Earlier this year, when he was literally unable to do much of anything on a baseball field other than draw walks, I suggested that Jason Giambi was having possibly the worst season in history for a player with an on-base average above .380, and wrote, not for the first time, that the Yankees should simply release him. Given what was known at the time, I don’t think I was wrong to write what I did, but Giambi promptly made a fool of me and everyone else who wrote him off.

In June, despite hitting only one home run, he posted a .310 BA/.431 OBA/.474 SLG line, and then of course in July he had a month for the ages, hitting .355 with 14 home runs and 21 walks. It wasn’t a fluke; ever since, he’s been more or less the player the Yankees thought they were getting when they signed him after the 2001 season, and, along with Alex Rodriguez and Mariano Rivera, he’s been one of the three best players on the team this year. He leads the league in on-base average and has been, per at-bat, every bit as good a hitter as Rodriguez, David Ortiz, or anyone else in the league. It’s been remarkable to watch, and even if the Yankees’ grasp on first place proves tenuous, Giambi’s vindication as a player is complete.

This is a case where I’m quite happy to have been so badly wrong. Except in those rare cases where a player is an outright dangerous criminal, I always want all players to do well. Claims that such-and-such player is done or no good at his job are meant not to be vindictive or malicious, but descriptive. Especially since Giambi has been one of the very few to come out of the steroid scandals with any shred of personal dignity left, it’s a good thing to see him succeeding.

Broadly, I think most would agree on the root causes of Giambi’s resurgence. He credits improved health, especially in his knee, with allowing him to plant his foot and drive the ball again, and has said that as he began to drive the ball he grew more confident, leading to better hitting and still more confidence. (Those who claim he just got back on the juice have to explain either why it wasn’t working for the first two months of the season or why, if he started taking steroids in July, they started working instantly, like a magic spell.)

The results of Giambi’s improved health and self-confidence have been visible and plain. Earlier in the year, he was trying to do the wrong thing with the ball, and going about it the wrong way. Half the time he was getting tied up on inside pitches and lunging at pitches on the outer half in an attempt to just make contact, which wasn’t happening because his front leg was collapsing, sapping his stroke of all its power. The other half the time he was just not swinging at anything. His high walk totals were the result of passivity, not discipline. His improved health showed up in a more stable base, which allowed him to reach pitches he’d previously been flailing at, and in his improved confidence in a better approach, as he laid off pitches he couldn’t pull with power.

This is demonstrated rather neatly by his monthly statistics. In April, he had 23 strikeouts and 14 walks; in May, 16 strikeouts and 7 walks. In June, when he started to turn things around, he walked 17 times against 12 strikeouts, and in July and August he again walked more than he struck out. This month, the ratio has reversed itself, but not by enough to think it’s anything more than a blip. Given that in his last two seasons with Oakland Giambi walked 266 times against 202 strikeouts, the fact that he’s again walking more than he strikes out – an accomplishment that is usually left to a few slap hitters and a very few elite power hitters in today’s game – is the best sign that he still has a lot of life left in him as a genuine threat in the middle of the order.

It’s also a fascinating study in how plate discipline is not such a static skill as it is sometimes thought to be. Within a season, Giambi has gone from utterly lost and unable to tell a ball he can smoke from one he can’t reach to completely unwilling to offer at pitches he can’t square up on. A great deal of it has to do with physical skill, and a great deal has to do with the way pitchers started working him more carefully once his power returned. Sometimes it’s easy to make it sound as if players can simply decide to walk more by an act of will; unless one is willing to believe Giambi’s knowledge of the strike zone disappeared and returned this year, his season proves that’s not the case.

All of this also goes to show just what a remarkable hitter he really is. In some of the most difficult circumstances ever faced by a New York athlete, Giambi has comported himself with decency and been one of the very best players in baseball. Having dismissed him so lightly in print this spring, all I can say is good for him.

tmarchman@nysun.com