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With A-Rod out, Yanks don't strike fear in foes

Wallace Matthews

May 8, 2008

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The news coming out of the Yankees clubhouse was worse, in a way, than the news on the scoreboard. They hadn't been able to do much with Cliff Lee last night, but then, neither has anyone else so far this season. That came as no surprise.

What did come as a surprise was the news, following the Yankees' 3-0 loss to the Cleveland Indians, that all that prancing and strutting and swinging Alex Rodriguez did around the batting cage before the game was nothing more than show.

It will be MRI, not RBI, for A-Rod next week, and now, the best they can hope for is a return next Thursday at the earliest. In the meantime, the lineup is punchless, the Captain is Crunchless and for the second straight night, a starting pitching performance that should have been plenty good enough for a win was merely just good enough for a loss.

"That's a big bat," manager Joe Girardi said in breaking the news that Rodriguez, who was supposedly two minor-league rehab starts from returning to the Yankees, was being set back a day or two at the very least. It may not sound like much, but for a lineup that managed seven hits last night, two of them infield rollers and one a bloop, it is an eternity.

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"Over the long haul," Girardi said, resignedly, "it's not a replaceable bat. It changes the whole dynamic of our lineup."

Rodriguez wasn't exactly burning up the league before he went down with a strained right quad, with four homers and 11 RBIs in 24 games, but his very presence in the lineup exuded menace. Now, his absence, along with that of Jorge Posada, out for the next six weeks with a bum shoulder, does more than change the dynamic. It renders the Bronx Bombers a toothless collection of spray hitters, without a single hitter to be avoided, pitched around, or feared.

Right now, the leading home run hitter on the team is Melky Cabrera, with six. The second-most potent power bat on the club belongs to Jason Giambi, who has five, but his .157 batting average makes that a sick joke, too. And with the lefthanded Lee pitching, Giambi rode the bench last night in favor of Shelley Duncan, hitting .192 without a homer.

"It's tough without Alex and Jorge, but we got some guys who can swing the bat," Derek Jeter said. "We can't go feeling sorry for ourselves."

Jeter had a poor night, going 0-for-4 with two strikeouts. The second came in the eighth inning on a check swing that had the normally stoic Jeter jawing briefly with plate umpire Brian Gorman.

"It's frustrating whenever you lose," Jeter said, although in his case the frustration may run deeper than that. Counting last night, Jeter has now gone 120 at-bats this season without a home run, the second-longest homerless drought of his career, not counting the 2003 season when he was knocked out on Opening Night with a separated shoulder.

That leaves him just six at-bats short of the only slower start of his career, in 2001, when it took him 126 at-bats to hit his first homer. He finished that season with 21, the second-highest total of his career, but that was a 27-year-old Jeter, not the 33-year-old whose power numbers have dwindled over the past three seasons.

"I realized a long time ago that I wasn't going to catch Babe Ruth," Jeter said. "So it doesn't really concern me."

Then he added, "I haven't hit many fly balls, period, this year. I think my best shot is the inside-the-park homer."

Despite his attempt to make light of his early-season power outage, there is no disputing that over the past few seasons, some of the pop has gone out of Jeter's bat. He hit a career-high 24 home runs in 1999, and 23 in 2004, but since then, his power has steadily trended downward: 19 in 2005, 14 in 2006, only 12 last season. He stroked the most important hit of the 2000 World Series against the Mets, a home run to lead off Game 4, robbing the Mets of any momentum they might have gained after winning Game 3, but lately hasn't seemed like much of a threat to start a game off with a bang.

"I've never really concerned myself with hitting home runs," he said. "I'm more of a situational hitter."

He has mostly excelled at that, but the long ball is a dimension of his game that has gone missing. And without Rodriguez and Posada, someone has to step up into the void and provide a reason for opponents to not just respect the Yankees' bats, but fear them.

"At times this year, it's been our pitching, at times it's been our hitting," Girardi said.

Last night, there was no mistaking what the problem was. For the Yankees, A-Rod can't return soon enough. And right now, it doesn't sound as if he's returning any day soon.