Gary Sanchez’s Season Is Not As Bad As It Looks

It’s hard to put a good spin on Gary Sanchez rolling into late June as the seventh-ranked catcher in Roto value (per ESPN’s Player Rater), but while his season has been disappointing, it has its bright side. For one thing, at least he is having a better fantasy season than Willson Contreras. For another, he leads all catchers in runs (35) and is second in home runs (13) and RBI (39).

It’s clearly Sanchez’s .194 batting average that is holding him back, and now that he is mired in a 6 for 62 slump, it’s heading in the wrong direction. He is a bit off last season’s home run pace and his strikeout rate has risen slightly from 22.9 percent in 2017 to 24.6 percent so far in 2018, but his real problem is what he is doing on balls in play.

Heading into this season, Sanchez compiled a career .307 BABIP, but through his first 59 games of this season, his BABIP is a comically-low .203. What is less funny, especially to Sanchez and his fantasy owners, is that his xBABIP is just .216 (per xStats). In perusing Sanchez’s batted ball profile, there is an obvious culprit. His flyball rate has soared to 44.9 percent — up from 36.6 percent last season — and 22.9 percent of those flies have been of the infield variety.

Popups aren’t Sanchez’s only problem. He is 5 for 65 on ground balls. Certainly, Sanchez’s owners did not draft him for his prowess on grounders, but his current .077 ground ball batting average pales in comparison with his .243 career mark heading into 2018. As the graph below shows, Sanchez has been pull-heavy on grounders this season, as he has been throughout his time in the majors. A few hitters (e.g., Matt Kemp, Jorge Soler, Kris Bryant) have managed a high batting average on grounders with high pull rates, but that’s the exception rather than the rule.

Note: Green dots indicate a higher speed score, and larger dots indicate a higher hard contact rate on ground balls.

A high pull rate is not the only thing preventing Sanchez from getting more ground ball base hits. He is not fleet of foot, which may explain why he has only one infield hit to date. He did tally 13 infield hits last season and eight in the roughly one-third of a season he played in 2016. Still, as the tooltip on the graph shows, Sanchez’s speed score is 1.8, and there aren’t many hitters with a sub-2.0 score who are batting as high as .250 on grounders.

It might seem safe to assume that a slugger like Sanchez is hitting grounders with authority, but his hard contact rate on ground balls is just 21.5 percent, which is 5.4 percentage points below the major league average. As shown in the table below, the impact of pull rate on ground ball batting average is greater on hard-hit balls than on soft-hit balls. While Sanchez would help himself by going the other way more often, he could still go a long way towards improving his batting average if he made more frequent hard contact on grounders. In each of the previous two seasons, he was slightly above average in this regard.

Let’s assume, however, that Sanchez does not start making more frequent hard ground ball contact. As ill-equipped as Sanchez may be to get ground ball base hits as he is currently constituted, he should still be hitting far better than .077. Travis Shaw, Justin Smoak and Maikel Franco profile similarly to Sanchez in terms of pull and hard contact rates and speed score, and their ground ball batting averages are .160, .176 and .233, respectively. More to the point, no one in this pool of 152 hitters has a batting average on grounders anywhere near as low as Sanchez’s, even though his profile is not uniquely unfit for a decent batting average. The next-lowest batting average belongs to Dexter Fowler, who is hitting .130 on grounders.

An additional six hits would bring Sanchez more in line with Shaw and Smoak. He is on pace to get 298 more at-bats this season, and if we give Sanchez those six additional hits through his first 216 at-bats, that would add eight hits to his prorated rest-of-season totals. Therefore, if nothing else changed for Sanchez over the remainder of the season, he would bat .221 from here on out.

That is likely a worst-case scenario. If Sanchez starts to make more frequent hard contact on grounders, his average will rise more. He may not need to hit much better than the .220s to rise substantially among the ranks of catchers. Yasmani Grandal ranks third at the position in Roto value despite a .243 batting average and counting stats that are similar to Sanchez’s. If Sanchez can come closer to last season’s home run pace and reverse his massive surge in popups, he could hit .260 or better the rest of the way, but he probably won’t need to in order to be one of the best fantasy catchers once again.