MAKE -UP CALL
Passing on Stanton ultimately helped Yanks draft Judge
When the Yankees selected Aaron Judge in the first round of the 2013 draft, the towering righthanded slugger probably should have thanked Giancarlo Stanton.
Six years earlier, the team had scouted Stanton and passed on the powerful high school senior — also from California — because they believed he was going to play football in college.
“It probably helped that when we saw Judge, we knew what kind of player Stanton had turned into,’’ Yankees vice president of amateur scouting, Damon Oppenheimer, said. “There really wasn’t a comparison when Stanton was coming up.”
But that doesn’t mean the Yankees weren’t intrigued by Stanton when he burst onto the scene.
Like every other organization, they were well-represented during the summer of 2006 at the Area Code Games, an annual showcase for the nation’s top high-school players that has been held at Long Beach State for more than two decades.
Stanton made an impression in front of scouts and college coaches at the week-long event, blasting homers out of Blair Field — a notoriously difficult park in which to hit home runs.
“He definitely showed his power,” said Jeff Patterson, the Yankees’ West Coast crosschecker at the time. “But there was still a lot of development needed. And everyone knew football was in the picture.”
Stanton had drawn interest from several schools as a wide receive, among them USC.
And the Yankees’ concerns that he might end up pursuing football in college and not signing with the team that drafted him weren’t without merit, since Stanton showed enough ability playing football that the Trojans’ head coach at the time, Pete Carroll, believed he could have suited up for him.
“[Giancarlo] was an excellent prospect in high school and we knew he had a ton of potential,’’ the Seahawks head coach said in an email on Friday. “We truly saw him as a multi-sport athlete, which is rare at that level. He was so good at both sports that we would’ve wanted him to play both [football and baseball] if he came to SC.”
Instead, the Marlins took a chance and picked Stanton in the second round, 76th overall. The Yankees had picked just once by then, selecting Andrew Brackman with the 30th pick. The 6foot-10 right-hander pitched in just three games in the majors.
“I don’t think we put enough work in on him his senior year,” Oppenheimer said of Stanton. “When the Marlins took him in the second round, I thought, ‘Wow. They must know they can sign him and keep him from playing football.’ We were thinking he’d go in the other direction.’’
While clearly no one foresaw Stanton becoming the game’s top power hitter, it didn’t come as a complete surprise.
“He was a scout’s dream,’’ said Kendall Carter, who, like Patterson and Oppenheimer, was at the showcase at Long Beach State and was Arizona’s national scouting supervisor before joining the Yankees’ scouting department in 2006. “When you’re scouting, you scan the field for bodies and physiques like that with that kind of athleticism. He looks like Adonis and he had all the tools. He could throw and run, too. But there was that thought of him playing football at SC and that got him out of the first round.’’
Eleven years later, the Yankees finally landed Stanton thanks to the Marlins’ latest selloff — and Oppenheimer is glad he’s coming to The Bronx.
“You don’t see many guys like this,’’ Oppenheimer said. “So it’s nice to get a second chance at him.”