Yankees: Gary Sanchez working his way back to stardom

Just three years ago, Gary Sanchez had as good a rookie season as any catcher in history. The following year resulted in All-Star and Silver Slugger honors for the Yankees catcher. But Sanchez’s third season didn’t go quite as planned.

While Gary Sanchez has faced a handful of injuries during his short Yankees career, currently sitting on the 10-day I.L. and having only played 89 games last season, some of those departures from the starting nine was due to lack of performance.

Austin Romine, the clear backup to Sanchez, posted the best numbers of his career in The Kraken’s absence.

Nevertheless, Sanchez remains the Yankee starter and for good reason. A .299 BA and 20 home runs in just 53 games his rookie year, followed by a .278/.345/.531 season with 33 homers catapulted Sanchez to the top of the MLB’s list of top backstops.

But then came 2018, in which Sanchez hit just 18 home runs while hitting under .200 on the year.

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The drastic drop in ability from Sanchez is likely due to his lowered line drive percentage. After hitting 16.4% line drives in his rookie season and 21.1% in 2017, Sanchez saw this same stat drop to 14.3% last season.

Since Sanchez’s line drive rate went down, this means something else had to go up. In 2018, as Sanchez’s line drive rate dropped, his fly ball rate jumped.

From 36.6% in 2017 to 42.9% in 2018, shows Sanchez was getting under the ball too much.

However, since Sanchez is still a power hitter, no matter what type of contact he gets on the ball, it’ll again be struck. This is likely why Sanchez was able to keep his home run numbers somewhat stable.

With Sanchez still hitting balls hard, even while hitting over 40% fly balls, some of those are bound to be home runs, especially in Yankee Stadium’s small confinements.

Otherwise, Sanchez hasn’t strayed too much from season to season. His higher walk rate in 2018 was a nice change of pace but came along with a career-high strikeout rate.

This convinces me that Sanchez’s feeble offensive production last year influenced the catcher to become more patient at the plate, taking more balls and strikes.

As seen from his seasonal BB:K ratio, the young catcher continues to strike out over 1.5 times as often as he walks.

This season in Sanchez’s limited plate appearances (45 thus far), the Dominican Republic native has shown an awareness of his line drive drop but hasn’t quite straightened it out just yet.

Although he has gotten his line drive percentage up from last season a bit, he has also improved in other ways. After seeing his fly ball rate jump a tad last season, in fluctuation with his line drive rate, Sanchez has almost cut his ground ball rate in half from over 40% to just over 20%.

This steady increase of line drives, along with the massive attempt to keep away from ground balls, has resulted in an astounding 62.5% fly ball rate.

Over the past three seasons, the highest seasonal fly ball percentage of qualified hitters was Joey Gallo’s 52.4% back in 2017. Gallo went on to hit 41 home runs that season with a .209 BA; sounds a bit like Sanchez.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing; Gallo’s bat has a lot of pop. Plus, Sanchez’s 2019 batted ball data would put him in the uppermost quartile for fly balls and hard-hit balls.

His 53.1% “hard contact” is harder than any annual total since 2016, as is his fly ball rate. And Sanchez’s company in these two uppermost quartiles is reassuring.

This qualification applies to just 24 players since 2016, which includes MVP winners Mike Trout and Mookie Betts, as well as a handful of other top players.

The problem is Sanchez’s line drive rate, which is lower than 75% of all qualified MLB hitters since 2016. But if Sanchez were to get his line drive rate up, even near league average, his production should skyrocket.

In the above graphic, we can see how comparable Sanchez’s 2017 was to other top players. But as that line drive percentage dropped below 15%, the batting average went with it.

If El Gary can get that line drive rate as we talked about, don’t be surprised to see Sanchez join the best hitters in baseball. But limiting his ground ball rate to an extreme low has helped Sanchez out in lieu of less line drives.

As seen above, Sanchez’s home run percentage, calculated as home runs per at-bat, has been steadily decreasing up until this season, although through limited playing time thus far.

Last season topped off the trend as Sanchez registered an all-time low 18 home runs. All three of his seasons prior to 2019 also resulted in at least 42% ground balls.

But Sanchez’s uber high fly ball rate of over 60% has allowed Sanchez to produce home runs at a rate higher than any player since 2016 has sustained for a whole season, by about 4%.

Least to say, Gary Sanchez has some work to do, especially returning from injury. But it looks like the All-Star catcher is on his way back to that All-Star level.