HOUSTON -- Gary Sanchez’s day began with some of the most serious questions he has had to face all year. It ended with him providing the exclamation point that emphatically punctuated another win for his rolling New York Yankees.
A day after one of his starting pitchers intimated his desire to continue pitching to a different catcher, Sanchez played as if he was unfazed.
With yet another solid swing of Sanchez’s bat, and an unexpectedly long but quite strong night from the Yankees’ bullpen, New York got past the Houston Astros with a 4-0 win Tuesday. Including last season's AL Championship Series, it was only New York’s second win at Minute Maid Park in the past year.
The win also came on the heels of a dominant 14-strikeout start for Astros pitcher Justin Verlander, who threw eight scoreless innings going toe-to-toe with a Yankees bullpen that was equally as tough to solve. According to Elias Sports Bureau research, this marked the fifth time in baseball’s modern era (since 1900) that a team lost a game in which the starting pitcher struck out 14 or more hitters across eight scoreless innings.
If there was a lesson for the Astros to learn following their ninth-inning collapse, it was this: Don’t pitch to Sanchez if you can help it.
That’s a lesson the teams slated to play the Yankees in the coming days (Cleveland, Boston and Oakland) would also be wise to heed.
“I’m sure they considered that,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said of the Astros. “But I’m sure they figured, pitch carefully to him.”
They didn’t.
Once Sanchez realized he wasn’t getting intentionally walked with first base open and runners on second and third, he was hunting a pitch in a spot that would let him do some damage.
“I thought they were going to throw some uncomfortable pitches,” Sanchez said through an interpreter. “I was looking for something that I could hit. He left something there for me.”
When Sanchez’s three-run homer off closer Ken Giles landed 423 feet away, disappearing beyond the center-field fence, the Yankees took a late 3-0 lead they wouldn’t relinquish. The scary version of Sanchez the world has seen in recent days made yet another appearance.
This was the fifth time in eight games that Sanchez had homered. It also was the third time in the past six days that he hit a game-deciding home run. Sanchez had a walk-off against the Twins last Thursday, and also launched a 447-foot, two-run blast at Angel Stadium on Sunday that proved to be all the scoring the Yankees would need in that game.
Hours before Tuesday's first pitch, Sanchez fielded questions from reporters about whether or not he felt he could handle possibly taking a back seat as starting pitcher Sonny Gray’s catcher. Gray mentioned having a heightened comfort level with backup Austin Romine the night before.
Sanchez reiterated through an interpreter that he felt comfortable doing whatever needed to be done for the team to succeed, even if that meant watching Romine primarily catch Gray.
Boone believed Sanchez greatly proved his defensive value to the team Tuesday after he caught six pitchers and had only one wild pitch from reliever Dellin Betances get behind him. Those six pitchers combined for a 13-strikeout shutout, made all the more difficult when starter Jordan Montgomery left after the first inning with tightness in his left elbow.
Sanchez handled each pitching change as smoothly as the pitchers handled the Astros’ hitters.
“He’s in a good place,” Boone said about Sanchez’s defense. “He’s worked so hard to put himself in a position to be successful on that side of the ball and all the work he’s put in prepares him. He’s prepared when he goes back there. He’s in a good place back there, and he was impactful back there [Tuesday].
“I’m proud of him, but I also expect it.”
Kind of like how those opposing pitchers ought to expect by now big, timely blasts to come off Sanchez’s bat.