The Yankees pounded out 12 hits yesterday, but Derek Jeter had none.
The Yankees scored seven runs yesterday, but Jeter scored none.
Though the season is just three games old, Jeter admitted he is not yet comfortable with the mechanics of his new swing, and that he’s thinking too much at the plate.
“Still a work in progress,” Jeter said. “Any time you change things you think about it. Eventually, you get to a point where you don’t [think about it].”
That admission is startling considering Jeter and the Yankees have said he began making the adjustments at the end of last season, so it was not a brand new technique he was employing when he went 0-for-4 in yesterday’s 10-7 loss to the Tigers at Yankee Stadium.
Jeter, sitting on 2,928 career hits, is 2-for-10 on the season, and on a day when his teammates took part in a dinger derby that saw seven home run balls leave the yard, Jeter did not even hit a ball in the air.
The 36-year-old captain hit four ground balls, three to the right side. He reached on a fielder’s choice in the eighth inning.
“I’ve been hitting ground balls for 15 years,” Jeter said. “That’s not going to change.”
This is not the way Jeter, a career .314 hitter, wanted to begin the season after a winter filled with criticism of his poor 2010 performance, which was so bad it prompted the 11-time All-Star to alter his stride at the plate in the hope of regaining his previous form.
Jeter wasn’t the only top-of-the-order hitter to pull an 0-fer. Leadoff batter Brett Gardner was 0-for-5 with three strikeouts, making him 2-for-12 on the season with five strikeouts.
“Just a bad day,” Gardner said. “Forget about it, come back tomorrow and get a fresh start.”
The Yankees scored 23 runs in the three-game series with the Tigers, but they will be hard-pressed to maintain that success if their table setters continue to struggle. It took four home runs from the rest of the lineup to mask Jeter’s and Gardner’s struggles yesterday.
“If you lose sleep every time a guy goes 0-for-4 you wouldn’t sleep one night a year,” Joe Girardi said. “Some guys get off to hot starts and some guys get off to cold starts, and you have to work your way through it as a hitter.”
