Giancarlo Stanton Is Putting on a Fireworks Show

The Yankees lost to the Rays for the second night in a row on Wednesday night to fall behind in the Division Series, two games to one, but Giancarlo Stanton continued his rampage. The 30-year-old slugger, who was limited to just 23 games this year due to a Grade 1 left hamstring strain, has now homered in all five of the Yankees’ postseason games, with a consecutive games steak that’s one short of the record.

Stanton’s latest blast, his sixth of the postseason, came in the eighth inning off Shane McClanahan, a 23-year-old lefty who in Game 1 became the first pitcher in major league history to debut in the postseason without having pitched in a regular season game. He got out of that one unscathed, but not so on Wednesday:

The homer, Stanton’s second hit of the night, came with a man on base and trimmed the Rays’ lead to 8-4, but the Yankees could draw no closer. To date, they’ve scored 18 runs in the Division Series, 10 of which have been driven in by Stanton with his four homers. He broke open Game 1 with a ninth-inning grand slam off John Curtiss, extending a 5-3 lead to 9-3:

Stanton followed that up with a pair of homers off Tyler Glasnow in Game 2, first with a game-tying opposite field liner in the second inning, and then a three-run blast — and I do mean blast — in the fourth, which cut a 5-1 lead to 5-4, though the Rays eventually pulled away for a 7-5 win:

For the completists out there, Stanton also hit two in the Wild Card Series against the Indians, starting with a ninth inning shot off Cam Hill in what was already an 11-2 rout in Game 1, then adding a more crucial dinger off Carlos Carrasco in Game 2, when the Yankees were down 4-0; they would come back to win 10-9 and advance:

The shot sheet from Statcast:

All of Stanton’s postseason homers this year have left the bat at 107.9 mph or faster, and all but one traveled at least 410 feet. By distance, the 458-footer was the second-longest of of any hitter in this postseason, after Luis Robert’s 487-footer in Game 3 of the White Sox’s Wild Card Series loss to the A’s. By exit velocity, Stanton’s drive was the fastest postseason homer of the Statcast era:

Spot a trend? Stanton owns four of the nine highest exit velos on postseason homers, three from this year, and the Yankees have hit seven of the top 11. Then again, as Baseball Savant’s resident savant, Daren Willman pointed out, Stanton, Sánchez, and Judge together have produced the 24 highest exit velocities in Statcast history (not just on homers) with 18 of those belonging to Stanton:

The top 24 highest exit velocities in @statcast history are by all #Yankees players. pic.twitter.com/vCioXaR90J

— Daren Willman (@darenw) October 7, 2020

Whew. For the purposes of apples to apples comparisons, the leaderboard for all postseason batted ball events has Stanton first, second, and seventh, all on homers, with a Sánchez groundout fourth and a Judge homer seventh. Brian Cashman and company certainly know how to find themselves some bat speed.

Stepping away from Statcast for a moment, here’s where Stanton fits on the leaderboard for consecutive postseason games with a homer:

The expanded playoff format has helped fill out that list, as has the juiced ball and, perhaps, the Astros’ sign-stealing mischief (Springer ranked second on the team in confirmed trash can bangs during the regular season, and the scheme reportedly continued through the 2017 postseason). It’s a cool list, with some Hall of Famers and perhaps some future ones as well, but as Murphy’s presence at the top suggests, there’s an element of random-dude-gets-hot, too. When you have the kind of bat speed and power that Stanton does, you’re always a threat to land on here… if you’re healthy.

Unfortunately, Stanton has so rarely been healthy in the past two seasons, that after a two-year stretch in which he was at his most durable. Recall that from the time he debuted in the majors with the Marlins (June 8, 2010) through the end of the ’16 season, he topped 123 games only in ’11 (15) and ’14 (145), the latter despite suffering multiple facial fractures when he was hit by a Mike Fiers pitch. Knee, quad, and hamstring injuries have otherwise taken a significant bite out of his playing time; from 2011-16, he averaged just 121 games per year, which means he missed about a season and a half within that span alone. After playing 159 games and bashing a career-high (and major league-high) 59 homers in 2017, he was traded to the Yankees, and while he dipped to 38 homers, the fact that he was available for 158 games was still a net positive.

Stanton’s 2019 season, however, was the most frustrating of them all. He didn’t even make it out of March unscathed, and played just 18 regular season games. During the team’s season-opening series against the Orioles, he strained his left biceps, landing on the Injured List on April 1, no fooling. Just as that injury was clearing up, he needed a cortisone shot in his left shoulder due to what was eventually diagnosed as a strain. He headed out on a rehab assignment on May 20, but after being hit by a pitch during batting practice, the assignment was put on hold due to what was soon revealed to be a left calf strain. He finally returned to the Yankees on June 18, but played just six games before suffering what was initially believed to be a right knee contusion on a slide into third base, but later discovered to be a strain of his posterior collateral ligament. He was out until September 18, and remained upright into the postseason, but suffered a right quad strain while legging out an infielder hit during the ALCS opener against the Astros, and played just once more in the series. Who knows how things might have turned out had he remained healthy?

Only the industry-wide shutdown due to the pandemic prevented Stanton’s 2020 from approaching that level of frustration. He was diagnosed with a Grade 1 strain of his right calf in late February, and would have begun this season on the IL had it started on schedule. He was good to go by the time summer camp rolled around, however, made it through unscathed, and homered off the Nationals’ Max Scherzer in his first plate appearance of the season. He followed that up with a 483-foot blast off Erick Fedde two days later, the longest in the majors this year until Ronald Acuña Jr. hit one 495 feet on September 25.

After serving as the Yankees’ designated hitter in 14 of the team’s first 15 games this year, Stanton left the second game of the team’s August 8 doubleheader with the aforementioned hamstring strain, and what was initially expected to be a three- to four-week absence went beyond five. He returned on September 15 and was handled carefully, playing just nine of the team’s final 13 games; he went 4-for-5 with a double and a homer on September 17 but otherwise just 3-for-30 in his return. Not once in his 23 total games did he play a defensive position, and for the year, he hit a modest .250/.387/.500 with four homers in 94 PA, that after a .288/.403/.492 showing with three homers in 72 PA in 2019.

Within the limited data he’s produced, Stanton’s average exit velocity has fallen from its Statcast era peak, but with so many starts and stops, it’s difficult to get a true read on his recent performance:

On the one hand, Stanton is elevating the ball with less frequency and thus hitting more grounders relative to fly balls, but on the other, he’s still barreling the ball — striking it with a combination of velocity and launch angle that produces a minimum of a .500 batting average and 1.500 slugging percentage in comparably struck balls — at a rate that’s double that of this year’s qualified leader, Fernando Tatis Jr. Of course, Stanton’s seasonal sample sizes from the past two years are small enough that they’re not quite to the point of stabilization (50 batted balls for both exit velo and barrel rate, via Russell Carleton), hence the difficulty in getting a true read.

That said, Rob Arthur’s finding that a player’s maximum exit velocity — even from a single batted ball event — tells us something about how he’ll fare relative to projections is also worth bearing in mind. The start-and-stop nature of Stanton’s career has been frustrating, and we’ll never know just how high he might have climbed on the all-time homer list had he been healthy (I’ll save the what-if projections for another day). But after all that he’s been through, the fact that he can still produce these kind of fireworks is reassuring. The Yankees – who are going to be paying him into 2028 given that he’s bypassing his opt-out — and those of us who enjoy watching displays light-tower power, can only hope that the show doesn’t end tonight.