Anticipating the Next #HotGarySummer

Analytics
Written By Will Harris
Gary Sanchez flips his bat after a home run in Boston

We’re looking forward to seeing a lot more of this pose in 2022 (MLB.com)

The Basics

Those of you who follow us on Twitter will know that here at YankeesFiles.com, we are huge fans of The Kraken, El Gary, Gary Sanchez. You may be aware that #HotGarySummer shows up on more of our tweets than any other hashtag. To get started off on the right foot, take a look at some Gary Bombs.

Those of you who listen to our podcast will know that I spend an awful lot of time defending Gary Sanchez (even more than I spend trashing Kyle Higashioka) and that I take umbrage with the people who don’t recognize Gary’s talent. Please find some examples below…

… and those are just the ones we’ve posted since the season ended.

At this point, you have some idea of who Gary Sanchez is. So do I. Here are some things on which we can agree.

  1. Gary burst onto the scene in the big leagues, and even after a disappointing and injury-riddled 2018 season, he was a player who was universally thought to have a ton of promise.

  2. When he’s locked in he’s one of the best hitters in baseball.

  3. The best baseball we’ve seen the Yankees play in the last 6 seasons has all come with Gary on the field.

  4. He’s neither a good framer nor a great blocker of balls (although he was better than Higashioka at preventing passed balls on a rate basis last year), but he has one of the best arms of any catcher.

In case one of those strikes you as incorrect, try these stats on for size.

Gary Sanchez had played in 457 games at catcher. In those 457 games he has more home runs than any other player in their first 457 games at catcher since WWII. His RBI and slugging over that span rank him fifth and eighth in those categories respectively. From an offensive production perspective, we are watching the career of one of the top-10 catchers of the last 77 years (in the number of games he’s played at the position). Take a moment to digest that. Even by OPS he’s in the top-20. This is the guy so many fans want to get rid of. If we take out the last two years, which I’m willing to say the pandemic gives us license to do, the numbers get even wilder. Gary moves up to ninth in OPS among players in their first 306 games at catcher, leads the group in home runs by 14 over Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, slots in at second in slugging, and is third in RBI. He ranks ahead of Jorge Posada and Yogi Berra in almost every run-production category.

This is all not to mention that Gary had made two All-Star games by the time he was 26, that he has as many 20+ home run seasons (and 30+ home run seasons) as Aaron Judge, and that he’s beaten Berra and Posada’s single-season home run AND OPS marks (min. 200 PA). But look, these are just the basics. I understand that anyone can cherry pick stats (although I’d resent being accused of doing so) and I’m willing to give you some more information.

It’s Better to be Lucky than Good - Just Ask DJ LeMahieu

A lot of you aren’t going to want to hear this, because it sounds like an excuse, but you need to understand that Gary Sanchez has been a very unlucky hitter in recent years.

To put this in perspective, let’s turn to the numbers. Last year, only 13 players had a bigger gap between their expected and realized batting averages than Gary Sanchez. His xBA was .228 while he only hit .204. Of the bottom 20 players in BA-xBA, he had the highest barrel rate and an above-average hard hit rate (min. 300 PA). In that sense, there’s nothing about the quality of contact he’s making that suggests he should be having this kind of bad luck. In a lot of ways, he was like the anti-2020-DJ LeMahieu, the luckiest hitter I’ve ever seen.

He was not quite as unlucky in slugging, though he still finished the season 29 points off of his xSLG. Of the bottom 42 players in SLG-xSLG, his barrel rate was almost 50% better than the average (min. 300 PA). This might have something to do with shifts and outfield positioning. Only 14 RHBs face shifts more frequently than Gary (a lot of these guys are very good hitters, like Kris Bryant, Luke Voit, and Mike Trout), and we know outfielders play deeper against the Yankees than they do on average to take advantage of the team’s lack of speed and defend against extra base hits. Finally, his realized wOBA was 22 points lower than his xwOBA, making him the 33rd-unluckiest player in the league last year by that metric in my sample of 262 hitters. Last year alone, Gary was somewhere in the bottom 20-40 major leaguers in batted ball luck.

In 2020 and 2021, Gary hit 108 balls with an xBA of .500 or higher. That accounts for 31% of all of his batted balls in that span. The rest of the league’s batted balls only achieved such an xBA threshold 27.8% of the time, more than 10% less often than Gary’s. Not surprisingly, given the topic of this section of the article, the league got a lot luckier than Gary on these batted balls on average. Gary’s batted balls that had an xBA over .500 had an average xBA of .755, while the league’s had an average xBA of .733. Despite this, Gary’s realized batting average on those balls was .703, while the league hit .753 on those balls. If Gary had experienced the same “luck boost” from his xBA to his realized batting average that the league benefited from, he’d have hit .776 on those balls, and that would equate to 8 additional hits in his last 2 seasons, enough to raise his cumulative average in that span by 15 points.

This bad luck has plagued Gary throughout his career. In 2020 his realized batting average was 44 points below his xBA, and his realized SLG was 62 points below his xSLG. This all happened despite his batted ball profile remaining relatively constant over much of his career. In fact, in 2020, his most widely-criticized campaign, he posted numbers above his career averages in both barrel rate and hard-hit rate. The tough part about 2020 for Gary was how quickly it ended. His peripherals were much better than the stats he was able to post, and then a lot of people drew heinous conclusions about him based on a 49-game sample. Do better.

Try as I may, I struggle mightily to identify a factor other than luck that is causing Gary’s outcomes to be so poor when compared to his expected outcomes. He hits the ball very hard (89th percentile in max exit velo last year), walks a ton (86th percentile in walk rate), and makes solid contact very often (86th percentile in barrel rate). Sure, he rates pretty poorly in whiff rate and strikeout rate, but neither of those explain why balls that he puts in play that are more likely than not to be hits on average end up being hits at surprisingly low rates.

What Could He Be?

We’ve already seen Gary be a ridiculously productive player at the major league level on multiple occasions. He should’ve won the Rookie of the Year award in 2016 when he hit 20 homers in 53 games. He made All-Star teams in 2017 and 2019, his two 30+ homer seasons (and the two most recent years that the Yankees went to the ALCS). People keep telling me he’s “not that guy anymore” though, so let’s try to see if we can figure out what kind of production he’s still capable of.

In the last two years, Gary has posted a 14.7% barrel rate. Here are some guys who were at 14.7% +/- one percentage point in barrel rate last year. You might like this list.

  • Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

  • Teoscar Hernandez

  • Brandon Lowe

  • GIANCARLO STANTON

  • George Springer

  • Rafael Devers

  • Pete Alonso

  • Matt Chapman

That’s not exactly horrible company, but I won’t pretend that barrel rate has exhaustive explanatory power here. I don’t expect that Gary will show up this year and put up Guerrero’s 166 wRC+.

Savant gives us some additional data that’s instructive when figuring out what kind of player we might expect Gary to be. Check out his affinity map.

The most similar hitter to Gary has back-to-back top-10 MVP vote finishes.

That’s right. According to hitting profile, Brandon Lowe, Ryan Mountcastle, Chris Taylor, Matt Chapman, and Kyle Lewis are all among the top-13 most similar hitters to Gary Sanchez. For context, those guys all had a wRC+ between 101 and 137 last year. The more we look into the data, the more difficult it gets to see Gary’s realized stats in 2021 as indicative of his true talent.

What Might Surprise You?

On top of his strong batted ball profile, Gary is better than he gets credit for at swinging at strikes. He especially does not get this credit from Twitter user Tom Curry.

What Tom doesn’t know is that Gary’s chase rate (per Baseball Savant) is better than the league average by over 10%, and his oSwing% (basically chase rate but from Fangraphs) is the same as Michael Brantley’s, and better than that of such players as 2021 NL MVP Bryce Harper, 2020 NL MVP Freddie Freeman, 2021 AL batting champ Yuli Gurriel, and other great players like Giancarlo Stanton, Shohei Ohtani, Yordan Alvarez, Corey Seager, Wander Franco, and Manny Machado. He’s a disciplined hitter.

Not surprisingly, this translates into a very good walk rate for Gary. Last year he walked exactly as often as Aaron Judge, widely considered to be one of the league’s most disciplined hitters, and more frequently than Corey Seager, Carlos Correa, Fernando Tatis, Giancarlo Stanton, Chris Taylor, George Springer, Xander Bogaerts, Manny Machado, Kris Bryant, Rafael Devers, Cody Bellinger, and Marcus Semien.

A common complaint about Gary is that he strikes out too much. I wonder if the people who make this complaint have the same problem with Rafael Devers, Starling Marte, Rhys Hoskins, and Jose Abreu, each of whom had exactly the same BB/K as Gary last year and hit for wRC+ of over 120….

So What Gives?

The questions that I’m left with after diving into all of this information are the following: If we know Gary compares so favorably to all of these great hitters and that he has unprecedented power for a catcher, why does Steamer project him to be basically average this coming season? Why does it think he’s going to post a .317 wOBA when his xwOBA has never been below .336? Why is he projected to have fewer PA than he has had in any season except 2018, and his fewest career WAR (2020 excluded)? Why does luck continue not to go his way?

Gary Sanchez is incredibly talented. He hits the ball like a great hitter. He has a history of getting surprisingly unlucky. Those of you who listen to our podcast know that I’m a firm believer that regression to the mean comes for us all. Soon it will come for Gary Sanchez, and he will hit at an All-Star level again. Is he ever going to be an elite defender? No. Did he allow passed balls less often than Kyle Higashioka last year? Yes. Is he ever going to be one of the league’s top framers? No. Is he going to remain among the best catchers in the league in arm strength, pop time, and exchange time? Yes.

If Gary Sanchez makes the 2022 All-Star team, you shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, it’s possible you should be more surprised if he doesn’t.

The Crux

The state of catching around the league is horrible. Many Yankees fans who want to move on from Gary Sanchez would find his replacement, whoever that is, to be equally offensive, if not worse. Mike Zunino has struck out in 36% of his plate appearances since 2019 and is a .188 hitter since then. Kyle Higashioka has a career wRC+ in the 60s. Even Yasmani Grandal, one of the two or three best catchers in baseball, would infuriate the fans that hate Gary with his unwavering commitment to the three true outcomes.

If you think the only thing that matters from the catcher position is defense and that the only component of catcher defense that matters is framing, I have two thoughts. First, I can’t convince you to like Gary Sanchez, and I won’t try to. Have fun with Jose Molina. Second, you’re weird and probably not that smart given that the thing that plagued this team all last season was an inability to score runs.

For me, run creation is always going to matter more than run prevention, and Gary Sanchez is one of the best run creators in the league at his position. On top of that, the numbers say that eventually his luck should even out and he will perform closer to his expected numbers when it comes to creating runs. Unless you can find a way for the Yankees to get Will Smith, JT Realmuto, or Yasmani Grandal, you should love Gary.

It’s time for you to renew your belief in Gary Sanchez. I’ll see you on the beach for the next #HotGarySummer.

Will Harris
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