How to Sort by Date if my date fields are not formatted as Dates

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Using this plugin, but it is being applied to a data YML file in Jekyll and I wonder if that is why I am getting the above error. Anyone know how I might change the plug in code to apply this to a data file instead of a collection?

module Jekyll
  module DateFilter
    require 'date'
    def date_sort(collection)
      collection.sort_by do |el|
        Date.parse(el.data['date'], '%b %-d %Y')
      end
    end
  end
end
Liquid::Template.register_filter(Jekyll::DateFilter)

The error again is:

Error: undefined method `data' for #<Hash:0x007f859f5e9d78>

Being applied this way:

{%- assign comments = site.data.comments | sort date_sort -%}