Cincinnati’s Barry Larkin overtook Rey Ordonez by a whisker in the latest all-star balloting. But after the voters see what kind of baseball the Mets’ shortstop has been playing lately, some of them may want to rethink their ballots. Ordonez went 4-for-5 in last night’s 11-3 rout of Toronto. The four hits tied his career-high, and raised his batting average to a healthy .266. And, even though some reputations die hard, Ordonez is quietly doing his best to shed his label as a light hitter.
The book on Ordonez has always been all glove and no bat, as weak at the plate as he is solid in the field. But the two-time Gold Glove winner is rewriting that book.
“Rey had, I thought, one of the better games of his career,” manager Bobby Valentine said. “[He had] a great hit-and-run single, and actually hit a ball over an outfielder’s head. He’s playing a good brand of baseball.”
He’s always played a great brand of defense; but for a change, he’s contributing at the plate, and doing it consistently. The four-hit game was the fifth of his career, the last coming July 9, 1998, against Montreal. And it made him 6-for-7 with four RBI in his last two games.
“I’m very happy I got four hits. But I’m glad not only that I got four hits, but that we won the game,” said Ordonez, who is just 367 votes behind Larkin with 117,747. “I feel a little better. I’m seeing the ball a little better. I feel good hitting. I felt I hit [the ball] very well in the Yankee series; it’s just that I didn’t get any hits. Fortunately, today I got the hits.”
And he got them to every part of the park. He singled up the middle to lead off the third and scored the Mets’ first run on Rickey Henderson’s sac fly. In the next inning, he showed surprising power by doubling over Jose Cruz Jr.’s head in center field. Ordonez admits even he can’t remember the last time he did that.
He added a single to left in the sixth, and then the coup de grace in the seventh, a clutch single to right to plate Robin Ventura and Matt Franco, turning a 6-3 lead into an 8-3 blowout. And, truth be told, this has been coming for awhile.
He hit just .216 in 1997, and was hitting .226 last July 4. But he hit .267 the rest of last season, and he’s continued that improvement. He’s hitting .300 in his last 37 games. That’s no hot streak; that’s, dare we say it, prolonged success at the plate.
So what’s his secret? Recently departed hitting coach Tom Robson? A 26-year-old coming into his own? Or is it that day-glow orange hair he’s been sporting since the Yankee series?
“If it’s the hair, I’m going to keep on doing my hair all year long,” Ordonez said. Next on his color chart is blue. But if he keeps hitting, the Mets hope he’ll go through the whole spectrum.