JOHNNY DAMON is wearing an ice pack on his shoulder that is both colder than the Yankee bats and large as the void he potentially leaves at the top of their lineup.
Damon left a .319 batting and .387 on-base percentage impaled on the left-field wall Friday afternoon. If, like the ball that fell out of his glove and landed on the top of the fence before rolling back into play, this Yankee season could still go either way, their no-longer-so-patiently awaited surge will have to start without him.
Damon went to the DL yesterday for the first time in his 14-season career. The Yankees went to fleet rookie Brett Gardner as their left fielder until Damon becomes eligible to return on July 20.
That’s not quite until hell freezes over, only was beginning to seem like it when Gardner dragged a 1-for-16 in five major league games into last night’s game against Boston. In fact, it turned out to not be even as long as seemed the eight-pitch at-bat Gardner battled Jonathan Papelbon before bouncing a splitter up the middle in the 10th inning to finish a comeback that the kid himself had started with a sixth-inning single.
“I’ve been trying to buy a hit for six or seven games now,” said Gardner, who, as the ultimate hero of a 5-4 gut check victory, survived a Yankee mobbing at first base that represented the approximate population of Holly Hill, S.C. “[Papelbon] threw me some fastballs on the plate I should have hit and fouled them off, then he threw me a couple of tough pitches I was able to get the bat on.
“The last was a split I didn’t see it out of his hand and I was able to see it enough to get it through the middle.”
The Yankees finally, finally, got some clutch hits, and other than Robinson Cano’s two-run game-tying double, the two biggest were by their littlest battler.
“That’s what Brett Gardner does, fight you and fight you,” said Joe Girardi. “He really does the same things that Johnny Damon does.”
The kid, who led AAA in stolen bases, is faster than a speeding bullet, even quicker than his average was plummeting with soft fly balls until he got one deep enough with Wilson Betemit on third on Saturday to drive in what proved to be the winning run.
Last night the Yankees had just one hit, Alex Rodriguez’s homer, and were minus one manager for disagreeing with Laz Diaz’s strike zone, when Gardner lined Tim Wakefield’s next knuckleball for a single into center field, stole second base and came around on Derek Jeter’s liner to cut a 3-1 sixth-inning Boston lead in half.
Igniting is what the kid did in the minors, and the major-league team obviously use a little igniting too.
“I’m not going to say I can fill [Damon’s shoes] because nobody can,” said Gardner.
Yankee left fielders are gone into thin air faster than Bigfoot. Hideki Matsui, who will try to hit off his bad knee when the swelling is down, still has a good chance of needing surgery and being lost for the year.
Gardner was brought up last week to give the struggling Melky Cabrera a run for the center-field job. Now Gardner temporarily has Damon’s job and Cabrera, by necessity, still has his.
If Matsui can’t come back, or maybe even if he can on a bum knee, Damon is going to have to be able to play left field again. Plan C would be for Gardner to be another Shane Spencer, without the power, just the legs and the spark he delivered last night.