The right move, it increasingly appears, calls for the Yankees to start Eduardo Nunez at shortstop when their season kicks off April 1 against the rival Red Sox. Derek Jeter, if he is ready, can be the designated hitter against Boston’s lefty Jon Lester.
It would be more than a sensible decision on the part of manager Joe Girardi and his superiors. It would be symbolic, too.
Consider yesterday’s news a warning flare about what the Yankees reasonably can expect out of their captain, who is coming off major left ankle surgery and turns 39 in June. And it might as well remind them that leaning too heavily on any of their senior citizens could lead to disaster.
“I’d like to have him at shortstop on Opening Day, but if we collectively feel he could use a few more days, we’ll wait,” Girardi told reporters, after scratching Jeter from the Yankees’ lineup because of what the team called mild inflammation in his left ankle. “We might have to make some adjustments on the fly.”
Girardi won’t get caught up in the ceremony of Game 1, no matter how badly Jeter wants to patrol his standard position. Where the manager will need help is in, say, Games 121 through 162 or so.
Last year, as the Yankees battled Baltimore for the AL East title, Jeter started 66 of the Yankees’ final 67 games, missing only the opener of a Sept. 19 doubleheader against Toronto. Fourteen of those 66 starts came at DH. In all, Jeter started 133 games at shortstop and produced one of his finest seasons — and perhaps the best campaign ever by a shortstop turning 38.
That all crashed with a thud, however, when Jeter’s ankle gave out in front of everyone during the AL Championship Series opener.
Yesterday would have been Jeter’s fourth Grapefruit League start at shortstop, and never one to concede anything, he told reporters, “I don’t think it’s a setback” and emphasized that the stiffness occurred in a different area of the left ankle than where he underwent surgery.
OK. Let all of that be truth and not just spin. It doesn’t change the reality that the Yankees need to exercise extreme discipline, all season long, when it comes to Jeter — not to mention Mariano Rivera (43, and coming off right knee surgery) and Andy Pettitte (40, and hasn’t made more than 21 regular-season starts since 2010). Ichiro Suzuki, 39, probably shouldn’t start against most left-handers.
If that restraint leads to a poor record, because the Yankees don’t have other guys to plug the holes resulting from such careful deployment, then it’s on the front office. The solution can’t be to push the old guys more, because you want the old guys around in September and beyond.
Set the optimistic goal for Jeter’s shortstop starts at 110, and resolve to learn, finally, who Nunez is and what sort of value he can provide. Give David Robertson some closing opportunities. Go to a six-man rotation on occasion to ensure that Pettitte and 38-year-old Hiroki Kuroda (who, to his credit, threw 219 2/3 innings for the Yankees last year) don’t work too much.
These men are at such advanced baseball ages that, even if they produce at reduced rates and opportunities, they still will be historic. Only six players, totaling 11 seasons, have clocked at least 100 games at shortstop in the season they turned 39. None matched the 740 plate appearances Jeter recorded
last year while turning 38, nor his 216 hits or 15 homers. The single-season saves record for a pitcher 43 or older is 15, by 47-year-old Jack Quinn in 1931.
The Yankees face such sobering facts as they try to navigate issues of roster depth, health and austerity in addition to age and find their way back to an 18th postseason berth in 19 years.
“Cautious,” a word Girardi used yesterday in discussing Jeter, might as well replace “mystique” and “aura” in the Yankees fans’ vocabulary. They’ll be hearing it plenty.
kdavidoff@nypost.com