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As a player’s body changes over time, the same movements he used to make may not work well for him anymore. Adjusting to these changes (or not) will make or break his career. These changes have been especially stark for Giancarlo Stanton. The 35-year-old slugger serves as an interesting case for observing how great hitters can alter their swings over time to adjust to their changing physical attributes.

Stanton had a 116 wRC+ in 459 plate appearances in 2024 – the 15th season of his career. That’s nearly identical to the 118 mark he set across 396 plate appearances as a rookie in 2010. The difference between Stanton then and now, though, is night and day. Let’s take a look at Stanton at age 20 to get an idea of what his swing was like during his first major league season:

Open stance, non-neutral shin angle, slight hand row. None of these things are currently present in Stanton’s swing. None. When he came up, he looked like an uber-athletic NFL tight end. He could run well, move fluidly, and was twitchy enough to have a bit of extra movement in his swing (compared to recent years) and still have success. Yeah, he struck out over 30% of the time in his rookie campaign, but he was still learning big league pitching. He boasted a 141 wRC+ the following season with a very similar swing. It wasn’t until his third season where there was an obvious change. This was when Stanton showed what he was really capable of at the plate (and when he started going by Giancarlo):

Now that’s what I’m talking about. These are truly Stantonian homers here. In 2012, Stanton raised his wRC+ to 158, delivering 5.1 WAR in just 123 games. He cemented himself as one of the scariest sluggers in the game, and much of that should be attributed to his mechanical adjustments. He changed his stance to a neutral position and raised his hands up a considerable amount. From this point on, his hands would stay in a higher slot. His hand row from the previous two seasons always brought him to a higher point than where he started in his setup. As a player with 80-grade power, he didn’t really need that extra movement to create force. Depending on your body type (arm length, upper body flexibility, etc.), swinging a flat bat from a high slot makes it easier to get your bat on plane. Since he wasn’t the type of hitter who varies his shoulder plane all that much, it was a logical change to simplify his approach.

Even with these changes, we’re still pretty far off from where Stanton has been over the last few seasons. He maintained these mechanics throughout 2012 and 2013. However, during this time, health became an issue. He missed time in both of these seasons for knee, abdominal , ankle, thigh and shoulder injuries. Without biomechanical data, we can’t definitively say these injuries forced his body to change and/or he had to adjust his swing to compensate for his compromised health, but my goodness, those are injuries almost from head to toe! It wasn’t until the 2014 season that Stanton played over 140 games in a single season. And unsurprisingly, he came into that year with another modified setup:

This is the first time in his career where we saw Stanton narrow his stance. I’m theorizing here, but taking away movement could have had two benefits for him: Similar to my point before, he is so strong that he never really needed to move all that much to create power, and less movement would give him a better shot at making contact. Second, by narrowing his stance and not crouching as much, he would put less stress on his body. He ended this season with a 161 wRC+, the highest mark of his career. He also remained healthy until the middle of September, when he was hit in the face by a pitch that prematurely ended his season.

The narrowed stance kept working for him in 2015. Across his 74 games to start the year, he scorched 27 home runs — a full-season pace of 58. But on June 26 — his 74th game — he broke his hamate bone swinging at some point during his final two at-bats, both strikeouts, and missed the rest of the season.

The one thing about Stanton’s swing that he has never really reconciled is that he doesn’t decelerate much. I think this is a big reason why we see such egregious whiffs from him. Once he gets started, there is no slowing down. It also comes with some added risk of injury. This is such a violent swing, and his body bears the brunt of that force because he doesn’t have the brakes in place to come to a controlled stop.

Although he was healthy to start the season in 2016, it was clear the injury had compromised him. By the end of the year, he’d completely gotten away from the setup that he’d had so much success with before the hamate injury. In fact, he returned to a similar stance that we saw from him early on in his career:

Forward lean, slightly open hips, and more knee bend. Sound familiar? That’s because this is essentially rookie year Stanton, not the great hitter he was in 2014-2015. His performance also reverted back to where it was in 2010; his 118 wRC+ in 2016 was identical to his mark as a rookie. It makes sense, then, that he ditched this setup in 2017. Closed stance Stanton has entered the chat:

Stanton didn’t close his stance off until about June, but he didn’t run it back the first few months with the stance he used during his down 2016 season. He came into 2017 with the same stance he had in 2014-2015, when he was raking. But from the summer on, he closed things up, finishing the season with 59 home runs and winning NL MVP. It was a special run that completely took off due to another mechanical change – probably the most important of his career.

Stanton was traded to the Yankees following the 2017 season and showed up with the same exact setup, and for good reason. After struggling big time out of the gate, he ended up with a 128 wRC+. Not great but still very good. He was healthy for pretty much the entire season too, playing in 158 games. Then in 2019, the injuries piled up. After a knee injury that kept him out for almost the entire year, he returned in the playoffs and sustained a quad injury. Then it was hamstring injury that limited him to 23 games during the shortened 2020 season. Over the two years, he played in a total of 61 regular season games.

Unlike other times in his career, Stanton’s injuries in those seasons didn’t lead to a mechanical overhaul. At this point in his career, he knew what the best version of himself looked like. If he could get his body back to feeling healthy, it made sense not to go through any big changes. And in 2021, that worked out well. He swatted 35 homers in 139 games and finished with a 138 wRC+. He suffered a minor quad strain early in the season, but other than that, he was healthy all year.

Though he missed 10 days with a minor calf strain in late May/early June, Stanton was also mostly healthy for the first half of 2022, and he hit well enough to make the All-Star team (133 wRC+ during the first half). But then the lower body injuries returned, and this time they were even lower than before. He made it three days into the second half before landing on the IL with Achilles tendonitis. He missed just over a month, and when he came back in late August, it took him about two weeks to get going. He also had a minor injury scare when he fouled a ball off his foot on September 5; he wasn’t in the lineup for the Yankees’ next four games, though he did pinch hit in two of them. He caught fire upon returning to the lineup on September 10, posting a 133 wRC+ with seven home runs over his final 79 plate appearances of the regular season.

Still, these particular injuries represented a new challenge for Stanton. As a closed-stance hitter, he is far more reliant on his connection to the ground, making these repeated injuries from the ankle downward especially concerning. Not only does he have to regain his strength, but he also has to figure out how to move in space and interact with the ground. This gets more difficult for players as they age and the injuries compound. The thing about Stanton, though, is he has always been willing to tweak his mechanics. However, he needed to hit rock bottom before deciding to go away from the setup that he’d had so much success with for so long.

Health was a problem for Stanton again in 2023. He strained his hamstring in April and missed almost two months. Upon his return, he was far off from his diminished 2022 form, when he finished the year with 113 wRC+, which to that point was the worst mark of his career. His 86 wRC+ to end the year was bleak. He stayed healthy after his return, but the awful performance brought up the question: Was this just too much for him to overcome? For Stanton, the answer was to do what he had done so well for his entire career. He made some more changes, this time to his mechanics and his body.

There was a lot of discussion around Stanton’s adjustments at the beginning of 2024, including this comprehensive look from Jay Jaffe. In short, the main point was that he slimmed down (a lot!) and shifted closer to the neutral setup he had from 2014 and 2015 rather than the extreme closed stance he had employed beginning in June of 2017.

This goes back to the talk about matching your swing to your physical attributes. Stanton has dealt with so many lower body issues over the last five years, and they have impacted what he can do physically. He couldn’t sustain the same movement pattern in the closed stance with his current body, so he went to a similar version of the swing that his body could handle. His regular season still wasn’t great, but it was a major step up from the year before. And when you consider the show he put on in October, it’s safe to say his changes worked pretty well overall. For a last look, let’s see where he stands as of October, from a mechanical perspective:

Whatever your opinion is of Stanton’s career, how he projects for the rest of it, or anything related to that, there is no denying that what he has done throughout the last 15 years has been remarkable. There aren’t many hitters who can change as much as he has and still have success. A big part of being a great baseball player is making adjustments. Stanton has done that incredibly well for a long, long time.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2016 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Billy Wagner was the ultimate underdog. Undersized and from both a broken home and an impoverished rural background, he channeled his frustrations into throwing incredibly hard — with his left hand, despite being a natural righty, for he broke his right arm twice as a child. Scouts overlooked him because he wasn’t anywhere close to six feet tall, but they couldn’t disregard his dominance over collegiate hitters using a mid-90s fastball. The Astros made him a first-round pick, and once he was converted to a relief role, his velocity went even higher.

Thanks to outstanding lower-body strength, coordination, and extraordinary range of motion, the 5-foot-10 Wagner was able to reach 100 mph with consistency — 159 times in 2003, according to The Bill James Handbook. Using a hard slider learned from teammate Brad Lidge, he kept blowing the ball by hitters into his late 30s to such an extent that he owns the record for the highest strikeout rate of any pitcher with at least 900 innings. He was still dominant when he walked away from the game following the 2010 season, fresh off posting a career-best ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

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This year’s free agent class features a recent — as in the past two years — MVP. He’s playing the same position he has his entire career and has suffered no recent major injuries: 151 games played in his MVP campaign, 154 in each of the two that followed. And yet interest in this legend of the game is expected to be limited.

On the Top 50 free agents list, Ben Clemens ranked him 41st, which is third at his own position and lower than eight — EIGHT! — relief pitchers. I don’t know why I’m being coy about this player’s identity, actually, because presumably you can see the headline and header image and already know I’m talking about Paul Goldschmidt. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Athletics. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Philadelphia Phillies.

Batters

The quick exit in the postseason at the hands of the New York Mets was a disappointing finale for the 2024 Phillies, but the season as a whole still has to be considered a successful one. Cristopher Sánchez convincingly evaporated any questions about whether his late-2023 performance was a fluke, Bryce Harper stayed healthy and proved to be a more-than-competent defender at first, and the bullpen stayed strong despite a few veteran losses from the year before. But that’s not to say there wasn’t some good fortune involved. I don’t mean that to diminish the Phillies; most great teams have more things go their way than not. The preseason NL East favorite, the Atlanta Braves, saw some of their best players lose most or all of the season with serious injuries, and along those lines, the Phillies didn’t have their depth tested to the same degree. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Rich Hill’s latest (and hopefully not last) pitching exploits, then discuss how Rob Manfred’s desire to craft his legacy as commissioner could shape the sport’s direction, why sports commissioners’ tenures last so long, what qualities of the World Series-winning Dodgers rival teams might try to emulate, rumors surrounding the Dodgers and Roki Sasaki, and more.

Audio intro: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Hill gamer
Link to Hill pitching matchup
Link to Hill strikeout montage
Link to Hill on next season
Link to Manfred on expansion
Link to Manfred on national TV
Link to Manfred on media training
Link to Theo on copycats
Link to NBC Sports Chicago news
Link to link rot wiki
Link to Theo on decadal changes
Link to Lewie’s newsletter
Link to team postseason percentages
Link to semantic satiation wiki
Link to MLBTR on Sasaki
Link to Rosenthal on Sasaki
Link to Ben’s Halo podcast

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The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

“If [John] Donaldson were a white man or if the unwritten law of baseball didn’t bar Negroes from the major leagues, I would give $50,000 for him and think I was getting a bargain.” — John McGraw, quoted in various newspapers, 1915

The career totals are staggering — 428 wins, 5,295 strikeouts, 14 no-hitters, and two perfect games over a span of 33 years — and they’ve all been documented by a network of researchers unearthing primary sources. But only a fraction of those are on Seamheads, and an even smaller fraction on Baseball Reference, covering his time in the major Negro Leagues. John Donaldson is an enigma. He may have been the greatest Black baseball pitcher of all time.

A 6-foot-1, 180-pound left-hander who had speed, a wide assortment of curveballs, and a good changeup, Donaldson spent the years from 1908–40 carving out a singular career in Black baseball. He barnstormed before the major Negro Leagues were in place, dominating the competition, spent five seasons (1920-24) with the Kansas City Monarchs (whom he’s said to have named) of the first Negro National League, primarily as an outfielder rather than a pitcher, and then spent over a decade and a half continuing his barnstorming odyssey on integrated and Black semiprofessional teams. Read the rest of this entry »

Tuesday was this year’s 40-man roster deadline, the date by which players who would otherwise be eligible for the Rule 5 Draft at Winter Meetings need to be added to their club’s roster in order to be protected. In addition to a few dozen players’ big league tickets essentially being punched on this day, there is often a flurry of trade activity as teams with a surplus of rosterable players look to find teams with skimpier rosters with which to trade.

I’ve updated the scouting reports for these newly rostered players over on The Board, which you can find here. There will probably be a couple of guys from this contingent whose grades change between now and when their team’s prospect list goes up on the site, but for the most part, these evaluations are hot off the presses and will hold up all offseason. I go into much greater depth on each player in their Board scouting report than I have here. The commentary below often has more to do with a team’s roster makeup than any individual player. Read the rest of this entry »