SEATTLE — In honor of the NFL kicking off another season of physical trauma and social-issue insensitivity, let’s discuss the Yankees’ catching situation in depth-chart form.
Assuming quite safely that the Yankees will be playing the A’s in the American League’s win-or-go-home wild-card game on Oct. 3, here’s a recommended catcher depth chart for that crucial contest:
1. Austin Romine
2. Gary Sanchez
3. Kyle Higashioka
With 22 Yankees games left in the regular season, as action resumes Friday night against the Mariners at Safeco Field, Sanchez has time to leap back over Romine. Yet if you watched the first inning of the Yankees’ most recent game, their 8-2 loss to the A’s — with two Sanchez passed balls and two Luis Severino wild pitches contributing significantly to the A’s four-run, first-inning roundhouse — you can’t possibly want your season in the unsteady hands of Sanchez, can you?
“We definitely had a bit of trouble getting on the same page in that first inning.” Sanchez said of him and Severino, through an interpreter.
You can cut Sanchez’s understatement some slack given the language barrier. Whereas Aaron Boone, in plain English, portrayed Sanchez’s effort — two passed balls and two wild pitches in the first inning and zero of both the rest of the way — as something like a triumph of resilience.
“I’m glad he flipped the page real quick and didn’t let it be a bad night altogether,” Boone said.
Counterpoint: It was an awful night altogether. Whatever good happened from the second inning onward, including Sanchez’s two-run homer in the seventh, didn’t come close to outweighing the bad.
We all get why Boone chose to be the good cop. A peak Sanchez represents a far better option than a peak Romine, and the last time a manager tried to play bad cop with Sanchez … well, as Boone took an off day with the Yankees, his predecessor, Joe Girardi, did some work as MLB Network analyst.
“To me, over the next four weeks I’d try to fix the base. It’s his base,” Girardi said Thursday on “High Heat” with Chris Russo. “His left knee collapses and he’s not in a position to catch some of these balls and block some of these balls. If they can fix that, it’s a no-brainer.”
Shoot, if this is the problem — Girardi warned, in a helpful addendum, “Sometimes it’s hard to [fix] during the season” — then get after it so that Sanchez can assume his proper role. However, considering what a train wreck of a season this has been for Sanchez, between his .186/.283/.411 slash line and 13 passed balls (tying him with Houston’s Martin Maldonado, who has caught 102 games to Sanchez’s 59, for the major league lead), there just might not be enough time to make Sanchez close enough to whole.
Yup, Sanchez has a better catcher’s ERA (3.51) than Romine (3.97) this season, and no one will debate who can produce more offensively. Romine has caught a higher percentage of opposing base-stealers (28.3 percent) than Sanchez (25 percent), though, and when even Severino sounds like he’s yearning for Romine’s stewardship, as the team’s titular ace did late Wednesday night, that gets your attention.
This isn’t to say that Romine should start every postseason game behind the plate, and let’s leave the starting designated hitter issue unresolved, especially since it’s not at all clear which pitcher the A’s would start in the wild-card game.
For the game to extend or end the season, though, look at it this way: When a starting pitcher goes haywire, as Severino did in last year’s AL wild-card game against the Twins, then you get him the heck out of there, as Girardi did, leading to a successful outcome.
If your starting catcher goes haywire? It’s hairier, especially with Sanchez’s bat a factor.
The role remains Sanchez’s to win, rather than Romine’s to lose. But we’re quickly approaching the point where a Sanchez leap into the top slot on the depth chart would represent an upset. We, and the Yankees, have seen too much to shrug off Sanchez’s glove troubles with a high-stakes season on the line.
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