Yankees Injury Report: Gary Sanchez nearing his return from the IL

Injuries have hit the Yankees hard again over the past couple of days but this weekend the team is expected to welcome back All-Star Gary Sanchez from the IL. Sanchez will start a rehab assignment Wednesday night with Triple-A Scranton and play two games before rejoining the club in Toronto.

This will be the second time this season Sanchez returns from the IL and the Yankees sure hope it will be the last. He missed 11 games in early April with a calf strain and on July 23rd he strained his left groin while running to first base.

The initial diagnosis was a Grade 1 strain which is the least serious but the expectation was that he would still miss around three to four weeks. However, a little over a week after the injury Sanchez started feeling much better and was able to ramp up baseball activities this past homestand. If he gets through his rehab assignment without any issues he’ll rejoin the club this weekend after missing only two and a half weeks.

When Sanchez went down he was in the midst of a terrible slump that started all the way back at the end of June during the London series against the Red Sox. He went through a brutal 10 for 85 stretch and in July he batted .105 with only one HR and four RBI. After he had one of the most productive first halves a Yankee catcher has ever had Sanchez was looking like the 2018 version of himself again.

His numbers are still great from a power standpoint with 24 HR and 58 RBI as he leads all major league catchers in both categories even though he’s only played in 77 games. However, his average dipped all the way down to .229 after it was as high as .273 on June 23rd. Sanchez’s chase rate went up a bit during the slump but the main reason for his struggles was the 10% increase in his groundball rate which led to a decrease in his average exit velocity.

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Now that he’s all healed up the Yankees need Gary to return to his pre-London form and play like the legitimate MVP candidate he was for the first three months of the season. Even though Austin Romine and Kyle Higashioka have done an outstanding job once again filling in the Yanks need their All-Star backstop if they’re going to make a run at a championship this October.

Romine is arguably the best backup catcher in baseball and Higgy is very solid as well but when Sanchez is at his best he’s the cleanup hitter in the lineup and a true game wrecker. He’s also much better at controlling the running game and his overall defense overall this season hasn’t been an issue at all.

It might take him a couple of games to shake the rust off which is okay because the Yankees have built such a commanding lead atop the AL East. That being said, let’s hope he shakes it off fast and gets off to a hot start because we all know how quickly things can spiral downward for him when he tries to hard to make up for lost time.