Gary Sanchez, Edwin Encarnacion, and Baseball’s Oldest Former Player
The non-tender deadline for MLB teams came and went on December 2 and one prominent player rumored to be a potential non-tender candidate escaped the chopping block. Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez, coming off a terrible season at the plate, will be offered a contract by the team and go through the arbitration process. This should result in a slight raise over the $5 million Sánchez made last year. MLB Trade Rumors projects he’ll earn around $5.5 million through arbitration.
There’s no question Sánchez was terrible at the plate in 2020. His .147/.253/.365 batting line resulted in a career-low 69 wRC+, meaning he was 31 percent below league average on offense after league and ballpark effects were taken into account. He also had the highest strikeout rate of his career, at 36 percent, and doesn’t have good defense to fall back on, like other light-hitting catchers. Overall, he was below replacement-level (-0.1 WAR, per FanGraphs, and -0.5 WAR, per Baseball-Reference).
Oh, and he continues to hate triples.
By wRC+, this was the second time in the past three years Sánchez was below average offensively. Just as in 2020, in 2018 Sánchez had a sub-.200 batting average and sub-.300 on-base percentage. In both years, he also had a Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP) below .200.
It’s not often a player has a BABIP under .200. In 2020, there were 175 players with 170 or more plate appearances (Sánchez had 178 plate appearances). Just three of them had a BABIP below .200—Gregory Polanco (.193), Gary Sánchez (.159), and Edwin Encarnacion (.156).
In 2018, when Sánchez had a .197 BABIP in 374 plate appearances, he was one of just two players who finished with a sub.-.200 BABIP (350 or more plate appearances). The other was Logan Morrison, who hasn’t hit a lick in part-time play over the last two years.
One of the unusual aspects of Sánchez’ 2020 season, compared to his prior career, was that he hit worse against the shift than with no shift. Given his profile as a slow-running, right-handed hitting slugger, I assumed he would have a history of struggling against the shift, but this was the first time he hit worse against the shift than with no shift. From his Statcast page:
YEAR: wOBA-No Shift, wOBA-Shift
2016: .369, .601
2017: .359, .391
2018: .267, .354
2019: .241, .406
2020: .328, .218
That same Statcast page does reveal some positive news. Sánchez’ exit velocity, hard hit rate, and barrel rate were all in the 89th percentile or above. He also had the second-highest max exit velocity in baseball. Despite his strikeout woes and his BABIP problems, he can still crush the ball and he’s only one year removed from a 34-homer, 116 wRC+ season. Ultimately, it makes sense for the Yankees to offer him a contract and hope for a rebound.
Historically Low BABIPs and Eddie Robinson
In the 2020 season, both Gary Sánchez (.159) and Edwin Encarnacion (.156) were in rarified air when it comes to low-BABIPs. Very few players in the history of baseball have had BABIPs below .160 in seasons in which they came to the plate at least 170 times. Since 1910, which is as far back as BABIP-data goes at FanGraphs, there have been 28,483 times a player had 170 or more plate appearances in a season. Only 10 of these players had BABIPs below .160. Sánchez had the ninth-lowest of all-time and Encarnacion had the sixth-lowest (2017 Ryan Schimpf, at .145 was the lowest).
As you can imagine, it’s almost impossible to have a good offensive season with a BABIP below .160. Almost. One man did it and he has an amazing story. In 1955, Eddie Robinson, playing for the New York Yankees, hit .208/.358/.491, good for a 126 wRC+. He accomplished this despite a .152 BABIP. For reference, that 126 wRC+ is about as good as Kyle Lewis (126 wRC+) and Kyle Tucker (125 wRC+) were in 2020.
To achieve a .152 BABIP and still have an above-average season, you have to hit a bushel of homers and walk often. Robinson had 36 hits—16 homers, 1 double, 19 singles. He also walked 36 times, struck out 26 times, and had more runs batted in (42) than hits (36), which is another rare accomplishment. Robinson played for the Yankees that year, so a knowledgeable fan might wonder if most of his home runs were hit at Yankee Stadium, where the left-handed Robinson could deposit home run balls in the right field seats. They were not. He hit nine of his 16 home runs on the road, which led to this incredible batting line for Robinson in away games: .165/.319/.462, .086 BABIP! Of the 15 hits he had on the road that year, nine were home runs and six were singles.
There’s much more to Robinson’s story than that incredible low-BABIP season. Growing up in Paris, Texas, he was offered a four-year scholarship to the University of Texas as a teenager, but chose to sign a pro contract with the Knoxville Smokies of the Southern Association in 1939 because his family needed the money. He signed for $300. At the end of his first season, his manager, believing Robinson wasn’t good enough to ever make the major leagues, told him he “may as well go back to Paris and open an ice cream parlor.”
Robinson didn’t take that advice and continued to play in the minor leagues, ultimately making his way up to the major leagues with Cleveland for eight games as a 21-year-old in 1942. His career was interrupted by three years in the Navy that included a bungled leg operation, but he returned to the game with a terrific season in the International League in 1946, where he was named MVP of a league that included Jackie Robinson, who was playing for the Montreal Royals and would soon break the modern color barrier in major league baseball.
The 1947 season was Eddie Robinson’s first with regular playing time. He would ultimately play 13 years and appear on the rosters of seven of the eight American League teams in existence at the time. He was a four-time All-Star and was part of the last Cleveland team to win the World Series back in 1948.
Near the end of his career, he was elected to be the player rep for the Philadelphia Athletics, which was the beginning of many years working with the MLB Players Association. From his SABR bio:
Even in retirement, Robinson remained active in major league baseball, persistently lobbying for and finally helping secure “orphaned” pre-1979 major league players a pension. Although today every player who appears on a major-league roster for even one day is vested in the pension fund, before 1979 players had to have four years of major league service to qualify for any pension at all. Working for more than a decade through the Major League Baseball Players’ Alumni Association, Robinson finally, in 2011, got the Players’ Association and the commissioner to agree to at least partially fund those 800 or so former players.
In addition to his service with the MLBPA, he was a coach for the Baltimore Orioles, then moved into player development with the Houston Astros. In the mid-1960s, he was the farm director for the Kansas City Athletics, who were owned by crazy Charlie Finley, one of baseball’s most colorful owners.
Robinson later went on to be the general manager for the Atlanta Braves and worked for Ted Turner, another peculiar baseball owner. He also worked for Bill Veeck and George Steinbrenner. Finley, Turner, Veeck, and Steinbrenner would be a fitting Mount Rushmore of Eccentric Baseball Owners, and Robinson worked with all of them. Upon his retirement in 2004, Robinson had received a paycheck from 16 major league clubs over 65 years in professional baseball.
Robinson wrote an autobiography that was published in 2011 and is titled “Lucky Me: My Sixty-Five Years in Baseball.” Last November, he was a guest on FanGraphs’ Effectively Wild podcast, where he talked about playing against Jackie Robinson, playing with Satchel Paige, and his long friendships with many other famous players from that era. He returned to that podcast in February this year to talk about sign-stealing.
Robinson is the oldest living former MLB player and will turn 100 years old on December 15. He recently started a podcast called “The Golden Age of Baseball with Eddie Robinson”. In early episodes, he talks about growing up during The Great Depression, signing his big $300 bonus as a teenager, his friendship with Bob Feller, the freak accident in the Navy that almost cost him his career and, most recently, playing ping pong with Bobby Riggs.
