Gary Sanchez is NOT Kevin Maas

Gary Sanchez is a man possessed and will not be stopped this season after Brian Cashman unleashed the Kraken on the league earlier this season. Sanchez has done nothing but unload on almost every pitcher thrown in front of him this season while also adding great defense and game calling behind the plate but while most are happy to see one of the Baby Bombers not only get a chance and succeed there are others who have to question how real this run really is. Some expected Sanchez to cool off by now, and he hasn’t while others have gone as far as to compare Sanchez to another couple of Yankees who started hot only to fizzle away, Shane Spencer and more notably a former Yankees first baseman named Kevin Maas.

Shane Spencer came up in 1998 only to belt 10 home runs in first 67 at bats helping the Yankees to a World Series ring and 114 victories while Kevin Maas hit 13 home runs in his first 110 at bats back in 1990. The similarities in them both are that both had careers that started hot and both had careers that quickly fizzled out but what Maas has that makes him unique to Spencer is that Maas was once considered a Yankees top prospect, like Sanchez, where Spencer was not.

One has to keep in mind that Sanchez has never hit the ball with this much authority in his career, not even in the lowest levels of the minor leagues, so a regression is in store for the Yankees catcher and his fans. The thing about Sanchez though is that he’s pretty much always been solid, especially for a catcher, offensively speaking so even with a regression to say .275 with 20-30 home runs that’s still something special for a 23-year old and a catcher in general.

Unlike Maas and Spencer, and Jesus Montero before him as well, he has the defense to stick and the on-base percentage to allow you to wait out the lows in order to reap the benefits of the highs. He may never hit in the .350’s again and he may never be on pace to hit something like 200 home runs in a season, I’m just guessing and exaggerating slightly, but having watched Sanchez as a 16-year old kid to what he has developed into today I just can’t see him falling by the wayside like Maas and Spencer. I don’t have a stat to back that up or anything other than my gut and the eye test I’ve received in 2016 but this kid is just too good, too mature, too willing to put in the word and too cool under pressure to let the big lights of New York and MLB pitching affect him. He can hit fastballs and he can hit the offspeed stuff too and I just can’t think of anything that he can’t do. That’s why he will be successful. Write it down.

Remembering Kevin Maas

I actually had the Starline poster, but I couldn't find a good picture of that.

It often amazes me how some people can get so attached to prospects, and get so mad when a prospect is traded. Even if the return makes sense, as I believe getting Michael Pineda for Jesus Montero makes a ton of sense, there are still many people with ill feelings towards the deal. This makes me think that maybe I'm the fool for liking a trade. But then I think of guys like Kevin Maas.

Over Kevin's last 278 games in the minors, before he made his MLB debut in late June of 1990, he hit 59 HR (good for a 162 game average of 34) to go along with an OBP of .390. I couldn't find anything that states he was a top prospect, but I'm sure there were some Yankee fans that were expecting this guy to take over 1B for Donnie Baseball.

He was called up to the Yankees, from AAA Columbus, on June 29th against the Chicago White Sox. Maas was 1-3 in the game (a single), to go along with a strikeout. Although he hit an RBI single in his 2nd game, Kevin's first HR didn't come until July 4th in Kansas City. And things took off from there.

Kevin set a MLB record by reaching his 10th HR faster than anybody in history (72 at bats). He was also the fastest in history to 13 and 15 HR. By the end of the 1990 season Maas had hit 21 HR in only 79 games, and finished 2nd in Rookie of the Year voting to Sandy Alomar, Jr of the Cleveland Indians. If you want to know just how psyched he had people, check out this quote from BaseballEvolution.com...

A funny thing happened last season. After several seasons of thinking about it, we finally decided to create an award to honor Kevin Maas’ place in the annals of baseball history. Kevin Maas, as our generation will remember, looked like the next Lou Gehrig for one summer in 1990 before making baseball fans around the country feel stupid for having bought the hype.

Well, no sooner than we'd created the Kevin Maas Award, it was pointed out that this was actually two great awards: an award for a rookie who we would be stupid to expect to see a duplicate performance from, and an award for a player whose performance was so out of character with the rest of his career that we would be stupid to expect him to duplicate it.

"The next Lou Gehrig". Yeah, you read that right. I loved Don Mattingly, so to assume anybody could truly replace him is putting a lot on a guy. But to say he looked like the next Lou Gehrig is putting gigantic expectations on a guy.

So what did Kevin end up doing? Well, in 1991 he put up a line of .220/.333/.390 with 23 HR. You might say that although all three triple-slash categories went down (his SLG went down big-time) his HRs actually went up. Yeah, but they went up thanks to having played 69 more games in MLB. In 1992 he hit .248/.305/.406 with 11 HR in 98 games. And things just went downhill from there, until he played his final MLB game in 1995 (he held on in the minors through 1997, but retired after that).

Was Kevin Maas over-hyped? Absolutely. But does that mean Jesus Montero, Manny Banuelos, or other big prospects are over-hyped too? Yeah... possibly. But, that doesn't mean Jesus nor Manny can't become really good MLB players either. I'm just using Maas as a reason why I don't get nearly excited about prospects as some people. And I'm also pointing out that leaning hard on prospects for your team's future success is not the smartest thing to do. Mixing home-grown players along with free agents is the way to go, and the austerity budget hopes to do just that (along with save a butt-load of money).