As the Season Heats Up, Jeter's Bat Remains Cool

BALTIMORE

In every town they visit, the Yankees are baseball's mystery team of the season. They may be potential champs who simply haven't yet hit their stride. Or something fundamental may be wrong with the current Yanks. Both are plausible. Six A.L. teams began Tuesday night's games with records as good or better than the Yanks' 25-18. Are George Steinbrenner's millionaires drifting back toward the pack? Or, in a few weeks, will we glance up to see that, once again, they've pulled away?

Team captain Derek Jeter is a perfect example of this Yankee ambivalence. Is he a Hall of Famer about to break out of one of the worst and longest slumps any superstar has ever endured? Or, after eight fabulous seasons, has the league found a flaw? Are Jeter and his Yankees quite what they used to be? The conventional wisdom is a resounding "yes." But don't be too sure.

It's the last week of May and Jeter is hitting .189. That doesn't sound unredeemable. True, after an 0-for-32 nightmare in April he came into Tuesday night's game at Camden Yards in a 5-for-44 funk. But as he says, "Don't write the story for the whole season because there's four months left."

Yet, if you want to know the depth of Jeter's slump, consider this: If the Yankee captain duplicates Joe DiMaggio's statistics in his 56-game hitting streak (91 for 223), Jeter still won't be able to get his average this season up to his career batting average.

That's not a slump. It's three or four normal slumps rolled into one.

Jeter's (public) attitude is that it's all no big deal. At every Yankee stop, Jeter says some variation of the following: "I feel good, comfortable. I'm just not getting hits. When you're scuffling, everything you hit, they catch. When you're going good, you can check a swing and get a hit."

How does he feel when they put his batting average on the scoreboard?

"I try not to look," he says.

However, Jeter's problem, like the Yankees' flaws in general, may not be so easily dismissed -- because they have tangible causes. In Jeter's case, he swings at everything. More so now than in the past because, as Manager Joe Torre says, "he's overanxious." But Jeter has always been impatient. Roughly 40 percent of his at-bats this season have ended within two pitches. On Tuesday night, Jeter swung at the first two pitches of the game and flew out weakly on the second. Can a hitter completely reverse a characteristic so basic? And once pitchers have recognized it, will they forget?

"The question I get asked most is, 'Do you think it's A-Rod being here that bothers Jeter?' " Torre said, referring to the offseason acquisition of all-star shortstop turned third baseman Alex Rodriguez. "Derek would have to be awfully shallow if that is what bothers him."

Perhaps Jeter is simply human. Many believe that Jeter should move to second base and give shortstop to the more gifted Rodriguez. How incredibly unjust that must feel to Jeter? A Yankees captain with six pennants and four World Series titles by his name may feel like an interloper at his own position. If injured Nomar Garciaparra, who seems in no hurry whatsoever to play his first game of the year for the Red Sox, has been rendered a head case by all of last winter's A-Rod courtships, then why not Jeter, too?

Of course, the Yankees' problems may solve themselves in time. Maybe Nomar will sit out the whole season, sign with the Yankees as a free agent, play second base in New York next season and the Yankees can win the next five pennants.

However, at least for this year, Yankee life is more complex, and thus interesting, than simply buying another crown. Oh, the Boss has laid down $180 million in payroll. There's never any attempt to play fair in the Bronx. But what has he bought?