DJ LeMahieu continues to be machine-like at the plate

As he watched DJ LeMahieu pump out two or three hits a night, it took Gary Sanchez just a couple of weeks into last season to give him a nickname that stuck: The Machine.

“I started calling him that when they started shifting and he was hitting against the shift,” Sanchez said midway through last season. “They went left, he’d hit right; they’d go right and he’d hit left. I mean, it’s impressive to do that.”

The Machine is at it again in 2020, about as close to automatic at the plate as a big-league hitter can be.

LeMahieu entered Saturday night’s game against the Red Sox hitting .429 (30-for-70) with a 1.031 OPS in 18 games. His .429 average and .474 on-base percentage led the American League. He left the game, however, with a sprained left thumb and will undergo an MRI.

"I feel pretty locked in right now," LeMahieu said by way of understatement. "I'm just part of a really good lineup and I'm just trying to do my part to get on base. If I get on base, I feel like we're in good shape to score runs. Just trying to be tough on the pitchers.”

The Yankees' lineup as a whole has been potent, but LeMahieu has been the team's most consistent batter.

"He's a special hitter," Aaron Boone said of LeMahieu, who batted .327 with 26 homers, 102 RBIs and an .893 OPS in 145 games last season. "He's a guy that uses the whole field, has pop, handles righties and lefties. He has tremendous bat-to-ball skills and does a great job of just laying the bat head in the zone for a really long time."

Hitting coach Marcus Thames joked — though maybe he was only half-joking — that when LeMahieu is in the kind of groove he’s currently in, when it comes to coaching: “Stay out of the way.”

“He’s prepared, man,” Thames said. “We have a couple of cues that he uses if he gets off [rhythm], but other than that, you just let him get his work in every single day. He knows what he’s trying to do. Just let him play.”

LeMahieu, the National League batting champion in 2016 with a .348 average, is attempting to become the first undisputed batting champion in both leagues. According to MLB.com, Major League Baseball recognizes "Big Ed" Delahanty as having won the 1899  batting title with the Phillies in the National League and the 1902 crown with the American League’s Senators, but other researchers have retroactively credited Nap Lajoie with a slightly higher average than Delahanty.

"It's early in the season. There's a lot of baseball to be played," the always low-key LeMahieu said, "but I definitely have the same type of confidence [as 2016] for sure. And the results are following as well."

Those results have many people inside and outside the game debating the chances of a player such as LeMahieu or former Rockies teammate Charlie Blackmon hitting .400 in this  60-game season and how it should be recognized. (Blackmon, who like LeMahieu contracted COVID-19 before summer camp, is off to an even better start than his close friend, taking a .447/.482/.645 slash line into Saturday.)

“I don’t think I’ll be able to give it much credit, to be honest,” Blackmon recently said of hitting .400 and how it would be viewed, according to USA Today. “I think it will be too easy to say that weird things happen. The COVID got us. You’re playing in a bubble with no fans. It counts, certainly. This is Major League Baseball, on major-league fields, and it counts. But for right now, I feel like it’s different.”

LeMahieu said he thinks “it’s possible” in this brief season for someone to hit .400 and that yes, if someone does — or achieves some other kind of milestone — it should be given its proper due.  

"I think all the awards are valid,"  he said. "We're all playing in the same situations. I think there will obviously be some surprises, but there are every year. I don't think it's discredited at all just because it's 60 games."