Joyner’s Knee Healthy Again; So Is His Batting Average

ANAHEIM — The X-rays showed nothing as June turned to July last season, so Wally Joyner kept playing.

He had been extraordinary during the month of May, batting .337 in that month alone with five home runs.

“I thought I was off to one of my best starts,” Joyner said.

By July 12, he had played his last game of the season, succumbing to a stress fracture of the right knee.

His average went into the books at .268, the lowest of his five-year career.

What might that season have been like if not for the injury that detracted from his statistics, little by little, before it stole his season?

“Sometimes I think about it,” Joyner said Tuesday after contributing one of the Angels’ four home runs in a 7-4 victory over New York at Anaheim Stadium.

It is May once again, and a healthy Joyner is off to another good start, batting .326 after spending the month of April in the company of the American League batting leaders.

Used to be that April was one slow warm-up for Joyner, never a fast starter. This season, the slow start never happened. On April 22, he was hitting .415, and he was still hitting .368 by April 27.

“Maybe I’ve done a few things correctly coming into the season to take that and put it on the back burner,” Joyner said, referring to conditioning and his mental approach.

What everyone wonders is whether his mental approach involves a dollar sign. A veteran of two arbitration hearings who will be eligible for free agency after the season, Joyner has hinted he will test the market. He hopes that doesn’t mean every RBI is viewed as Joyner’s attempt to gain leverage.

“Hopefully I don’t have to deal with that,” he said. “I am eligible for free agency this year. I don’t think that’s anything new. Unfortunately, quite a few things are mentioned in the same breath as baseball--salaries, free agency.”

If he is bidding for a bid, Joyner is not doing it with the obvious ploy, the home run. After hitting 22 and 34 in his first two seasons, he started to try to hit them. Now, with only two this season--two since last June 26 in fact--he is no longer pressing for homers.

“After my first couple of years, I put a little too much pressure on myself,” he said. “I tried to get off to a good start home run wise, to keep that pressure surmountable.”

What he is saying is: It didn’t work.

Now he is a hitter who is comfortable batting second, as he did Tuesday, taking a lot of pitches and walking often, anything to try to move the runner over.

Ahead lies another May. Whether it will be like last May, no one can say.