The Kyle Higashioka Problem
“Come on man. You’re really going to say I’m the problem?” (NJ.com)
Since the All Star Break, COVID cases and injuries have teamed up to decimate the Yankees’ roster. Here is a list of recently-injured (or ill) Yankees.
Clay Holmes
Aroldis Chapman
Domingo German
Gio Urshela
Anthony Rizzo
Gleyber Torres
Gary Sanchez
That’s not to mention the numerous guys (Sevy, Kluber, Hicks, O’Day, Clint, etc.) who have been out for an extended period of time, unrelated to this recent rash of injuries.
If we’re honest, a lot of these injuries are survivable for the Yankees. The back end of the bullpen is still stacked with Loaisiga, Green, and Britton, and supplemented by an emergent Albert Abreu. The starting rotation has held its own nicely as well. Rougned Odor has filled in respectably (if we ignore his defense) for Gio Urshela, who’s been out longer than it was projected he would be. Anthony Rizzo’s absence is very noticeable, but the Yankees replaced him with the defending league leader in home runs. Gleyber’s injury is particularly tough because it opens the door for a lot of playing time for guys like Andrew Velazquez and Tyler Wade, but the most tragic injury here is that of Gary Sanchez. Not only does it throw a real wrench in #HotGarySummer, but it requires that Kyle Higashioka, who is actually very bad at being a starter on a Major League Baseball team, play every day.
Kyle Higashioka is a fine backup catcher. He is! It might be hard to believe, but he’s been better offensively this year than a lot of guys that we know and love. His 78 wRC+ ranks ahead of such guys as Victor Caratini, William (not Willson) Contreras, Christian Vazquez, Tomas Nido, Martin Maldonado, Jorge Alfaro, Stephen Vogt, Kurt Suzuki, and plenty of others among catchers with at least 100 PA.
There are certain things Higgy does really well too. He’s a top-10 catcher this year when it comes to runs from extra strikes (a metric that evaluates the quality of a catcher’s framing by seeing how frequently pitches outside of the strike zone are called strikes when he is catching), despite having caught fewer pitches this year than all but one other catcher in the top-10. His 3 runs from extra strikes this year put him a full 6 runs ahead of Gary Sanchez in that stat. Of all qualified catchers, Higgy converts pitches outside the strike zone into strikes more frequently than all but 5 other players.
Continuing with our defensive theme, Higgy’s pop time to second base is better than league average, and is another metric in which he’s a top-10 catcher (though he ranks just behind Gary this time (and the most recent data that Baseball Savant has here is from 2019)). Where he runs into some trouble is with his arm strength. Whereas Gary is top-6 in arm strength and above-average in exchange time, Higgy is only very slightly above-average in arm strength and is in the bottom-10 in exchange time. Combine that with the consistent ability of the Yankees to construct a pitching staff that is very susceptible to runners stealing, and Higgy can be a true liability behind the plate (as we saw during Monday’s game against Kansas City).
On the offensive side, there are some more things that Higgy has developed the ability to do nicely. He slugs a bit, ranking ahead of 29 of the 56 catchers who have 100+ PA this year, including Reese McGuire, Yadier Molina, James McCann, Tom Murphy, and Christian Vazquez. His xwOBA is pretty impressive too! It doesn’t stack up to Gary’s, which is 11th among all catchers, but it puts him ahead of such guys as Yadi, Jacob Stallings, Roberto Perez, Francisco Mejia, and James McCann.
It’s abundantly clear to me that Kyle Higashioka is a phenomenal backup catcher. He has a case for the title of best backup catcher in the league. As we saw with Austin Romine though, and are currently seeing with Kyle Higashioka, there are often abundant reasons why backups are backups.
In order to begin illustrating this point, allow me to present you with the exhaustive list of things Kyle Higashioka does better than Gary Sanchez.
Play defense (excluding things requiring having a good arm)
And that’s fine! Kyle Higashioka, as I’ve detailed, is a perfectly serviceable backup catcher. The Yankees get in trouble when he has to be the starter (or when they choose to make him the starter).
On April 27, Boone effectively announced that Higashioka had won the starting job. Up to that point in the season, he’d been phenomenal, and he was catching Gerrit Cole, who was the best pitcher on the planet at the moment. Higgy was slashing a ridiculous .320/.414/.880 for a 239 wRC+ at the end of play on April 27 after going 2-4 with a homer in Baltimore. In 105 PA since then, Higgy is slashing a paltry .147/.219/.263 for a 33 wRC+ (67% worse than league average). At least when Gary Sanchez hit .147 last year he was able to slug his way into a 68 wRC+. Not all slumps are created equal.
Kyle Higashioka played a phenomenal trick on the Yankees. He did it really well. It came in two parts. The first part is that he managed to convince the Yankees that he was the only person on the planet who could competently catch Gerrit Cole. We know now that Gary Sanchez can do a fine job of that. Even if he couldn’t, that would only warrant starting Higgy 20% of the time. The second thing he did was have 77 terrific plate appearances. I don’t think this is clear enough to a lot of fans. Kyle Higashioka had 77 regular season plate appearances between July 26, 2020 (his first appearance last year) and April 27, 2021 (the day he was named the starter). That’s all! Was he 54% better than the average hitter in that time? Yes. Should we ever read so much into 77 PA? Obviously not! We know that since that run of 77 great PA, Higgy has been 67% worse than the average hitter. It’s not as if we didn’t know exactly who he was coming into that streak either! Prior to the 2020 season starting, Higgy had a 41 wRC+ in 156 PA. It’s critical to understand the scale we are working with when we discuss Kyle Higashioka. He only has 338 plate appearances at the MLB level, and he did not appear in a single game before he was 27, despite being drafted out of high school. Gary Sanchez had his 338th Major League plate appearance in May of 2017 when he was 24!
I am telling you all that to emphasize that we know exactly who Kyle Higashioka is. He is a glove-first, weak-hitting, late-developing catcher with an impressive ability to call a game and manage a pitching staff, and a sneaky ability to slug. However, his offensive inconsistency often borders on ineptitude and he does not approach starter quality at the Major League level in almost anything.
As a result of this, it’s not too hard to make the argument that Gary Sanchez’s injury hurts the Yankees the most. They replaced Anthony Rizzo with the defending AL home run king. They were able to play infield by committee for a while in spite of injuries at different times to Gleyber Torres, Gio Urshela, and DJ LeMahieu. They recently started Tyler Wade and Andrew Velazquez in the same game, which is tough, but they were able to handle things acceptably for a while. A recently-resurgent Brett Gardner has held the fort in center field (with occasional help from Estevan Florial and Greg Allen), and Joey Gallo is a massive upgrade over what was previously a black hole of ineptitude in left field. Kyle Higashioka is the one backup who has to play all the time. He is the only thing standing between the current state of affairs and Rob Brantly regularly catching for this team, and he’s horrible. Gary Sanchez is one of the best offensive catchers in the league, and one of the best players on this team.
Really, it was a little dishonest to call this the Kyle Higashioka problem. It’s more of a backup catcher problem. Backup catchers are one of the least productive groups of players in the game, and there’s a reason they’re backups. The Yankees have been incredibly lucky in the last few years when they’ve needed to use backup catchers regularly. Austin Romine’s OPS+ was 95 between 2018 and 2019, and Higashioka had a phenomenal 2020. That’s not sustainable, and it’s currently biting the Yankees.
In addition to having an elite arm, which would have saved the Yankees a couple of runs in the first two games against the Royals, Gary Sanchez has posted a 123 wRC+ with 27 XBH since Higashioka was named the starter. Of course, Gary won the starting job back and made a push for the All Star Game with that performance. Losing this production, and having to play Higashioka every day, constitutes a massive drop in production, and one that is incredibly hard for the lineup to handle. Frankly, it’s only really comparable to giving PAs that used to go to Gleyber and Gio to Andrew Velazquez and Tyler Wade.
What’s really important to remember here is that it doesn’t make any sense to be excited about Higashioka getting regular playing time. Kyle Higashioka has shown us he is not the player he appeared to be for 77 surprising plate appearances. Kyle Higashioka is exactly who we thought he was, and if you ever advocated for him to start over Gary Sanchez, you outed yourself as someone who is not serious about baseball.
Honestly, this really does feel like an issue that is specific to the Yankees. Robinson Chirinos is having an unusually good 70ish PA for the Cubs right now (it’s actually very reminiscent of Kyle Higashioka’s 2020). Do you think Cubs fans want him to replace Willson Contreras? At least Chirinos has some record of being a serviceable offensive player, but of course that’s not what Cubs fans want! Something tells me White Sox fans are not thrilled with having to start Zack Collins or Seby Zavala when they’d normally have Yasmani Grandal. Austin Barnes even had 100 good offensive games a few years ago, but you’d have to be insane as a Dodgers fan to prefer him to Will Smith.
I’m not saying you need to hate Kyle Higashioka, although a number of reactions from Yankees fans to his fleeting hot streak did push me in that direction. I am not saying that Kyle Higashioka is uniquely bad compared to the set of guys who play his position (although he has been a special kind of bad since May). I am not even saying that I would prefer a host of other backup catchers in the league over him (though I might, if I looked at it in some detail). What I am saying is that you don’t build a team expecting that your backups are going to play all the time, and if you did you would hope against hope that the regularly-playing backup you have to play all the time was not your catcher. The Yankees have, from a combination of bad luck, bad decisions, and a stringent testing regime, ended up in a situation that requires that they play one of the worst hitters in the league, who provides unimpressive defensive value, all the time.
I can’t make this all negative though. Here are some sick bombs that Higgy has hit.
Save us Gary Sanchez, you’re our only hope.
