Giambi's path free of fallout

July 18, 2006

Yankees slugger Jason Giambi doesn't look at the Barry Bonds saga and publicly say that with some bad legal advice, a bit more arrogance or unquenchable lust for a spot in the record books, there but for the grace of God might go he. But Giambi doesn't have to.

The longer Bonds, his Bay Area contemporary, sweats out the wait to see if a grand jury indictment is coming down against him any day now for his ever-deepening part in baseball's steroid mess, the more Giambi seems able to put more distance between himself and the entire debacle. Even though, of the two of them, Giambi is the only one who has admitted any guilt.

It's an odd paradox, isn't it? Giambi is back to earning curtain calls on the Yankee Stadium dugout steps and clouting tape-measure home runs, the latest one the upper-deck shot he hit last night in the Yankees' 4-2 win over Seattle.

He's not just among the league leaders in home runs. He's been allowed to get on with his career rather than have the media and IRS bloodhounds investigate every corner of his past and hold it up to public view in the same wincingly ugly detail that Bonds' life continues to be exposed.

Then again, Giambi and Bonds have never been confused with being the same sort of person, even if they were accused of doing some of the same things.

Giambi ensured that he'll never become a hero or even an inspirational story in some quarters when it was leaked that he told the grand jury behind closed doors that he used performance-enhancing drugs. But he's no surly incorrigible like Bonds, either, clinging to some silly alibi even he can't possibly believe. Giambi has become a parable, of sorts, about how telling the truth can set you free.

"I think I've just been in a good mind-set this year," Giambi said last night. It was another of his typically oblique references to the avalanche of problems that beset him after his 2003 grand jury testimony, starting with the pituitary-gland scare that left him worried for a while that he might have cancer, then his declining stats, then those few weeks last season when he had to convince the Yankees not to send him down to the minors.

Giambi heated up in the second half of the season, powering the Yankees to a division title they seemed unlikely to win. Now, with Hideki Matsui, Gary Sheffield and a handful of other Yankees out for an extended time this season with various injuries, Giambi ranks among the biggest reasons the Yankees are only a half-game behind Boston in the American League East. He knows it.

Before he stood still long enough to answer a few questions, he happily bustled around the clubhouse as if he didn't have a care in the world beyond the stifling 93-degree game-time heat, finding his glove in his cluttered locker, then hurrying out to the field on time for his pregame work.

He was honest when kidded about how much he never liked being a designated hitter before this year. "That's just because I was just never good at it," Giambi blurted back. He graciously insisted it is second-year Yankees hitting coach Don Mattingly who has resurrected his career -- "No question" -- and not anything that he personally has done.

"I'm just more prepared to play the games," Giambi said.

The peace of mind that he has (and Bonds doesn't) has to have something to do with that, too. While Bonds struggles to recapture his home run swing, Giambi is in an especially good groove right now. Twenty of his last 33 hits have been for extra bases. He already has 28 home runs, putting him on a pace for 50.

As Yankees manager Joe Torre said of Giambi last night: "I don't know if, in my years in baseball, if I've ever seen a guy who can think home run and go up there and still be as selective as he is, too ... He's been terrific."

So terrific that not many people at the Stadium could have been terribly surprised last night when Seattle intentionally walked Giambi with runners on second and third and one out in the seventh to get to Alex Rodriguez, merely last year's league MVP. Giambi, a past MVP himself, has been that good.

And A-Rod -- who struck out swinging in that bases-loaded at-bat to go with the three errors he committed last night -- has been that bad under pressure.

"Tonight, I stunk," A-Rod said. "You just move on."

Giambi is proof that it works.