Yankees News: Gary Sanchez awful base-running fuels blame from YES Network, Boone

So far this season, New York Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez is playing above expectations, however, the bar wasn’t set very high, to begin with. Sanchez is currently hitting .267 with two homers and four RBIs over nine games. His strikeout rate is sitting at 16.7%, indicating he’s making better contact and walking a bit more.

Overall, this is a solid start to his 2021 campaign, despite his defense being a tad problematic. Unfortunately, the games he has called haven’t always been efficient, as the Yankees were tortured by the Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday, allowing seven runs, five of which came from Jamison Taillon over the first 3.2 innings.

Sanchez, though, hurt his team significantly in the eighth inning as the Yankees were desperately trying to claw their way back into the game. After Clint Frazier singled to left field, DJ LeMahieu doubled to deep center, and Giancarlo Stanton singled to center, the Yankees needed just a bit more offensive production to draw the game close.

However, Aaron Judge flies out to right, Sanchez walked, pushing Stanton to second base, and that’s when things got problematic. Sanchez, who hesitated to run to second base, was picked off in between base-paths, ending the inning prematurely without getting any more runs on the board.

This devastating baserunning error hurt the team significantly, and the post-game show on YES really got into how bad this was.

“That’s just inexplicable,” Yankees TV analyst Jack Curry said on YES Network’s post-game show. “That cannot happen. It looks awful. That’s something that probably shouldn’t happen in a high school game and it happened in a major-league game. And it really hurt the Yankees.”

Even skipper Aaron Boone had a hard time not blaming Sanchez in his post-game comments. Ultimately, he tried to spread the blame around, not singling in on any given player, but it was quite obvious what he was trying to dictate.

“I think (Sanchez) knew that he had second base, and Giancarlo was going to third and had a little bit of a hesitation a couple of steps into his trek to third, and that kind of froze Gary,” Boone said. “It’s a ball obviously (Sanchez) could have moved up on, but it’s important not to run off the guy in front of you. But you’ve just got to be heads up and in a better position to take advantage of that.”

At the end of the day, Sanchez needs to stop making these questionable mistakes, as they are the difference between winning and losing at times. A late-game comeback could be the spark that turns around the entire team after a tough start to the 2021 season. You never know what can act as a catalyst, and making boneheaded mistakes like being caught in a pickle with two outs is unacceptable.