Image: (AP Photo/Michael Laughlin)
The first step is admitting you have a problem, and here I am admitting that I have an unhealthy obsession with Jesus Sanchez. I couldn’t tell you how often I’ve pulled up his Fangraphs and Savant pages in the middle of lectures, or scoured Youtube for his highlights. I’m not even a Marlins fan.
Now you may be wondering why I’m obsessed with a career below average hitter by WRC+ (99), and to that I’d say the ball flies off his bat like few others. With a similar Savant profile to 2024 breakout Lawerence Butler, albeit with more strikeouts and worse sweet-spot ranking, Jesus Sanchez has the hitting tools to be a productive big leaguer, but has never posted a WRC+ above 111.
On September 17th against the eventual World Series Champion Dodgers, Jesus Sanchez posted a 5/5 day with two doubles and three singles, but that wasn’t the most impressive part of his day. Sanchez registered 4 balls hit over 105 miles per hour, including the three hardest hits of that game: a 108.9 MPH single, and doubles of 111.8 and 117.2 MPH respectively. Sanchez was one of 18 players to go for 5 hits in a game in 2024, and yet this performance was swept under the rug by his haters, as Shohei recorded his famous 6 hit performance just two days later.
Not many hit the ball as hard as Sanchez, though he doesn’t see the same success as the rest of the hard hitters. Out of the top 15 batters by hard hit rate (Baseball Savant) he has the lowest wOBA by 14 points trailing Oneil Cruz, and the next closest is over 40 points from Sanchez at .359. Light tower power is as good of a way to describe Sanchez as anyone else, and yet he might’ve been one of the most average players in baseball in 2024. He lives in my head rent free, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Career Background:
The 27th ranked international prospect by Baseball America in 2014, Sanchez signed with the Rays in 2014 for $400,000 as a 17 year old. At the time, Baseball America was higher on his hit tool than his raw power, but since signing Sanchez has filled out to more of a traditional power hitter.
From 2015-2018 he excelled in the minors, never finishing with a full-season WRC+ below 115 with limited strikeouts, but hit a snag at AAA in 2019. That same year he was traded from the Rays to the Marlins for righties Trevor Richards and Nick Anderson, and he’s been with the Marlins ever since.
Sanchez made his major league debut in the shortened 2020 season, getting a 10 game cup of coffee and struggling mightily, striking out 38% of the time. He split time between the Bigs and AAA in 2021 and ‘22, showing flashes of success with a .904 OPS in September 2021 and putting up a 134 WRC+ at AAA in 2022. He also notably hit a 496 foot bomb at Coors Field in 2022, tied for the 5th longest home run in the Statcast era.
Since 2023 Sanchez has found himself as a regular in the Miami lineup, posting unremarkable numbers (1.4 fWAR in each of the last two seasons) despite his eye-popping raw power. These seasons have also seen more of a platoon approach used for Sanchez, which will likely be the standard for the rest of his time in MLB.
Underperformance of the Expected Numbers:
As stated before, Sanchez hits the ball extremely hard, but doesn’t have the statistical results to back it up. Over the past two years, Sanchez has extremely underperformed his expected numbers by batted ball data. This leads to a very important question: is Sanchez due for some positive regression, or is he the inverse Isaac Paredes, who is a notorious overperformer of his expected numbers?
This is the second year in a row that Sanchez has placed in the 75th percentile or higher in many important Savant categories (xwOBA, xSLG, Barrel%, Bat Speed) including 93rd percentile average exit velocity, and 95th percentile hard hit rate in 2024. Despite these numbers, he finished exactly at league average in terms of WRC+ in 2024, severely underperforming his expected numbers.
In terms of wOBA, a stat attempting to better understand the offensive output of a player by weighing outcomes more comprehensively, Sanchez underperformed this metric by 26 points: the difference between a hitter like Josh Bell (.317 wOBA) and Bryan Reynolds (.343 wOBA). It would seem that one of these years, Sanchez would live up to these lofty batted ball numbers, but the success hasn’t come yet.
In fact, it seems that Sanchez is the complete opposite of Isaac Paredes. When comparing their two Savant profiles, Paredes seems to thrive where Sanchez struggles, barely striking out and turning relatively poor quality of contact into consistent home run power (including a 30 homer season in 2023).
This is largely due to the trend of pulled fly balls greatly out-performing their expected numbers since they are hit to the most shallow parts of the park. In contrast to Paredes’ 53.7% pull rate and 22 degree average launch angle, Sanchez is much more of a spray hitter, and often struggles keeping the ball off the ground (7.7 average launch angle).
Taking a further look at these batted-ball numbers reveals a shocking trend; Sanchez hits over half of his fly balls to the opposite field. For reference, Isaac Paredes had a 42% pulled fly ball rate, meaning Sanchez goes oppo at a higher clip than the pull rate of even the most extreme pull hitters. This is a major issue as for the most part, pulling the ball is much more successful than pushing it. In a 2024 article from Fangraphs, using data from 2022-2024, by wOBA the only situations where oppo balls perform better than pulled balls are at lower launch angles or lower exit velocities.
This means that for a guy who hits the ball hard like Sanchez, he would perform much better by working to pull the ball more. This is demonstrated by the fact that only 2 of his 18 home runs on the season were to the left of center field, including a 344 foot home run to the Crawford Boxes at Minute Maid Park in Houston. Sanchez has the capabilities to be more of a pull hitter, hitting 45% of his grounders and 32% of his liners to the pull side, but caps his offensive upside by not pulling his fly balls. As long as he continues to push fly balls as much as he does, Sanchez will continue to greatly underperform his expected numbers (since they only take into account launch angle and exit velocity), and fail to reach his power potential.
Career Crossroads
Sanchez isn’t a bad player by any means, he has decent speed for his size (46th percentile sprint speed), and isn’t a liability in right field, but his best tool seems to be lagging behind everything else. He turned 27 over the offseason, and will be entering what should be his prime years, but some changes in his approach will be needed to stick around long term in any other lineup besides the Marlins’. He either needs to cut back on the swing aggression to limit his strikeouts, or work more seriously to elevate the ball to the pull side.
With a 17.5% home run to flyball ratio (dragged down by all those oppo flies), when he’s getting the ball in the air it’s leaving the yard, but ground balls have also been an issue for his whole career. In Fangraphs’ 2021 prospect report on Sanchez, they highlighted his physical tools, finding it “ludicrous” he wasn’t hitting for power, but blaming it on his propensity to “[swing] at pitches he can’t do anything with or failing to lift a lot of the ones he can.”
Since these issues have plagued him his whole career, it’s worth questioning if a change of scenery could tap into his potential with the bat, and finding himself another year closer to free agency (2028) he could end up on another team sooner rather than later. No matter how Sanchez performs, I’ll still have a soft spot for his violent hacks, but I’m hoping he finds success somewhere, even if it’s in a platoon role.
Categories: Analysis, Articles, MLB Player Profiles
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