Veteran Sánchez adjusting to new club, pitchers

This story was excerpted from AJ Cassavell’s Padres Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Crazy how seamlessly Gary Sánchez is fitting in.

Sure, the homers help. The fact that he has a .927 OPS through his first six games with the Padres helps, too.

But I’m not even talking about that. Sánchez has joined a staff full of pitchers who boast deep, deep arsenals. Yet, he already looks like he’s caught them for years.

That’s partly a product of the new age of PitchCom devices. With pitchers able to call their own games, Sánchez can sit behind the plate and absorb what pitch the pitcher tells him he’s going to throw. He doesn’t need to know the signs. He doesn’t need to know precisely how a pitcher wants to sequence his pitches.

Then again, it’s still no easy thing catching Yu Darvish, as Sánchez was tasked with on Saturday night. Austin Nola had caught every one of Darvish’s starts dating back to 2021. Clearly, those two had developed an understanding of the way Darvish likes to use his arsenal, which spans practically a dozen pitches.

But Sánchez caught seven brilliant innings from Darvish on Saturday night. The only time he’d caught Darvish’s arsenal before that? During Darvish’s bullpen session on Wednesday in Miami.

“It’s just about feeling confident when you go back there during the game that you have a little bit of knowledge with what’s going on with the pitchers,” said manager Bob Melvin. “It’s always going to be a work in progress, and after you catch guys a few times, you’re going to feel that much more comfortable. To this point, he’s off to a really good start.”

No kidding. Offensively, Sánchez has been precisely what the Padres were looking for after they’d begun the year with the league’s worst production from their catchers. Defensively, Sánchez may have has a few warts, but he's been relatively seamless in his transition to this particular pitching staff.

Sánchez caught six scoreless from Blake Snell. And, sure, Sánchez has always seen Snell well. (His five homers against Snell are more than any other pitcher in baseball.) But they worked well in tandem, despite the fact that the only time they’d ever met before Tuesday was at Aaron Judge’s wedding.

“We were on the same page,” Snell said. “It was good. I enjoyed it a lot. Felt like we were on the same page and really comfortable with each other right out the gate.”

Three days later, Sánchez caught another scoreless start, this time from Darvish.

“Maybe I was a little bit concerned about how things would go,” Darvish said. “But once we got into the game, everything went fine, and I felt like we worked really good together.”

Those two aren’t the easiest pitchers to catch, but Sánchez is a nine-year veteran. He’s also been nomadic lately, playing for his fourth organization in the past two calendar years, with a couple of Minors stints mixed in. He’s learned well enough to adapt to new pitchers.

It’s still early, but Sánchez has been everything the Padres hoped he would be at the plate, bringing a new dimension to the lineup. A needed one, too.

“He’s moved around quite a bit,” Melvin said. “Now I think he feels like he’s in a good place to be able to produce, and he’s going to be around. … He has the ability to obviously drive the ball and do some good things offensively.”