USA TODAY International Edition
Yankees’ Sanchez finally gets into groove
BOSTON – Before Aaron Judge, before Gleyber Torres and Miguel Andujar, before all of the promising young Yankees prospects yet to arrive, there was the man they called The Sanchize. Gary Sanchez was a touted talent in the Yankees system for so long that he predated the swift, stunning organizational youth movement now paying dividends at the big-league level. Sanchez exploded onto the Major League scene with a dizzying barrage of production as a 23-year-old in August 2016, homering at a Ruthian pace, revitalizing a fan base bored of overpaid veterans, and teasing the bright future ahead. Sanchez became an All-Star for the first time at 24 last season and appeared an inevitable cornerstone of the great Yankees teams to come: the rare catcher with light-tower power and a developing defender behind the plate with a cannon for an arm and a good feel for framing. Entering this season, few players in baseball looked more valuable than New York’s young backstop. Then it all went awry. Sanchez got off to a slow start to 2018, got hot in late April, then fell into a miserable funk that saw him hit .110 with a .431 OPS over a 23game stretch starting May 22 and ending, perhaps mercifully, with him landing on the disabled list with a groin injury in late June. He returned July 20, went 2for-14 over three games riddled with defensive lapses and failures to hustle, and went back to the DL until the start of September. Things hardly got better when he got back. In an important game against the postseason-bound Athletics on Sept. 5, Sanchez and starter Luis Severino could not sync up on signs, leading to two passed balls and two wild pitches in the first inning. He batted .179 after his return and finished the year with a disappointing .191/.291/.406 line, far below his established heights. Despite catching only 76 games, he led the league in passed balls and saw his caught-stealing rate drop to a career low. By the time the Yankees got to planning for the wild-card game, many in the team’s media and fan base believed the club would be better off using light-hitting glove-first catcher Austin Romine as its regular backstop for the postseason. The mighty had fallen. In Game 2 of the AL Division Series on Saturday, the mighty got back up. Sanchez homered twice in the 6-2 win over the Red Sox, a solo shot off David Price in the second inning that extended his team’s early lead, then an astonishing, 479-foot three-run blast off Eduardo Rodriguez in the seventh to put the game away. “I know it was a rough season for me,” Sanchez said after the game, through team interpreter Marlon Abreu. “It was a tough one. But that’s the regular season, and that’s done. We’re done with that. Now we’re playing the really exciting baseball, so to have an opportunity now to keep on playing and produce at this time, it’s actually more important.” “We know he’s capable of that,” manager Aaron Boone said. “That’s kind of what we’ve been waiting for, to some degree, where (he) can take over a game on offense. He was huge, obviously.” Boone also praised the work Sanchez has done defensively in the early part of the postseason. “First three games into the playoffs, almost more importantly, he’s caught really well. I think he has been really good back there, receiving, blocking, gameplanning, all those kinds of things.” But Sanchez’s calling card remains his potent bat, and if Saturday’s effort suggests he’s ready to produce at his full capacity, the Yankees lineup looks even more formidable than it did coming into the series. The regular-season version of Sanchez appeared perhaps the lone weak spot in their October batting order, and replacing it with this Sanchez, the 2016-17 Sanchez, creates a positively relentless offensive attack. Sanchez is happy to reward his club’s faith. “They definitely have a lot of confidence in me,” he said. “And I have confidence in myself. Although it has been a tough season for me, I knew I was able to produce the same way I produced last year.” On Saturday night, he did just that.