DJ LeMahieu, on Friday afternoon, bore the look of a man searching for answers and coming up empty-handed.
Following a three-day break during which he tried to fix his swing, LeMahieu had returned to the Yankees lineup Thursday night, only to go 0-for-4 with a pair of strikeouts. LeMahieu, whose career batting average sits just below .300, struggled to think of the last time he had hit so poorly.
“I haven’t hit this bad in a while,” he said. “I don’t know if ever. It’s coming at a bad time for our team.”
Indeed, with Aaron Judge out of the lineup, the Yankees need everyone to be firing on full cylinders.
Instead, the engines meant to be powering the middle of the lineup are backfiring on a nightly basis — and LeMahieu is far from the only one.
“For DJ, one thing that’s always come pretty easy to him is the ability to wake up and hang a line drive, right?” manager Aaron Boone said.
Not right now.
Instead, LeMahieu stood in front of his locker prior to the opener of a three-game series against the Rangers, trying to explain the slump he himself still seems to be trying to grasp.
“Moving in the right direction, hopefully,” he said. “It’s been a grind.”
The way LeMahieu loads his swing — the weight distribution on his back leg — is “part of it,” he said, perhaps accounting for the pair of awkward swings he took Thursday night in which he landed on his back knee. LeMahieu is healthy, but could not give a definitive answer as to whether he’s compensating for habits he picked up last year while playing on a fractured foot.
“My biggest thing is, I go out and compete and make things happen,” he said. “When that formula’s not working, I kinda gotta take a step back and say, ‘What’s mechanically off?’ So it’s finding that balance between, can I separate the mechanics in the cage and then go out and compete and translate [it to a game].”
Further complicating the process is that LeMahieu does not see himself as a “mechanical hitter.”
As a result, the need to step back and examine every aspect of his swing in an attempt to figure out the reason for what is now nearly a month’s worth of struggles has been particularly painstaking.
“It’s not too much different,” LeMahieu said. “It’s just, I sometimes get beat by a fastball and then I try to stay simple. And then by staying simple, I get out of my swing. If I look back on my career, if you look at even last year from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, my swing’s kinda completely different.
“I’m just a big feel hitter and just compete and go out and hit. Going and looking at mechanics is, honestly, it’s really not fun. But it’s something I’m having to deep dive on for sure right now.”
The longer the Yankees continue to wait for Judge (and on Friday Boone again declined to specify a timetable for his return from a toe injury), the less they can afford continued struggles from LeMahieu and others.
Since Judge hurt himself running into the wall at Dodger Stadium on June 3, LeMahieu had a slash mark of .143/.167/.257 prior to Friday.
“I think he has a good run in him,” Boone said. “I think we just gotta get him there and unlocked. It’s small victories within a game and I think as he’s gone through this, he’s had days where he’s felt really good and had some momentum. Then all of a sudden, he takes a funny swing or misses a pitch he feels like he can hit. You gotta fight that frustration and keep grinding away.”
