Sánchez and the Slider

There were a few years in my ESPN home league where Gary Sánchez was the first catcher off the board. Take a look at his 2016 end-of-season game logs and it’s easy to see why. Sánchez made the Yankees appear as if they had struck gold and found a franchise catcher that could have been the Yankee Posey (Ohh how I can just hear the cringing of Yankee fans behind computer screens after reading that sentence). But, things don’t always work out in such a storybook kind of way and Gary Sánchez is now in Minnesota splitting time with Ryan Jeffers. But, I have to admit, I’ve been super close to clicking that “Add” button just knowing that the one-time top three fantasy baseball catcher is freely available. There’s just one thing that has stopped me and it can be visualized in the video below:

This has always been something about a Sánchez at-bat that has stood out to me; a slider on the outside corner. I’ve thought to myself, “Who’s hitting? Sánchez? Just throw a slider on the outside corner.” But, is that justified? Lots of right-handed hitters strikeout to right-handed pitchers on sliders low and away. According to the Baseball Savant Pitch Arsenal Stats Leaderboard, Sánchez’s .310 wOBA on sliders in 2021 placed him in the 68th percentile among hitters with at least 10 plate appearances. Using the same leaderboard his Whiff% of 37.6% places him in the 40th percentile. I don’t want to make it seem like Sánchez simply can’t hit the pitch, since the 2021 season began he’s hit a few.*

*For the remainder of this analysis, I’ll only be referring to sliders in Savant’s gameday zones nine and fourteen from right-handed pitchers.

One of them even came off the classic version of this pitch from Sergio Romo:

That blooper fell for a hit, but the spray chart tells you that there hasn’t been a ton of production off the pitch in question over the span of more than a season. He swung and missed a lot more than he blooped one in for a single. Since the start of the 2021 season, Sánchez proved that he can take the pitch for a ball, but he also reached for the pitch and came up empty often. Here’s how all sliders from right-handed pitchers located in gameday zones nine and fourteen played out in that time period:

If we just look at the swing and misses, we can see that many of them if taken, would be translated to balls.

So, what would happen if Gary Sánchez just did-not-swing at a slider low and away? I don’t really have the bandwidth to figure that out, it’s a complicated question. You would have to infer too much about what would happen next if you went back and changed all swings and misses, foul balls, groundouts, etc., to takes. We can break apart data into at-bats where Sánchez did not swing at these specific sliders versus at-bats where he did:

This may not be the best way to do it though because it tells us nothing about the hit. He could have swung and missed at a slider and then nailed a fastball. It is interesting to see how much his OBP increases, however. But what about when he just doesn’t see a slider in an at-bat? Using statcast batted ball data from all of 2021 through yesterday’s games (4/19/22) limited to right-handed pitchers, I separated at-bats where Sánchez saw a slider on the outside corner and at-bats where he did not.

If this were a simple A/B test, there would likely be some statistical significance here. But, imagine being a young analyst for the Minnesota Twins and doing research on this topic. Your boss, looking to test your mettle, tells you that Sánchez is in the clubhouse now, “Go down and tell him what you found in your most recent study…”, he says. You find Sánchez eating a pre-game meal, walk up to him and say, “Ma, ma, ma…Mister Sánchez? I think it would be best if you stopped swinging at sliders low and away from right-handed pitchers.” Mettle tested. Now duck!

Of course, Gary Sánchez knows that he probably shouldn’t be swinging at sliders low and away from righties. But the pitch, when thrown well, looks like it’s going to just float right into the nitro zone for pure destruction, and sometimes it does. But, unfortunately for hitters, more times than not it slides and vanishes into whatever the opposite of the nitro zone is. Lucky for me, I’m not being asked to approach Sánchez while he’s eating his pre-game spaghetti and meatballs to tell him something he already knows. But, I am going to keep an eye on it from a fantasy perspective. If Sanchez starts doing more of what you’ll see in the video below, I’ll be heading to my fake baseball team and clicking the “Add” button, betting on Gary Sánchez’s lines to improve.