TORONTO — There are only so many times one can write that the Yankees aren’t hitting, that they need more pitching and that they’re fortunate to find themselves in a shockingly watered-down American League East.
So gratitude filled my heart when Mark Hale, The Post’s assistant sports editor, sent me this email on Tuesday: “What about a column that says what the Yankees lineup ‘should’ be?”
Perfect! The old “Drop Derek Jeter from the number two slot” take. Haven’t used that since 2011.
There’s only one problem, though: These Yankees’ offensive problems run so deep that demoting Jeter would hardly serve as a cure-all and probably wouldn’t be worth the agita. Compared to some other issues with their lineup, their retiring captain’s offensive decline hardly registers.
“I think over time, things usually balance out,” Joe Girardi said Tuesday, before the Yankees continued their series with the Blue Jays at Rogers Centre. “It would be different if you had one or two guys who were struggling and you had seven guys hitting .300 and you kept the lineup the same every day. But the most consistent hitters are probably getting the most at-bats, is what we’re doing.
“Obviously there are some guys that we know are capable of giving us more. You’ve just got to ride it out.”
Jeter, who turns 40 on Thursday, entered play Tuesday night — when he was set to bat second — with a slash line of .267/.320/.317. That gave him the lowest batting average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage for a full season; his average and OBP were lower in his cup-of-coffee 1995 and his injury-riddled 2013, and his slugging percentage surpasses only his .254 from last year.
His OPS+, which measures his OPS against the American League average incorporating the stadiums in which he has played, stood at 78, meaning he was 22 percent lower than the average of 100. Again, it ranked as his worst, aside from ’95 and ’13.
Yet on his final Yankees team, Jeter’s .320 on-base percentage — exactly the AL average as action began Tuesday — ranked him a respectable sixth among the 10 guys playing the most, and just a percentage point behind Brian Roberts’ .321.
The bottom of the Yankees’ lineup, in other words, is ocupado mucho. And Jeter’s teammates aren’t really making a case to get more prominent placement in games.
On June 13, 2011, when Jeter went down with a right calf strain, he owned a .260/.324/.324 slash line. That .324 OBP put him eighth among Yankees regulars, with his buddy Jorge Posada right behind him at .321 and a considerably better slugging percentage of .375. So when Jeter returned to the Yankees’ lineup three weeks later, on the verge of getting his 3,000th career hit, Girardi faced questions from me and other troublemakers about the validity of dropping Jeter down.
Of course, Jeter rebounded with a brilliant second half of 2011 and tremendous 2012; you could go broke betting against this guy. Nevertheless, with interesting options like Brett Gardner, Curtis Granderson and even Nick Swisher, Girardi could have thrown someone else in the leadoff slot at that juncture and been intellectually justified in doing so.
Now, however? Girardi wrote out a lineup Tuesday featuring 5-6-7 of Alfonso Soriano, Carlos Beltran and Brian McCann, all of whom are performing worse — both in general and relative to their career norms — than Jeter. His eighth hitter was Roberts. And his ninth hitter was the falling comet who goes by Yangervis Solarte.
The costs of demoting Jeter would be heavy: He’d hate having to answer questions about it, he’d hate the subsequent scrutiny and he’d hate tarnishing his legacy in such a way.
If the benefits outweighed those costs, then you’d pull the trigger. But what would the benefits be? Who on this Yankees team can assuredly deliver more from the number two slot while not hurting the middle of the lineup? Does Jeter really deserve to hit behind some of this lineup’s lesser players?
“You can shuffle every day,” a testy Girardi said Tuesday, in response to a question I asked. “Who do you want me to shuffle?”
I told the Yankees’ manager I had nothing for him, after looking through the numbers. I thought maybe he would have something, given he makes more money than I do.
“We’ll stick with it,” Girardi said, chortling.
Not a great resolution. The other possibilities, however, loom as far less great.