Is Giancarlo Stanton BACK Back?

To put it delicately, Giancarlo Stanton’s stint with the New York Yankees hasn’t exactly gone according to plan. To put it less so, Stanton has amassed fewer WAR in eight years in New York than Aaron Judge did in 2024 alone. When the Yankees acquired Stanton in late 2017, the expectation was that he’d be the foundation of the team’s lineup for the next decade as he finished assembling his Hall of Fame case. However, since a solid if mildly underwhelming debut season in the Bronx, Stanton has suffered through a parade of injuries that has left him with only a single 120-game season, and his deity-level exit velocities have rapidly become his main offensive skill. Five hundred home runs, which once would have seemed like a disappointing final milestone for Stanton, increasingly looked liked the happy result.

Stanton’s health has remained a problem, as he missed a large chunk of this season with a severe case of tennis elbow in both elbows. But the results he’s gotten when he has been available have been of classic Marlins vintage: a .313/.388/.663 line with 17 home runs and 1.9 WAR in 51 games, with the WAR total his best tally since 2021. With Judge first out with a flexor strain and then missing his usual power since his return, having Stanton bust out to this degree has kept the Yankees’ current spate of problems from becoming even greater.

So, how has he done it? Rather than revolutionize his game, Stanton is playing like the most Stantonified version of himself. His average exit velocity and hard-hit percentage are at their highest levels ever, and his out-of-zone swing percentage is the lowest it has been in years. The attack angle on his swing has ticked up a couple of degrees, enough to give him an ideal attack angle 65% of the time, up from 60% in 2024 and 57% in 2023. We don’t have bat tracking data further back, but we do know that Stanton has a career-high rate of flyballs and a career-low rate of grounders.

Groundballs aren’t necessarily the worst thing in the world, even though these days Stanton runs at about the same speed that George RR Martin finishes writing novels. Over the Statcast era, Stanton has a .271 BABIP on grounders, 30 points better than the league average over that time period. As with most aspects of the game, hitting baseballs hard is a useful skill, and this is no different, as grounders hit under 95 mph have a .171 BABIP while those hit 95 mph or harder have a .387 BABIP. Still, Stanton’s .271 batting average on balls in play is nearly matched by a .265 home run average on fly balls in play, and home runs are a lot better!

I wrote about Stanton’s Hall of Fame case about 18 months ago, and for 2024 and the first half of 2025, it didn’t look like the story was getting any sunnier. At the time, I included Stanton’s projected career WAR, home runs, and hits after each season of his career. Here’s an update, with 2024 added:

The ZiPS projections are more excited about Stanton right now than they have been in quite a while. His rest-of-season wRC+ projection is 127 in the simpler model that is updated daily, and 134 in the most robust version of the model. Naturally, this gives his projections a bump over what he had before:

Eighty-seven more home runs (83 in these projections, and an additional four for the rest of 2025) puts him at 533 for his career, giving him some significant clearance over the 500 home run milestone and edging him a bit closer to 2,000 hits. That’s good for the Yankees and good for Stanton’s chances of making the Hall of Fame. I can’t speak to how other writers feel about Stanton, but the version that we’re seeing in 2025 actually makes me excited to watch him chase 500 home runs. I have the same love for nice round numbers that most baseball fans do, but for me, milestones are far more compelling when a player is actually good during the end of the chase. Miguel Cabrera is an easy Hall of Fame vote for me, but I got little joy out of his 500th homer or 3,000th hit because the achievement involved him being — to be extremely blunt — a really lousy major league baseball player for the better part of a decade.

For the same reason, the 2022-24 version of Stanton making it to 500 homers isn’t something I care too much about, nor would it make me more likely to check his box on a Hall of Fame ballot than if he had retired after 2021 or 2022. From 2022 to 2024, Stanton hit .212/.291/.454, good for 1.4 WAR in more than 1,300 plate appearances, numbers that look more like Eloy Jiménez or J.D. Davis than an all-time great.

But this Stanton, who is hitting lots of balls in the air and will hopefully hit more in the .250-.260 range rather than .200, is a far more compelling player. The hope is that however he found his inner Giancarlo, he doesn’t lose it again. The 2025 version of Stanton is one who looks Cooperstown-bound rather than Cooperstown-meh, and that’s enough to make me flip over to the Yankees game to see him play.