Every day Jason Giambi arrives at Yankee Stadium, he quickly changes out of his street clothes, pulls on a pair of black batting gloves and heads straight to the batting cages to work with Bombers hitting coach Don Mattingly in an attempt to find his swing and the power that used to make him one of the more feared hitters in baseball.
For most of this season, the fruits of his labor were missing, his offensive numbers a disaster area.
Wednesday night, Giambi felt the wrath of the impatient Yankee Stadium crowd when he was booed louder and louder each time he trotted to the plate.
Through two strikeouts and a popout, he was becoming more and more of a target for the 48,828 in attendance.
When he came up in the bottom of the 10th, Pirates closer Jose Mesa attacked him with Russ Johnson on second base and first base open.
It was an indictment of how far his star has fallen in his tenure in The Bronx.
Mesa went after Giambi with inside fastballs, looking to continue Giambi’s string of futility with the bat in his hands.
The strategy to make him hit failed and Giambi crushed a walk-off home run high into the right field upper deck for his first heroic smash and his lone memorable moment of the season in a 7-5 Yankees win.
“It’s kind of starting to pay off,” Giambi said. “I started out really good, I was hitting home runs but fell into that funk a little bit.
“I’ve been getting my hits, but it just hasn’t been clicking. Donnie and I have really been working and we were hoping it was going to start to come around, and maybe it will.
“The power’s there,” Giambi added. “That’s not a question. It’s just squaring up the ball at the right time.
“Hitting a home run is so tough, it’s perfect timing, and we’ve been working hard to get it back.”
The home run set up last night’s series finale with Pittsburgh. The Yankees were looking for their first sweep since they took three straight from Detroit last month.
With Giambi operating with more confidence and what Joe Torre called “swagger,” the Yankees are certainly a different team. And Giambi thinks his timing is beginning to come back after missing significant stretches of the last two seasons with injuries and illness.
“I was either a little bit late, a little bit early, hitting the ball off the end of the bat a little bit, getting jammed a little bit,” Giambi said.
“I don’t think I can hit the ball any further than that. I mean, that was halfway up into the third deck. So it’s there. It’s just a question of putting everything together.”
Torre believes Giambi’s monster home run will help the embattled slugger regain his swing. After he was heavily booed when the series with the Pirates began, the home run was also expected to give him a respite from hearing the crowd’s displeasure with his .243 average.
“You look in his eyes and you know that he’s hurting at times, maybe not physically, with everything he’s gone through,” Torre said. “I think sometimes we forget these players have blood running through their veins. It was certainly a tremendous thing for him.
“He’s a competitor, and there’s no place to hide here, especially in this town. You gotta go out there and you got to ante up and take the good with the bad.
“A lot of times the bad outdistances the good, but that doesn’t mean you give up. I think that the people of New York appreciate the fact that when people hurt, they can relate to them a little bit more. They don’t want to see anybody that’s perfect. They want to see them pick themselves up.”