Jeter continues to be successful vs. Mets

Captain Clutch came through again.

It might have been easy to overlook Derek Jeter's tying two-run single in the seventh inning, considering the blur of soft hits and lucky breaks that followed for the Yankees. But as Joe Girardi put it: "That was the hit we were looking for."

The Mets beat up Ivan Nova, tagging him for 11 hits in 62/3 innings and taking a 3-1 lead into the bottom of the seventh. But in an instant, the Mets' good fortune dissolved.

Brett Gardner led off with a single up the middle before Mets starter Mike Pelfrey walked Chris Dickerson on five pitches and hit Francisco Cervelli on the left shoulder as he squared to bunt.

With the bases loaded and none out, Jeter hit a grounder up the middle that was just out of the reach of Pelfrey and shortstop Jose Reyes. The ball rolled into centerfield, allowing Gardner and Dickerson to score the first two runs of an eight-run inning in the Yankees' 9-3 win.

Jeter, who was 2-for-5 Sunday and 5-for-12 in the series, has a 25-game home hitting streak vs. the Mets dating to June 28, 2003, and is hitting .481 (51-for-106) in those games. He has hit .381 (122-for-320) with a .435 on-base percentage and a .575 slugging percentage in 78 games against the Mets. But Jeter said the Subway Series atmosphere has no effect on him.

"To be quite honest with you, I don't think about it too much," he said. "You enjoy playing in it because it's fun for us because there's a lot of electricity in the stands, be it here or over in Citi Field."

The Yankees scored six more runs in the seventh, with RBI singles by Alex Rodriguez and Robinson Cano, Gardner's two-run double and Dickerson's two-run single helping to overshadow the tying hit. Jeter -- who is 25 hits away from 3,000 -- was happy to divert the attention away from himself. "We had a lot of big hits that inning," he said. "A lot of times it's not how hard you hit 'em, it's where you hit 'em. And we were fortunate that inning. We had a lot of balls that fell in for us. Sometimes things are contagious, and it seemed like it was that inning.

"That's how it goes sometimes. You're going to hit balls hard and get out and sometimes people are going to say, 'What's wrong with you?' Other times you're fortunate and people say you're hot. We definitely needed an inning like that, but it all evens out, I think."

The Yankees hit six homers in the series, giving them a major league-leading 71 in 45 games, but frequently have struggled to get the timely hit. Jeter dismissed the notion that too many homers is a bad thing. "I don't care how we score runs, to be quite honest with you," he said. "A home run, singles, doubles, triples, it really doesn't matter. It was good for us to have an inning like that, but for me, it doesn't matter."