FanPost

Gary Sanchez and the Lore of the Yankee Catcher Position

With a good chunk of the offseason to reminisce, we all know that Gary Sanchez had about as torrid a rookie half-season as anyone has ever had. (Even Willie McCovey’s 1959 season doesn’t quite compare.) Each subsequent home run Sanchez hit seemed to set a "fastest to (X) home runs" record, and even in his games when he didn’t leave the yard, he typically had a double and a single sprinkled in there. Sanchez had such a beast finish to 2016 that Yankee fans could reasonably be upset that a Tigers rookie pitcher who threw 159.0 innings with a 3.06 ERA won the Rookie of the Year Award over Sanchez.

In the end, Sanchez didn’t quite debut early enough to win the Rookie of the Year Award, having made the big leagues full-time on August 3. If Sanchez had somehow won the award (he did come in second after all), Sanchez would have been the first Yankee AL Rookie of the Year since Derek Jeter in 1996. Not a bad name to draw Yankee comparisons to.

It’s a different Yankee AL Rookie of the Year that may catch the eye of Yankee fans when looking at the list of Yankees to win Rookie of the Year, though :  Thurman Munson.

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The Yankees have a storied history behind the plate. In Wally Schang, Bill Dickey, Yogi Berra, Thurman Munson and Jorge Posada, the Yankees have five of the top 19 catchers all-time, per Jay Jaffe’s JAWS metric of measuring Hall of Fame candidacy. If you prefer your metrics a little more old school, how about this? Those five catchers combined for an incredible 30 pennants in their time in pinstripes. If you toss in Elston Howard, the 35th-ranked catcher of all-time by JAWS, you get five more pennants for the Yankees in the early `60s.

That means that of the 40 pennants the Yankees have won in franchise history, 87.5% have come with a top-35 all-time catcher behind the plate, and 75% have come with a top-20 all-time catcher behind the plate. That’s remarkable.

As baseball fans, we know the incredible importance of the catcher position: they act as leaders for the team; their ability to frame a pitch can win a team numerous games a year; their relationship with the pitcher is one of the most important on the entire diamond. But even still, the Yankees reliance on a top-tier catcher to get them to The Promised Land seems high.

So how about the Yankees reliance on other positions? How about we go to the JAWS leaderboard for each position and look at the top 30, like we just did for the position of catcher, and find the Yankees in that group. Once we do that, we’ll see how many pennants the Yankees won with a top-30 player at each position, and figure out what can that tell us:

Well, it’s clear that only one position can even challenge catcher: centerfield. Remember, since we used top-30 as a cut-off, this doesn’t even include Elston Howard’s five pennants as a Yankee catcher, and even still, catcher is the position with the greatest impact on the Yankees winning a pennant. (Obligatory "correlation does not necessarily mean causation" comment.) Centerfield comes the closest, and centerfield in New York is a hallowed position, one that Mickey Mantle and Joe DiMaggio have battled over for supremacy in the mind of New Yorkers for decades. And even still, the Yankees won "only" 28 pennants with top-30 centerfields, and that’s with Bernie Williams and his six pennants just sneaking inside of the top-30 (27th all-time CF), instead of Elston Howard just outside the top-30. (It should be noted that Earle Combs won four pennants with the Yankees and is the 36th ranked centerfielder all-time, so the positions are close, but catcher still gets the edge.) Even with the system rigged to find a position with a stronger tie to pennants than catcher, it can’t be done.

Outside of centerfield, not another position is even close. A top-30 second baseman has been on less than half of the Yankee pennants and that’s the third-highest.

And that makes sense to a certain extent. The reason the positions are ordered: C, SS, 2B, 3B, CF, RF, LF, 1B on the above chart is due to the positional hierarchy that Bill James created and was later honed by James Click in Baseball Between the Numbers. Catcher has always been thought of as the important position on the diamond, so maybe it’s not too surprising to see the strong connection between elite catchers and pennants in New York.

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Of course, we are only a couple months into the young career of Gary Sanchez, and to set expectations of Sanchez as a top-30 all-time catcher is unreasonable. Still, there’s plenty of reason to be excited by the start that Sanchez has had to his career, and the fact that he plays at such an instrumental position — and one steeped in such lore in New York — is only more reason to get hyped about the young Yankee stud.

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