THE GREAT SANBINO!
Baby Bomber Sanchez on a mind-blowing run
At this rate, they may want to start planning Gary Sanchez’s induction to Cooperstown and the day the Yankees will retire his No. 24 jersey.
One of the greatest starts to a major league career continued Friday night, and it is showing no signs of slowing down. If anything, it is picking up speed, as Sanchez hits one long home run after another, taking the surging Yankees along for the ride.
The 23-year-old catcher blasted his 10th home run — equaling his minor league output this year in 71 Triple-A games — and drove in four runs in the Yankees’ 14-4 rout of the Orioles to kick off an important threegame series at the Stadium.
“He’s as hot as it gets right now,” left fielder Brett Gardner said. “We’re all having a good time watching him.”
His fifth-inning moon shot, with the game already well out of reach, drew the biggest roar of the evening. It was followed by chants of “Gary Sanchez, Gary Sanchez” from the crowd of 38,423 as he joined current Rockies rookie Trevor Story and former Red Sox first baseman George Scott (1966) as the only players to go yard 10 times in their first 22 games. He also became the first Yankees rookie to go deep 10 times in a month, with games to spare. Through 22 games, the only Yankee to have more hits than Sanchez’s 31 was Joe Di Maggio, with 38 way back in 1936.
The home run was his third hit of the evening — following a first-inning single and secondinning two-run double to the opposite field — for the ninth multi-hit game of his brief, thrilling career. He now is hitting a robust .403 with 17 extrabase hits in 77 at-bats and a through-the-roof 1.342 OPS.
“He seems to center every baseball he hits,” manager Joe Girardi said. “He’s patient, he gets his pitch, and he’s not missing them right now. It’s as good as I’ve seen to start a career.”
The Yankees (66-61) are 14-9 since the non-waiver trade deadline, have won five of their last seven games and have moved to within 3 ¹ /2 games of the Orioles for the second AL wild-card spot. Since trading cornerstones Aroldis Chapman, Carlos Beltran and Andrew Milller for highly rated prospects, a series of moves intended to improve the team’s future, the Yankees have taken off, playing the kind of consistently inspiring baseball that previously was absent.
It was all on display Friday night in The Bronx, where the Yankees pounded out 18 hits and chased Orioles starter Yovani Gallardo one out into the second inning.
Luis Cessa, the 24-year-old former Mets prospect acquired in December from the Tigers for reliever Justin Wilson, turned in his second consecutive stellar start. Cessa (4-0) allowed a pair of home runs to Manny Machado and nothing else over six innings, giving up five hits and three runs and striking out five. But it was the bats, led by Sanchez, that quickly turned this into a laugher.
Starlin Castro flied out to center field for the first out of the second inning, and the next nine Yankees reached base. There were six consecutive hits, and Gardner, Jacoby Ellsbury, Sanchez and Mark Teixeira, who also homered in the first inning, drove in runs in succession.
“It’s a lot of fun. This year, a lot of times, we struggled to score runs,” Gardner said. “Offensively, we’ve been disappointing for a lot of the year. We haven’t had a lot of games like that. It’s fun when you can put up a lot of crooked numbers.”