Giancarlo Stanton arrives in Boston as the face of futility. He already owns a pair of five-strikeout games, and leads the majors with 20 whiffs. The boos showered upon him by Yankees fans have become one of the biggest stories in baseball.
All eyes will be on Stanton when the Red Sox and Yankees kick off a three-game series on Tuesday, and that's really good news for one of his teammates.
With Stanton earning all of the headlines, Gary Sanchez has very quietly gotten off to the worst start in baseball. His .063 average ranks last in the big leagues among regulars, .006 behind former Red Sox shortstop Jose Iglesias in Detroit.
Sanchez is just 2-for-32 with a homer. What's bizarre is that while he has yet to walk, he has struck out only five times. That means his batting average on balls in play is an impossibly low .038, about one-eighth of league average. Most players in that kind of slump don't even make contact, but that hasn't been the case for Sanchez.
So when will Sanchez snap out of it? A year after smashing a career-high 33 homers in just 122 games, Sanchez can't buy a hit. He has been sidelined since going 0-for-6 and leaving in the 14th inning of Friday's loss to the Orioles with cramps, though he is expected to be available against the Red Sox.
"When you're that good of a hitter, as young as he is or in the prime of your career, that's a matter of time," Yankees manager Aaron Boone recently told reporters. "That just means somebody's going to pay at some point. I don't even sweat that. As great a hitter as he is, I don't sweat that at all. That'll come."