On Wednesday, Gary Sanchez hit a very impressive home run over the right-center field bullpen. It was clocked at 114.9-mph off the bat, had a launch angle of 27-degrees, and went 443-feet. It was one of the more impressive home runs he’s hit this season, up there with the 467-foot grand slam and towering shot he almost hit over the bleachers in San Fran.
GOODBYE GARY SANCHEZ!#YANKSonYES LIVE https://t.co/KmAiQcCdYI pic.twitter.com/gruI7RyYC1
— YES Network (@YESNetwork) May 15, 2019
But that is not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is this graph from Dan Szymborski.
Speaking of fastballs…uhh….Gary Sanchez.
(That's an expected SLG of 1.095, J.D. Martinez is second, 256 points behind). pic.twitter.com/BgdYNy4t1A
— Dan Szymborski (@DSzymborski) May 16, 2019
First of all — #nerd! There, I got that out of the way. After the initial flashbacks of struggling through my college statistics class, I realized this chart is saying that Gary Sanchez is demolishing the baseball.
This season Gary is hitting .263 (whatever), has a .346 OBP (fine), and .663 SLG (holy crap!). His OPS is over 1.000 and wRC+ is 163, which is 63% better than the league. The demolition doesn’t end there: his Barrel %, Exit Velocity, XSLG, XWOBA, and XWOBACON (no, I didn’t make that one up — it means XWOBA on contact) are all in the top 1% of the league. You know that means Gary is good since it has bacon in the name, and bacon is always a good thing. And as Dan points out, don’t throw Gary a fastball. His XSLG on heaters is 1.095 with JD Martinez so far behind him he’s not even able to see Gary with a telescope.
This all adds up to mean that Gary is literally in a class all by himself right now.
We know last year was a lost season for Sanchez, but even during his horrific 2018 his Barrel % was in the top-5% of baseball at 13.9%. This year it is 29.9%, more than double his mark last year. That means he is barreling the ball 30% of the time, which leads to a minimum .500 batting average and 1.500 slugging percentage. Christ!
I know many people don’t look at or care about any of those metrics, and that’s fine. Some of them are over my head too. But when you look at his Statcast page you realize 2018 is a distant memory and El Kraken is back. That is a very, very good thing for the Yankees.
Follow me on Twitter:Â @Andrew_Rotondi.
