The New York Yankees recently announced that they had tendered the contract of catcher Gary Sanchez, effectively returning the backstop to the Bronx for another season. Sanchez’s career as a Yankee has been a roller coaster filled with crazy feats of strength at the plate as a hitter and mind-bogglingly bad moments behind it as a defender. However, for all his warts, Sanchez was still one of the most talented prospects to come out of the Yankees system in quite some time. There are two reasons why the Yankees couldn’t give up on Sanchez and that talent.

Giving up On Sanchez Would Signal Another Organizational Failure

Think about it. The Yankees just had to stomach letting go of two guys who were in their organization for quite some time, Clint Frazier and Tyler Wade. No one was going crazy over Wade, but both he and Frazier were supposed to be contributors at the big-league level for the Yankees.

Neither player ever made good on the potential they showed, and a lot of the heat is being applied to the Yankees’ shortcomings as developers of talent. New York hasn’t been the best at identifying talent and drafting players- and when they do, the players the Yankees select either end up as trade bait or they fail to get better while moving up in the organization.

The Yankees couldn’t and cannot let that happen with Gary Sanchez. This is a guy who the Yankees touted as one of their best hitters, a guy who they believed could hit .300 someday. Yankees fans are laughing at that sentence right now because Sanchez has never even sniffed a .300 batting average, aside from his 2017 campaign.