CHICAGO — The old and the new combined to turn the White Sox blue Sunday.
Derek Jeter, the retiring captain and longest tenured Yankee who was honored by the White Sox before the game, and Masahiro Tanaka, the rookie pitching sensation, carried the Yankees to a dominating, 7-1, win before a sold-out crowd of 39,142 at U.S. Cellular Field.
Jeter, 40 next month, went 4-for-5, drove in two runs, used his 39-year-old legs to get a stand-up triple and scored a run. Tanaka, who had a 42-game regular-season unbeaten streak stopped in his last outing, smothered the White Sox for five innings and upped his ledger to 7-1 with 6 2/3 innings, allowing a run and five hits.
“It was a great day,’’ said Joe Girardi, whose club split four games against the White Sox after losing the first two by one run each. “[Jeter] was a big part of the offense and everyone contributed. It was a real good start for Tanaka and a nice way to go to St. Louis.’’
The extended stay in Chicago started by splitting two games with the putrid Cubs and included David Robertson’s first blown save of the season. Given that, the Yankees will take 3-3.
While Jeter led a lineup that produced 10 hits and went 3-for-9 with runners in scoring position, Tanaka was just as important.
He was working on four days’ rest and coming off an outing he wasn’t completely satisfied with even though it qualified as a quality start (three earned runs or less in six innings).
“I feel good every time he takes the mound,’’ Girardi said of Tanaka.
Tanaka lost a shutout bid in the sixth, when Tyler Flowers, the No. 9 hitter, opened with a double and scored on Conor Gillaspie’s two-out single. After being helped by Paul Konerko’s sizzling line drive which Jeter gloved and turned into a double play, Tanaka walked Alejandra De Aza to put runners at first and second.
With Tanaka’s pitch count at a season-high 118, Girardi replaced him with Adam Warren, who stranded two by fanning Flowers with a 95 mph fastball.
Warren worked the eighth and Matt Daley the ninth.
Against the Cubs, Tanaka was hurt with pitches left up in the strike zone. Working in between starts, he emphasized keeping the ball down.
“I wanted the ball to go down, that was why I made a tweak to my mechanics,’’ Tanaka said.
“It seems like the same thing every time we talk about him,’’ Jeter said of Tanaka. “He knows what he is doing.’’
Since 1996 so has Jeter.
“He has always done the right thing. Every time you turned around he was always in the right spot,’’ said former Yankees teammate and current White Sox manager Robin Ventura.
Jeter’s bid for a fifth career five-hit game died in the ninth when he whiffed.
Watching Jeter pull into third standing up in the fourth for his first triple since Aug. 25, 2011, he didn’t look like a 39-year-old player who had serious leg issues a year ago and has four months left in his final regular season. He didn’t look like Mike Trout, but who does.
“I worked extremely hard and I am happy about the way I feel,’’ said Jeter, who entered Sunday in a 3-for-19 slide but watched the four hits raise the average from .259 to .275.
There are days when Jeter doesn’t look like a player who will be 40 a month from Monday. Other times he does.
The Yankees can only hope that when Tanaka is Jeter’s age, he will have had a career that parallels what Jeter has done.