A mountain of heat smothered his left shoulder. A tight blue wrap covered the wrist on the same arm. Five hours later, the heat was replaced by ice and the wrap was gone in favor of more ice.
“The only area not being treated is your elbow,” Derek Jeter was told before last night’s 7-3 Yankees victory over the Mets in 11 innings at Shea Stadium.
“Stop, stop,” said Jeter, who missed the first six weeks of the season with a dislocated shoulder and was drilled on the wrist by the Mets’ neophyte right-hander Jeremy Griffiths Saturday at Shea Stadium.
While Joe Torre put Jeter’s chances of playing last night at “50/50” Saturday, Jeter guaranteed he would play because “nothing is broken.”
He was right since Torre had him batting second and playing short against Tom Glavine.
“It’s all right,” Jeter said at his locker before the game and after when he went 2-for-5 and would have had two more hits if the bullets he hit in the first and fourth innings had found holes.
Told that “all right” couldn’t be confused with OK, Jeter said, “When you get hit by a pitch it’s always a little stiff. But it’s nothing that hasn’t happened before.”
According to the way Jeter scorched the ball in his first three at-bats the wrist seemed fine. Even if he had only one single to show for it.
Jeter hit a bullet to second baseman Roberto Alomar in the first and lined a pitch off Glavine’s chest in the fourth. He singled to left in the sixth and grounded to third in the eighth.
His single to left in the 10th moved Alfonso Soriano (3-for-6) to second with no outs against Graeme Lloyd, but Lloyd escaped unscathed when Hideki Matsui grounded into an inning-ending double play.
Jeter has scoffed at the theory that his un-Jeter like .263 batting average is directly related to the shoulder injury suffered on Opening Day. So, don’t expect him to use the wrist as an alibi if he doesn’t hit for the next week.
“It’s stiff and it will be stiff for a while like every other time you get hit by a pitch,” said Jeter, who went 3-for-5 with a homer in Friday night’s 5-0 Yankee victory over the Mets. “But it’s no big deal.”
Aces on balls
David Wells has walked just X batters in XXX innings this season – an average of .XXX per nine innings. Here are the single-season leaders for fewest walks per nine innings pitched since 1900:
Pitcher Year Team W/9IP
Babe Adams 1920 PIT .616
Christy Mathewson 1913 NYG .618
Bret Saberhagen 1994 NYM .660
Christy Mathewson 1914 NYG .663
Cy Young 1904 BOS .687
Red Lucas 1933 CIN .737
Bob Tewksbury 1992 STL .773
Greg Maddux 1997 ATL .774
Cy Young 1906 BOS .782
Babe Adams 1919 PIT .786
Babe Adams 1922 PIT .788
Slim Sallee 1919 CIN .791
The four batters walked by Wells this season:
Torii Hunter, Twins, Apr. 21
Eric Byrnes, A’s, May 2
Todd Walker, Red Sox, May 19
Morgan Ensberg, Astros, June 12
