Yankees’ Paul Goldschmidt hitting like DJ LeMahieu did in his prime

Have the Yankees unearthed prime DJ LeMahieu?

While the actual LeMahieu is checking off boxes during a rehab assignment, the Yankees have received the same type of production — line drives smacked to all fields, few strikeouts and the second-most singles in baseball entering play — from an unlikely source.

Paul Goldschmidt, who led the National League in home runs in 2013 and who crushed 35 homers as recently as 2022, might be reinventing himself.

Emphasis on might because the sample size still is small enough to qualify as a blip in a long career, and perhaps the trends begin to change as the season wears on.

But through about a month of play, the numbers themselves — the highest line-drive rate in baseball and using the opposite field as he never has before — paint the picture of a “professional hitter,” as hitting coach James Rowson called him, adjusting for his age-37 season.

“He’s a guy who evolves as a hitter,” Rowson said before having a rare off night (0-or-5) in the Yankees’ 4-2 series-opening loss to the Blue Jays in The Bronx on Friday. “He’s a guy who takes what the game gives him. And I think what he looks at is the quality of his at-bat — he wants to put a good swing on a good pitch.”

According to Goldschmidt himself, the approach has not changed.

“I just try to hit the ball and just kind of let it do what it’s going to do,” Goldschmidt said. “But yeah, it’s been a little bit different, results-wise, but I haven’t really tried to do anything different.”

Entering play, Goldschmidt owned a .383 batting average that only trailed Aaron Judge in MLB. He was first in the majors in multi-hit games (12). Before Friday’s 0-fer that dropped his average to a still-impressive .364, he had an eight-game hitting streak that consisted of 12 singles, two doubles and zero triples or home runs.

This is not the usual stat line of a slugging first baseman who entered this season with 362 homers but enters Saturday with just 363.

But yes, the Yankees would absolutely accept this elite average-for-power trade-off.

“I think if he can continue to do that for the course of the year, we really don’t know what that could be [in terms of end-of-year numbers]. It could be something special,” Rowson said. “It’s not normal for him, but it’s something that if he keeps doing it, the numbers are going to pop up for him.”

The most tangible change for Goldschmidt involves his aggressiveness. A hitter who has a well-earned reputation for working pitchers entered having seen a career-low 3.73 pitches per plate appearance, down from a career mark of 4.16.

He has seen fewer pitches because he has attacked earlier in counts, swinging at a first pitch in 34.3 percent of at-bats after tallying a 24.7 percent first-pitch-swing rate in his first 14 seasons.

Goldschmidt shrugged at the change and theorized it was a reflection of how pitchers have attacked him rather than how he has attacked pitchers: “It feels like I’ve got a lot of strikes to hit,” he said.

He was not seeing a meaningfully different rate of strikes themselves, but he has been seeing more mistake pitches than usual. His 9.4 “meatball” percentage — which is what it sounds like, pitches over the middle of the plate — was the highest of his career.

The first baseman batted cleanup, squeezed between Ben Rice and Cody Bellinger on Friday, but he typically has batted behind Judge. Maybe having a runner on base ahead of him so often has forced pitchers into more mistakes.

“I definitely think pitchers, they want to get ahead of me,” Goldschmidt said. “But I haven’t really thought about it. Just trying to be ready every time I step in the box.”

He has produced as much offense as the Yankees could have envisioned while the production itself is far from what the Bombers could have envisioned.

Rowson said he has heard for years about the professional approach Goldschmidt takes at the plate, and even if the results have looked different, the at-bat quality has remained the same.

“The slug, all those things — I think he’s at a point where [he knows] you don’t hit home runs; pitchers throw home runs,” Rowson said. “He’ll hit some homers. But I think he’s in a great spot of not trying to do too much.”