Sanchez an irreplaceable force for Boone’s crew
MINNEAPOLIS — Here’s the thing about Gary Sanchez. Yes, sometimes he totally loses the baseball on the way from the pitcher’s hand and a runner advances 90 feet, frustrating teammates, management and fans.
Sometimes, though, in a 0-0 game when the Yankees couldn’t push across a run and were 0-for 7 with runners in scoring position, he will launch the baseball 460 feet. That home run opened the floodgates. Sanchez’s titanic sixth-inning blast landed in the third deck in left field at beautiful Target Field on a perfect night for baseball Monday to propel the Yankees to a 7-2 win over the punchless Twins. As exasperating as Sanchez can be, there is nothing that can replace that kind of power, especially in a wild-card playoff game.
Asked to describe the one word that best describes Sanchez, Aaron Boone chose: “Powerful.’’ That is the perfect word. “Hopefully tonight is the start of getting him rolling for us,’’ Boone said. “When he is going well he can change the game.”
The Yankees have learned to live with the good and the bad Gary, and you had better, too. That’s who Sanchez is as a player.
There was a J.A. Happ fastball that eluded Sanchez’s glove in the first inning Monday and was benevolently scored a wild pitch by the official scorer. It was one of those plays that made you shake your head.
There is the cross-up that happens so often when Luis Severino is on the mound. Happ managed to work out of that one-out trouble. A pitching pro, the lefty hurled six scoreless innings.
Happ and Sanchez could be the battery for the Yankees’ wild-card game. Happ has earned such a start and Sanchez, for all his flaws, must be the starting catcher for that game.
The Yankees are built on the home run, we all know that. They continue to mash home runs at a record-setting pace. This is not going to be a team that changes offensive game plans this late in the season.
They have hit a major league leading 233 home runs and San- chez has hit 16 of them, despite missing so much of the season.
Sanchez crushed the downand-in 2-2 fastball, a good pitch from Twins right-hander Kyle Gibson, into the first row of the third deck, the longest home run at Target Field this year.
A smiling Sanchez said through interpreter Marlon Abreu any home run is good, but when you hit one that far “that allows you to kind of relax right out of the box. It allows you to run the bases comfortably.’’
Sanchez added that “hopefully’’ this is the home run that gets him going. The home run was the 58th hit by the Yankees in the past 34 games.
This team is not about the hit- and-run. It is about the home run
With Aaron Judge out of the lineup but at least back taking batting practice and Giancarlo Stanton engulfed in a slump, the Yankees need to get the power where they can find it and for all his catching faults, Sanchez is one power bat. He came into the game batting an embarrassing .181 but picked up two more hits after the home run.
Sanchez is not making like Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez behind the plate. Until the home run, Sanchez was 3-for-27 since coming off the DL.
In the eighth inning Sanchez doubled but with two outs went back to tag up on the third out of the inning, a fly to right. Gary being Gary. With the AL East race now basically an impossible dream the Yankees have to do the best they can to be ready for the onegame wild card.
Playing these Twins is good for the Yankees’ baseball soul.
After Gibson left the Yankees scored six runs in the seventh. The first two scored on Miguel Andujar’s double to center, his 40th double.
On this night, though, it all started for the Yankees when Sanchez, who sometimes lets runners go that extra 90 feet because of a defensive lapse, blasted that 460-foot home run.