BALTIMORE — Until Monday, Chase Headley hadn’t drawn a walk since May 3. And with the way the third baseman has looked at the plate lately, it may have seemed like he hadn’t gotten a hit since then, either.
But after manager Joe Girardi opted to sit Headley for two games over the weekend, Headley was back in the lineup for Monday’s 3-2 loss to the Orioles at Camden Yards and singled to center in his first at-bat and walked in the seventh.
“I felt like I swung at good pitches [and] took good swings,” Headley said. “It was better than it’s been for the last week or so, that’s for sure.”
Talk about faint praise.
Over his previous 16 games, Headley was just 6-for-57 with no walks and 21 strikeouts, leading Girardi to give him some time to “refresh himself and just get him going again.”
Headley wasn’t thrilled with the plan, but admitted Monday: “It certainly didn’t hurt. I definitely felt relaxed a little bit.
“I don’t want to say I checked out because I was working,’’ Headley said of his two DNPs in The Bronx, when Ronald Torreyes filled in and went 2-for-6 with a walk. “But you remove yourself from the emotion of every at-bat. It probably did help.”
One game — with a hit and a walk — is a long way from proving Headley is back to being a productive player. And his strong start to the year, when he had an OPS of .863 with three homers, 11 RBIs and 15 walks by May 6, is a distant memory.
As much as Headley was pleased with his single against Baltimore right-hander Dylan Bundy, it was the walk on a 3-2 pitch from Bundy that seemed to have even more of an impact.
“That’s something I’ve always done well in my career,” Headley said of drawing free passes. “It’d been way too long since I had one.”
And that may have led to some of his issues at the plate, especially when he got frustrated several times during his rough stretch when he thought a close pitch was called for a third strike instead of ball four.
“You start not trusting the strike zone and expanding it,” Headley said. “You just get antsy. … Sometimes I let things snowball emotionally and you think, ‘Am I ever gonna get a hit again?’ ”
On Monday, Headley found out that he would.