Inside Giancarlo Stantons journey to becoming the exit velocity king

NEW YORK — Giancarlo Stanton became the exit velocity king on the Little League fields of Tujunga, Calif. He remembers the nights when he and his dad, Mike, hopped fences of locked fields and rushed through buckets of baseballs before the last bit of daylight passed.

Mike had a rubber arm in batting practice. He’d throw his son pitches for hours on end and did so without the use of an L screen to protect himself from his son crushing one right back up the middle. But to avoid blasting a liner off his dad’s chest, Stanton learned how to rotate his body and perfected his swing path by either pulling balls to left field or smashing them to right. He still credits his ability to hit homers to the opposite field because of the work he put in years ago with his dad.

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Saturday’s homer, his first of the season, was an opposite-field blast, the same variety he perfected to not pelt his dad with one of his patented missiles.

He didn’t realize how different his bat speed was until Statcast made its tracking stats public in 2015. Saturday’s home run came off his bat at 112.3 mph. It took a few years for him to fully understand the numbers because even though he was consistently hitting the ball hard, he didn’t know if he was generating pop because of his 6-foot-5 frame or if his power was generated by how hard he was able to swing the bat or if it was a combination of both. When he was younger, there were days when he would hit balls 50 or 100 feet over fences and it would seem effortless. Then there would be times when he’d swing as hard as his body allowed and he couldn’t hit a ball. Even now in his 14th major-league season, the chase of perfecting his swing is an ongoing process.

“Realistically, we have to be scientists,” Stanton told The Athletic. “We have to be physicists to understand the angles of your path to be the most successful hitter you can be. There’s all types of things you have to understand in your swing to be able to be consistent.

“Swings are the most fascinating and frustrating things in our world. There’ll be times where you feel like you’ll never get out and times where you have to question if you’ll ever get a hit again. I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s always your swing. It’s sometimes how you feel physically, how you feel mentally. All of that influences your swing to some capacity. It’s a fun test for yourself every day to try to be as perfect as possible and get to work so you can go out and be your best that day and then whether you were great or not so great, the moment it hits midnight, the day is over and you have another day. You have to have a short memory in this game.”

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That short memory showed itself Sunday afternoon. After ending Saturday’s 7-5 loss by hitting into a game-ending, bases-loaded double play, Stanton obliterated a baseball Sunday afternoon and caused Aaron Judge’s jaw to drop in awe. Exiting his bat at 117.8 mph, Stanton sent a ball 485 feet to straightaway center that cleared the batter’s eye at Yankee Stadium. It was the third-longest home run in the stadium’s history.

“I thought the wind was blowing out a little bit,” said Ross Stripling, who gave up the home run to Stanton. “So maybe 460 on a normal day. No, just kidding. That one was pretty large.”

In Statcast’s history, 108 balls have been hit as hard as Stanton’s mammoth blast on Sunday, and 56 of them have come off his bat.

“He’s definitely one of one in terms of putting the hurt on a baseball,” Yankees catcher Kyle Higashioka said.

Yankees manager Aaron Boone believes Stanton is “a way better hitter” now than when the team acquired him in 2018 after he won the 2017 National League MVP with the Marlins and led baseball with 59 home runs. Stanton’s ability has never been in question. He was on a blazing pace last season when he hit 19 home runs in 63 games and posted an .858 OPS.

Then Stanton dealt with soft-tissue injuries in his Achilles, calf and ankle. Stanton’s power and ability to consistently get off good swings was zapped in the second half of the season because of those injuries. He posted his worst wRC+ since joining the Yankees, a career-worst .759 OPS and his .211 average and .293 on-base percentage were 50 percentage points worse than his career averages.

For the past few years, health has been the biggest concern when discussing Stanton’s value. He’s averaged 124.5 games over the past two seasons. He played just 19 games in 2019 due to injuries and even in a shortened 60-game 2020 season, he played 23 games.

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“What he did in the first half is who he is,” Yankees hitting coach Dillon Lawson said. “That’s indicative of what he’s capable of. It’s not a fluke. If he can post 130 games, the numbers that he put up in Miami are still possible. I think 50 (home runs) is possible. If 50 is possible then 59? OK, yeah. Who would be so dumb to put a ceiling on him? He’s plenty capable of what he’s shown in the first half last year and over the course of his career. Like Boonie said, I think he’s getting better. He’s handled the pressure of being a Yankee and trying to win a World Series.”

Lawson calls Stanton one of his favorite players he’s ever coached because of how thoughtful and how accountable he is. Lawson said Stanton can tend to be more quiet and observant in conversation and it’s not always entirely clear what he’s thinking or how he’s feeling but he opens up, he calls the Yankees slugger one of the most thoughtful people he’s been around. There’ve been times when Lawson has asked him questions about different swing strategies and specific bat path angles and it’s sometimes taken a week for Stanton’s response because he wants his answer to be as detailed as possible.

That level of detail and preparation is what Judge tries to emulate from Stanton. When Judge was at Fresno State and coming through the Yankees’ minor-league system, Stanton was one of his favorite players along with Albert Pujols. Judge gravitated to Stanton when he was with the Marlins because he was one of the biggest players in MLB who could do it all. He hit for power. He could hit for average. He was a good defender in right field.

There aren’t many players who can relate to Judge the way Stanton can. Coming off a season hitting an American League-record 62 home runs, Judge has been interested in learning what that following season is like. Stanton hit 38 homers in 158 games with the Yankees after hitting 59 in 2017. Judge isn’t interested in running it back this year. He wants to be better.

“One thing I pick his brain about is his approach,” Judge told The Athletic. “He’s faced so many pitchers along the way and I’ve asked him about certain situations. ‘What are you looking for with these pitchers or what are you trying to do in these different spots?’ And then I kind of take it into my own game. He’s the guy that always gets hits in the big situations. He has a lot of walk-off homers so that’s one thing I asked him about a lot. Like, hey, in these situations where as a hitter you want to be the guy to deliver the walk-off, like, how do you handle when this guy is really pitching around you and trying to get you to chase? How do you relax and stay in the moment?

“It’s been impressive to see up close because from afar, you can kind of see a guy like that — he’s made his money. He’s won an MVP. He’s been an All-Star. You can kind of maybe think that guy might be like, ‘All right, well, I did my thing. Now I’m with the Yankees. I’m gonna chill and have fun.’ He’s a guy that comes in here and he works his butt off every single day and wants to improve and wants to get better. And you don’t see that too often with superstars like that.”

When Stanton was younger, becoming a professional baseball player wasn’t always the dream. He knew he wanted to be a professional athlete and baseball was one of the sports he excelled in along with basketball and football. He realized in high school at Sherman Oaks (Calif.) Notre Dame that basketball likely wasn’t going to be his choice. He could have stuck with football. During his senior year, Stanton caught 29 passes for 745 yards and 11 touchdowns. But he and his dad attended more professional baseball games. It was at the height of the home run race era and he visualized himself hitting dingers one day.

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So he chose baseball and has now become one of the most prolific home run hitters of his generation.

“I like to say, I put a motor on the ball,” Stanton said. “It just seems like it has its own little generator. Those would be numbers I would like to see for hitters. They have the RPMs on pitchers’ balls and RPMs on balls leaving the bat because I would say there’s as high of a correlation as pitchers with high spin rates.”

Stanton describes the feeling of hitting home runs as a “brief, euphoric, out-of-body stopped moment in time.” The Yankees would feel equally euphoric if Stanton could play around 140 games this season, including around 40 to 60 games in the outfield to open up more at-bats for others in the designated hitter spot. If Stanton can stay healthy, the Yankees know how prolific their offense could be.

“He’s an MVP,” Judge said. “He’s a guy that can, with one swing of the bat, flip a game, flip a series. When you got that right in the middle of your lineup, it makes for a tough and long day for the pitcher on the mound. That’s why one of my goals always in that first inning, if he’s batting fourth, is I want to try to get him up. I feel like he hits .800 when he hits in the first inning because pitchers got to go through me, DJ (LeMahieu), (Anthony) Rizzo. And then you got Giancarlo Stanton waiting on deck with a couple of guys on base. It makes for a tough outing for him. When he’s healthy and when he’s doing his thing, he’s one of the best in the game.”

(Photo of Stanton in the 2022 ALDS: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)

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