Yankee Lineup Is One Place Where Diversity Doesn’t Help

It would seem obvious that the one act in baseball that most correlates with scoring runs is the home run. Every home run grants its team a minimum of one run and a maximum of four. It’s automatic. Singles, bunts, and stolen bases don’t mean a whole lot by themselves; it’s only when you chain them together with other events that you get results. The home run requires no assistance to change a baseball game.The Yankees’ series with the Twins this week argued this, as did the Bombers’ first two home games of the season against the Royals. In the opener, the Yankees scored nine runs, six of them on home runs, three on Jason Giambi’s two-out blast in the first inning.When the home team enters the second inning up by three runs, it wins approximately 90% of the time. Despite the dramatic, ninth-inning game-winners that make SportsCenter such a pleasure to watch, there are fewer blown leads and dramatic comeback wins in baseball than one would expect at first glance, particularly for the visiting team.One reasons is that the home team always gets one more chance to bat. That’s what happened in the home opener, and once again the home run came into play. In the bottom of the eighth, Derek Jeter came to bat with one out, runners on first and second, and the team facing a one-run deficit. Andrew Cisco, a good young pitcher rapidly acquiring the characteristics of his ballclub, put a pitch out over the plate and Jeter belted it for 9-7 lead and the eventual victory.There is a lesson here to be learned even by the Yankees. What Jeter gave the Yankees is what old-time New York beat writers used to call “Five O’clock Lightning,” the sudden flash of game-changing power that comes just as the sun sets on a day game. The term was first applied to the Joe DiMaggio-era Yankees. Writers had frequent cause to invoke it because the team had strong hitters at almost every position and didn’t believe in one run strategies like trying to bring the winning run home with a squeeze bunt.The manager had faith that his hitters would hit, and given the chance to swing the bat, they often did.For some reason, the present-day Yankees are concerned with trying to diversify their offense. The worry is that last year’s club was overly dependent on power, munificent with the home run at times but unable to manufacture a run when it was needed. This thinking has led to the decision to give Miguel Cairo frequent playing time of late; he makes good contact and doesn’t hit home runs, so having him in the lineup must mean the Yankees have variety.The very idea that a player like Cairo is an asset because he doesn’t hit home runs illustrates just how much the diverse offense school of thinking is motivated by insecurity, a psychological need for management to feel like it’s controlling the game. But every power hitter you subtract, every Cairo you add, takes away from the team’s scoring potential.Last year’s Yankees excelled in all phases of the offensive game. They hit 229 home runs, had the second-best batting average in baseball, the second highest on-base percentage, and scored more runs than any team except the Red Sox (a fact more attributable to the differences between tiny Fenway and expansive Yankee Stadium rather than any real deficiency on the Yankees’ part).The team won 95 games and would have won more had the pitching staff been assembled with more care. The offense was the team’s primary asset, propping up an injured rotation and a weak defense.But when a power-based team loses, it looks lethargic, dead. The team that bunts and runs and scampers and hops might not score the most runs, but it’s lively, and its manager feels lively. He knows he’s making a difference because at the end of the game his arms are tired from nine innings of flapping signals to the batters, the baserunners, the coaches, the beer vendors.While he’s waiting for the home run, Joe Torre doesn’t get to make as many signals as, say, Minnesota’s Ron Gardenhire, so there’s a feeling of not doing enough to motivate scoring. But this is the team the Yankees built, and they need to learn to live with their strengths and limitations. Every time the Yankees bunt, it’s a victory for the opposition. Every time Cairo’s name is on the lineup card, the competition holds a pre-game parade in the locker room.Last Tuesday, Johnny Damon came to the plate in the bottom of the fourth with runners on first and second, no outs, and the game tied at 4. As a lefthanded hitter with excellent speed, Damon almost never hits into double plays – and even if he did hit into one here, it was only the fourth inning, too soon for a double play to be devastating to the team’s chances.Damon bunted, of course, leaving the real work to Jeter. Five o’clock lightning is nice, but if you can get it at three, you should take it.Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for www.yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.

Yankee Lineup Is One Place Where Diversity Doesn’t Help

Yankee Lineup Is One Place Where Diversity Doesn’t Help

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