Ready for The Post’s fearless prediction for Tuesday night?
Win or lose, advance or conclude, Gary Sanchez will be a major player in the Yankees’ fate.
For the catcher’s first full major league season has left us with two big lessons:
1. He’s an elite hitter, especially for his position.
2. He finds the spotlight, and the spotlight finds him.
“I think he handles the challenges of getting better really well,” Joe Girardi said Monday, before the Yankees worked out at Yankee Stadium. “And I think he’ll handle the challenge [Tuesday] night really well.”
Sanchez, like his batterymate Luis Severino, his fellow Baby Bomber Aaron Judge and Aaron Hicks, will make his postseason debut when the Yankees and Twins face off in the American League wild-card game.
Severino, by virtue of his position on the field, is guaranteed to be center stage. Judge will get everyone’s attention from go time because of what he has done this season.
And Sanchez, well, just tends to wind up in the middle of things, doesn’t he? He can’t quite match his Yankees predecessors Alex Rodriguez or Reggie Jackson, who hung around Monday, when it comes to drink-stirring. Yet give him time. He’s only 24.
I asked Sanchez on Monday whether he had spoken with Mr. October, or Girardi (who won three World Series rings with the Yankees as a catcher), or any of his more experienced teammates about playing the postseason.
“I haven’t spoken to them,” Sanchez, who was on the Yankees’ roster and never left the bench for their 2015 AL wild-card loss to the Astros, said through an interpreter. “I’m focused on the game [Tuesday]. It’s just one game. You want to go out there and enjoy the game and not get away from what you have been doing. That’s the focus.”
Yes, he needs to work on his quotes if he wants to join his buddy A-Rod and Reggie in the Lightning Rod Hall of Fame. Despite that shortcoming, however, Sanchez brings the heat:
- He followed up his spectacular, abbreviated rookie season of 2016, when he went deep 20 times in 53 games, with a superb 33 homers and a .278/.345/.531 slash line in 122 games; he missed 21 games while healing a strained right bicep.
- He participated in the Home Run Derby at Marlins Park and did the baseball equivalent of setting a pick for his buddy Judge by eliminating hometown favorite and defending champion Giancarlo Stanton in the first round. Judge wound up as the champion.
- His glove work regressed so dramatically that, following an Aug. 4 loss to the Indians in Cleveland, Girardi publicly called out his catcher and started backup receiver Austin Romine the next two games before returning to Sanchez. Even this past week, Girardi faced media questions about whether he could risk starting Sanchez at catcher. The manager heartily endorsed Sanchez for his hard work and improvement and made clear that Sanchez would get the assignment.
- Strong video work caught Sanchez sucker-punching Miguel Cabrera during an epic, bench-clearing brawl with the Tigers on Aug. 24. Major League Baseball suspended Sanchez for four games and eventually agreed to decrease the punishment to three games.
That enough for you? If not, well, the season isn’t over.
Girardi is making the right call going with Sanchez behind the plate.“Sometimes, we focus on the one ball that he misses, but we don’t focus on the 10 that he blocked, and those are pretty good odds, in a sense,” the manager said. “And the things that he’s able to control — the running game and he has great instincts in calling pitches back there. There [are] a lot of things that he does really, really well.”
Of course, in this tiniest of sample sizes, the odds could work against Sanchez, Girardi and the Yankees. A run could score on a passed ball or wild pitch. And Sanchez could not make up the difference with his bat. Or he might be involved in some on-field controversy that we can’t envision yet we can imagine Sanchez being in the middle of it.
“I feel good. I feel healthy,” Sanchez said. “Now I can just wait for [Tuesday].”
His performances on the big stage are usually worth the wait.