LUIS Sojo was talking about confidence and how much that one magical word means to a ballplayer. They all have the talent, it’s how the talent is projected that makes the difference.
Considering all that, Sojo thought a long time last night before saying this about Alfonso Soriano: “I haven’t seen a rookie come in here with so much confidence since Derek Jeter.”
Have any more questions about how Soriano will fare at second base for the Yankees?
All eyes are on left field and Chuck Knoblauch, but second base is the real position challenge for this team.
“When you got that confidence, things are going to be OK,” Sojo said before the Yankees took on the Royals at Yankee Stadium.
Soriano, who is only 23, is the Yankees first rookie to play second since Pat Kelly moved from third to second in 1991. Rookies aren’t supposed to be as comfortable as Soriano is and if you add in a position switch, his composure is amazing.
As for the challenge of switching from short to left to second, Soriano said, “The most important thing is that I play. I don’t care where.”
Second base, 50,000 people in the house, no big deal. In the Yankees’ 7-3 Opening Day victory, Soriano was involved in five plays in the field without a hitch and even managed to pick up a hit. Don’t mistake his relaxed attitude for overconfidence, either.
“He works hard,” Sojo said of Soriano. “Everybody loves him. He knows what he has to do at second and he’s hearing it from Willie [Randolph] and me all the time. But he’s a good listener. He is not in awe of anything. He just wants to step up to the plate and hit.”
General manager Brian Cashman remembers Soriano drilling two home runs in the future’s game a few years ago “and I think he made the comment, ‘I’m going to be a star.’ You like to hear that,” Cashman said with a smile. “He believes in himself.”
Joe Torre, who appears to be the most relaxed man on the planet, remembers what it was like when he was a rookie. He was scared to death.
“I came up at the end of the ’60 season and I had two at-bats,” Torre recalled. “I’m sitting on the bench in the big leagues. I remember one time Del Crandall was thrown out of the game by the umpire and I went, ‘Oh, bleep, is it me?’ But it wasn’t me.”
There’s no time to be nervous when you’re playing and Soriano excelled this spring, batting .348 with a club-leading five home runs. All that goes into the wash with the dirty socks once the regular season begins.
The game plan was for Soriano to go to Columbus, but things changed once Chuck Knoblauch went to left.
“He had a wonderful spring for us and played three different positions and played them well,” Torre said of Soriano. “There’s just a certain maturity that we see this year that we didn’t see before this and yet, he always tried to appear calm before this.”
Randolph calls Soriano, “a work in progress at second base.”
The challenge right now is learning to turn the double play. For most of his baseball life, Soriano was skipping across the bag as a shortstop and looking at first. Now he’s got his back turned to first and can be leveled by the runner. “He’s got to get rid of the ball as quick as he can,” Sojo said. “He has to turn the double play and forget about the runner.”
Torre had his own defensive cross to bear as a rookie.
“I had so much trouble catching pop-ups in the minor leagues because a lot of the lights are real low,” he said. “The ball would go up over the lights and I would go running to where I saw it last and the ball would land behind me somewhere. The first inning of the first game I caught, the pop-up went up and I saw it and I said, ‘Beautiful.’
There will be setbacks. Torre knows that.
“He’s going to go into a slump and you want to see how that affects everything,” Torre said. “That’s normally what happens with young guys. They need to be nurtured through that.”
Once the slump comes, a young player has to be careful not to over-adjust. “That’s what young people like to do,” Torre said. “They go, ‘Uh, oh, maybe they figured out how to pitch to me,’ and then all of a sudden you forget how you did it to begin with.’ Hopefully there’s enough people on this coaching staff and players who will help him through that.”
The support system is there and so is the confidence, an unbeatable combination.
