By Ryan Bologna
March 3, 2021
New York Sports Nation

Pho­to: Jim McIsaac/Getty Images

Gary Sánchez is arguably the most polar­iz­ing play­er on the Yan­kees. Since his break­out after being called up in 2016 he has had an up and down career, most recent­ly hav­ing a very bad sea­son in 2020.

My view on Sánchez is that 2021 is his year to either sink or swim. But despite the strug­gles I am opti­mistic about what Sánchez can do for the Yan­kees this year.

The first notion I hear a lot about Sánchez from many fans is that he has not been good since 2017. This is bla­tant­ly untrue. Sánchez had an .841 OPS with a 116 wRC+ and had the most home runs by a catch­er at 34 in just 106 games played in 2019. That is unde­ni­ably a good sea­son, espe­cial­ly when you con­sid­er what all of the oth­er catch­ers around the league typ­i­cal­ly do.

I brought up 2019 because it shows that despite what many think, in the last 162 game base­ball sea­son Gary Sánchez was a good play­er. I know I did not address his defense yet, but bear with me because I will.

Now on to 2020, which was unde­ni­ably awful for Sánchez. He post­ed a career high strike­out rate at 36% and just looked like he was over­whelmed with the bat in his hands.

The big ques­tion is if this is a fix­able prob­lem. Accord­ing to for­mer MLB play­er Trevor Plouffe it is. In a show Plouffe hosts called The Sequence, he explained how Sánchez tim­ing is off with his leg kick. He said what Sánchez has to do is start that leg kick ear­li­er so he is not late get­ting to pitch­es like he was in 2020.

Here is the full expla­na­tion if you would like to see:

Now I want to get to some under­ly­ing stats from Sánchez’s 2020 sea­son that show rea­sons to have hope for a bounce back sea­son at the plate. Sánchez’s sea­son was bad no mat­ter how you look at it, but when he did make con­tact it was often hard con­tact, and when he made hard con­tact he was very unlucky in 2020.

Sánchez was in the 97th per­centile in bar­reled ball per­cent­age in 2020. A bar­reled ball is defined as a ball that is hit with a cer­tain exit veloc­i­ty and launch angle that in com­pa­ra­ble sit­u­a­tions has at least a .500 bat­ting aver­age and a 1.500 slug­ging per­cent­age since Stat­cast start­ed keep­ing track in 2015.

To go along with this, Sánchez BABIP (bat­ting aver­age on balls in play) was .159. The league aver­age BABIP in 2020 was .292. This goes to show that despite the fact that when Sánchez made con­tact he hit the ball hard at a good rate, the actu­al results do not back that up.

This is not to say that every ball Sánchez hit hard was deserv­ing of a hit, there were times when he got pull hap­py and hit right into the left side of the infield that had him played per­fect­ly. When Sánchez is at his best, he often goes the oth­er way and he did not do that enough in 2020.

But over­all when a play­er has a BABIP that is over 130 bat­ting aver­age points below league aver­age there is some bad luck that plays a part. Near­ly every pro­jec­tion you can find has Sanchez’s BABIP being around 100 bat­ting aver­age points high­er in 2021.

So when look­ing at all of these fac­tors we have iden­ti­fied what is need­ed for Sánchez to have a resur­gence with the bat in 2021. Real­ly all he needs to do is get his tim­ing right with his swing and hope for bet­ter BABIP in 2021. If that hap­pens then Sánchez will be right back to being one of the best hit­ting catch­ers in baseball.

Know­ing the nature of fans that are done with Sánchez, they have been wait­ing for me to address his defense. This might sur­prise some but I would argue that while his defense is not great, the issues are large­ly overstated.

Sánchez has pos­i­tive rat­ings in Fan­graphs’ Def stat in every sea­son except for 2019 in which he had a ‑0.1 rat­ing. If you go back to 2019 many will remem­ber that Sánchez’s stance was changed to pri­or­i­tize lim­it­ing passed balls, and it worked. He only had sev­en passed balls that year.

That was Sánchez’s worst rat­ed year by the Def stat, but the one year he was not near the top of the league in passed balls. What does this tell me? Sánchez’s fram­ing suf­fered in 2019 and the eye test is not a great way to eval­u­ate catch­ers defensively.

Do I think Sánchez is a great defend­er? No. But I think the high amount of passed balls make it look worse to fans who do not look at defen­sive met­rics. I get it, the passed balls are real­ly hard to watch, but 18 passed balls over 162 games is not going to make a huge dif­fer­ence in the out­come of games.

There is more to catch­ing, like pitch fram­ing, which in Sánchez’s best defen­sive years he pri­or­i­tized and is some­thing he has to do in every inning he catch­es. There is also Sánchez’s can­non of an arm, which is clear­ly Sánchez’s great­est defen­sive attribute and shuts down the run­ning game on the base paths. Even if Sánchez’s passed ball woes con­tin­ue, as long as he has a resur­gence at the plate those defen­sive prob­lems are well worth deal­ing with.

What should fans take from all of this? They should know that while a Gary Sánchez resur­gence sea­son is not a guar­an­tee, it is very pos­si­ble in 2021. Give him a chance because the poten­tial is too high to give up on. If he fails again this sea­son, then it is fair to say he is not fit to be the Yan­kees catcher.