Having contextualized Sanchez's career performance, 2020 was still a disaster. Sanchez had a normalized batting line 31 percent worse than league average (based on wRC+) and struck out in 36 percent of his plate appearances, the 6th highest figure among all players who had at least 150 plate appearances. The 36 percent figure is by far the highest of his career and about eight percentage points worse than his previous high (which was 2019). This was the first time Sanchez was below replacement level over a 150 plate appearance sample in his entire career. The only stretch of play that resembled this was May of last season where he regularly posted batting lines about 10 percent worse than league average. For Sanchez, who has been about 20 percent better than average from 2016 to 2019, posting this type of line even over a tiny small sample of 178 plate appearances is surprising and unlike anything we have seen from him.
The million-dollar question (and the one every member of the Yankees front office will be thinking about this off-season) is whether or not this abbreviated 2020 season is reason to panic. Making a rash decision or evaluation over 178 plate appearances, on its face, seems foolhardy. Just last season, players such as Austin Meadows, Franmil Reyes, Robinson Cano, Yuli Gurriel, and Joey Votto posted 60 game lines similar to Sanchez in 2020. Meadows was one of the best hitters in the American League, Gurriel finished with a line 26 percent better than league average, Reyes almost hit 40 home runs, Cano was great when he played this year, and Votto took a step forward in 2020 after a rough 2019 season. Good, even great hitters, are capable of having stretches like this. Someone reading carefully might counter and say that I am cherry-picking good players when in reality, the list of players with stretches similar to Sanchez's 2020 is littered with more bad players than good. That person would be correct. However, we have a demonstrably larger sample of Sanchez being a very good hitter as opposed to a below replacement-level contributor.
Still, I have not answered the original question: should we be worried about Sanchez's performance going forward? We need to address the strikeout rate and his performance on contact. Even though he made some incremental improvements in taking walks, striking out 36 percent of the time is not conducive to being an effective hitter. From 2018 through 2020, among players seasons with at least 178 plate appearances, just 11 players were able to post above average batting lines while striking out in at least 33 percent (about one third) of their plate appearances. The players that are able to overcome massive strikeout rates are among the best in the league at hitting the ball with authority. Players like Joey Gallo (2018 and 2019), Miguel Sano (2019), Brandon Lowe (2019), and Ian Happ (2018) have struck out at similar rates to Sanchez in 2020 and were above average hitters in those seasons. The list of players also includes Willy Adames (who has about league average batted ball stats but ran a 0.388 BABIP in 2020), Jake Cave (a solid fourth outfielder/AAAA guy who actually had characterisitcs that support high BABIPs until 2020), and Tyler Austin (the quintessential AAAA player with pop but not enough to offset strikeout woes). The common thread here (besides Adames and his outlier 2020 performance) is these players have well above average exit velocity readings and hard hit rates (balls in play at or above 95 MPH). When they make contact, they make it count. Sanchez, unsurprisingly, did not post good enough results on contact and saw a sharp year-over-year decline in 2020.
For context league average wOBACON (wOBA on balls in play or contact) in a given year is anywhere between 0.370 and 0.380. Expected wOBACON is based on the launch angle and exit velocity of a batted ball. The past three seasons, Sanchez has underperformed his expected wOBACON figures (though in 2020, the leaguewide xwOBACON was much smaller than wOBACON which makes me think there was a calibration error in the model with the new HawkEye data or there was something weird with the baseball). Still, Sanchez actual results on contact were not what we should have expected based on his batted ball characteristics and much lower than league average and his career norms. Should we expect a player with barrel rates in the top five percent of the league in each of the past three seasons post below-average results when he puts the ball in play? Probably not. To say he was unlucky on balls in play in 2020 is an understatement. Sanchez posted a 0.159 BABIP, the third lowest figure in the past five seasons for player seasons with at least 170 plate appearances. The only worse seasons were Edwin Encarnacion in 2020 (0.156 BABIP along with a 13.2 percent barrel rate and 33 percent hard hit rate) and Ryan Schimpf in 2017 (0.145 BABIP along with a 16.5 percent barrel rate and 30.9 percent hard hit rate). Sanchez had a 17.4 percent barrel rate (97th percentile, after posting a 99th percentile figure last year) and a 49.5 percent hard hit rate (91st percentile). Not many players hit the ball as consistently hard as Sanchez while also posting barrels (the highest value batted ball type) at similar rates. Only six players in MLB posted both a higher hard hit rate and higher barrel rate than Sanchez in 2020.
All of this is meant to show that we should expect a healthy amount of positive regression from Sanchez in 2021 from a batted ball perspective. Players who hit the ball like Sanchez are among the elite hitters in the league. Can Sanchez get back to that level in 2021? Even if he maintains this level of performance on balls in play, he needs to trim his strikeout rate to be an all-star level contributor. Is this 36 percent strikeout rate here to stay or is he the guy who strikes out about a quarter of the time, his career rate going into the year. The classic sabermetrician in me says he should probably fall somewhere in between those two marks in 2021, if anything closer to the 25 percent because for much of his career he performed at that level. The issue is we know strikeout rate is one of the fastest metrics that stabilizes quickly for a hitter. But do not mistake stability for predictability. Stability indicates the amount of time (in this case plate appearances) required for a stat to be able to adequately explain a player's talent over the prior sample. Predictability is the amount of time we need for a sample of a stat to explain the stat in a future sample with the same size. So we need to diagnose if Sanchez's strike out woes are the product of variance or something has changed in his "true talent" level and we should expect strikeout rates similar to 2020 going forward. Borrowing from my methodology in a previous post, I am going to look at the probability of a player posting a 36 percent strikeout over 178 plate appearances by pure chance for varying levels of "true talent". I simulated the 178 plate appearance sample 1,000 times for each true talent level. The following is the distribution of strikeout rates for varying levels of "true talent" strikeout rates:
The dashed line represents an in-sample strikeout rate of 36 percent. Even for hitters with strikeout rates in the range of 25 to 30 percent, a hitter would be expected to strikeout at least 36 percent of the time fairly often. Furthermore, here is the percent of 178 plate appearance samples that showed strikeout rates exceeding 36 percent:
A 30 percent strikeout hitter is expected to post strikeout rates at least as bad as Sanchez in 2020 about 35 percent of the time. For a 25 percent strikeout rate hitter (Sanchez's career rate going into the 2020), about a 15 percent probability. So posting a season like 2020, where Sanchez had 178 plate appearances, was definitely in the realm of possibilities just by pure chance. And if you look at his approach at the plate, nothing really changed in 2020.
His overall swing rate barely changed from the past two seasons. He swung at slightly more pitches inside the zone while laying off more pitches outside of the zone compared to 2019. His chase rate was the best of his career. So I would argue his approach actually improved from 2019 despite much worse results. His zone contact rate was slightly down, but not so much so where you would see an influx in strikeouts. If anything, the increase in swings in the strike zone should have offset that and allow him to continue to put good hitter's pitches into play. Where Sanchez had a lot of problems was making contact when he chased pitches. While he has consistently posted out of zone whiff rates worse than league average, in 2020 Sanchez only made contact on 45.4 percent of his swings on pitches outside the strike zone, compared to a league average rate of about 60 percent. This was a large departure from his career rate going into the year (about 54 percent). The only way I can see this sustaining itself is if Sanchez is dealing with an issue of seeing the ball. But if he has a vision issue, how could he have both increased the amount of pitches he swung at in the zone while decreasing his chase rate. He improved at picking out balls from strikes. So the idea that he was not seeing the ball does not hold merit. I expect his contact issues to improve back towards his career norms going into the season, which should come with a corresponding decrease in strikeout rate.
When digging into the data, Sanchez's awful 2020 results at the plate seem to be the result of poor luck and being on the wrong end of variance. Yankees fans have been especially tough on him and have called upon Aaron Boone to put him on the bench throughout the entirety of the shortened 2020 season. Given what know about his underlying performance and regression, I would expect Sanchez to have a bounce-back 2021 season. To believe that an all-star level contributor suddenly turned into one of the worst hitters in MLB would indicate a lack of understanding of the variance associated with outcomes in baseball and not appreciating the brevity of the 2020 season and its small samples.
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