The Yankees offense has hit a bit of a rut of late, entering play Tuesday on the back of a three-game losing streak and four losses in their last five, the team scoring three or fewer runs in all of those losses. As such, there haven’t been many options to choose for At-Bat of the Week, meaning backup catcher Ali Sánchez earns his first nod in this series for his RBI double in the Yankees’ 5-3 series-opening loss against the Tigers on Monday.
We join Sánchez with two outs in the second inning facing Tigers’ southpaw and longtime playoff enemy with Houston Framber Valdez. José Caballero is on first after drawing a two-out walk, and his speed means that any hit that finds the outfield wall should be enough to open the scoring.
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Valdez starts Sánchez with a first pitch sinker at 93, Dillon Dingler setting a target low and away.
Valdez misses his spot, grooving this sinker pretty much right down the middle. Sánchez gets off an excellent swing, but just underneath the pitch. You can tell he was right on time by the way he fouls this pitch straight back to the brickwork behind home.
Seeing how Sánchez was all over that pitch from a timing standpoint, Valdez immediately changes speeds to the changeup. Again, Dingler sets a target low and away hoping to play off the release point of the previous sinker and fool the hitter in both timing and movement.
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Once again, Valdez pulls this pitch toward the zone. It ends up low and in instead of low and away, Sánchez at one point thinking he is going to get hit by the pitch. The changeup never looks like a strike during its entire path toward home, making for an automatic take from Sánchez.
Valdez switched away from the sinker after failing to execute, but interestingly sticks with the changeup despite the poor execution of the one we just saw.
This one is slightly better execution, but like the first pitch sinker is still in a very hittable zone for Sánchez middle-down. Sánchez once again gets off another impressive hack, but can’t sync his swing path to the downward movement of the pitch and tops it foul. It is worth noting that he was on time with his swing against both the sinker and changeup, so he must be seeing the ball well out of Valdez’s hand.
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With the count at two strikes, and having slowed down Sánchez’s bat with the prior pair of changeups, Valdez climbs the ladder with the four-seamer looking to get the strikeout on a pitch above the zone. If he can locate the pitch close enough to the top of the zone, Sánchez should chase – the only fastball he has seen so far is a sinker, whereas the four-seamer drops ten inches less.
Instead, Valdez gets his release point all wrong, perhaps distracted by Caballero taking off for second base, and Sánchez has to dodge some high chin music.
Now that Caballero is standing on second, I wonder if Sánchez’s mindset changes here from looking to do damage to simply getting bat on ball trying to find the outfield grass.
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Based on this swing against the curveball, it looks like Sánchez has shifted his approach away from trying to pull the ball in the air to more of an all-fields approach. It’s actually an impressive piece of hitting – you can tell Sánchez recognizes the pitch almost from the moment it leaves Valdez’s hand from the way he stays back on the pitch looking to drive it to the opposite field. He doesn’t miss a double down the right field line by all that much as he’s getting closer and closer to barreling the ball with each piece of contact he makes.
I wonder if Valdez is starting to feel uneasy having seen Sánchez make an on time swing against pitches in three distinct velocity bands: mid-90s on the fastball, mid-80s on the changeup, and mid-70s on the curveball. Watching Sánchez wait back on that curveball, it appears Valdez thinks he can now throw a fastball by him.
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This is a hell of a take from Sánchez. The pitch looks like a strike on the outer half when it leaves Valdez’s hand, only for the 13 inches of arm-side movement to carry it off the plate away. In a split second, Sánchez diagnoses pitch type, recognizes location, and remembers the movement of the sinker away from him.
Once again, I am pretty surprised that Valdez opts for a changeup in this full count. It is his third-best pitch, and he missed his location with the first two he threw to Sánchez.
Indeed, he misses his location for a third time, this one the worst of the lot. He leaves this pitch right down Broadway, and Sánchez jumps all over it, grounding it hard through the hole on the left side to plate Caballero as the game’s opening run. I love how level Sánchez’s swing is here, allowing him to stay slightly more under control of his barrel while still getting off an A-swing.
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Here’s the full AB:
It’s not often that I feature an AB from a losing effort on AB of the Week but frankly that speaks to the poor quality of ABs up and down the lineup for the better part of a week. Expectations for Sánchez are pretty tempered given he is effectively their third catcher. All you really want from him is a credible AB against righties and to do damage should he get a mistake he can handle, and he checked both those boxes with this encounter.
The Yankees desperately need better offensive production from the catcher position, Sánchez, Austin Wells, and J.C. Escarra combining to produce the third-worst wRC+ (53) of any team’s backstops. Perhaps that is why I have felt encouraged by the quality of at-bat exhibited by Sánchez over the last week. After looking downright overmatched in his initial exposure – no hits and a 50-percent strikeout rate in his first five games – Sánchez has turned things around to go 6-for-12 with two doubles, three RBIs, and a 243 wRC+ in his last five games. While that tiny sample size is certainly not prescriptive of future performance, it’s enough to earn more opportunities against lefty pitching whenever he returns from the paternity list (or possible injury).
