, ‘Okay, the pitch is this way, it’s going to be hard for this guy to pull.’

“Now the pitcher misses this much inside, that has a lot to do with it also. You have pitchers who hit spots and pitchers who don’t hit spots. Everything is thrown into the hopper when you talk about how he’s making plays and not getting balls he should have gotten. Maybe he was playing up the middle like we said and [pitchers] kept pounding him inside because they were missing their target. These things, people, when you break it down, they don’t look at stuff.

“It’s very important. And it’s even more so important when you get on these fast fields like when we go down to Tampa or when we play in Minnesota or when we play in Toronto, we have that turf. There are some fields that are faster than others. Big-league pitchers, you hope they hit their spots about 10 out of 10 times, or six or seven out of 10 times. A pitcher on a bad day will maybe hit his spots three out of 10. There’s nothing you can do about that.”

Terrific stuff from Bowa. Thanks, Steve.