STANTON COULD TURN JEERS TO CHEERS FAST
Here’s a thought for all those kindhearted Yankees fans who get their kicks booing and jeering Giancarlo Stanton:
You’re not helping.
The club’s new slugger can proclaim all he wants that the Bronx cheers he continues to endure at Yankee Stadi- um don’t bother him, but his stats and human nature tell a different story.
There are any number of ways to analyze Stanton’s early-season slump in his first year with New York, and his rapidly mounting strikeouts definitely merit attention, but more startling than any indicator is the huge disparity in the slugger’s production at home and on the road.
Check this out: In eight games and 39 plate appearances at Yankee Stadium, Stanton is batting .086 with one homer, a puny .351 on-base plus slugging percentage and an astonishing 20 strikeouts.
In eight games and 36 plate appearances elsewhere, he’s batting .323 with two homers, a 1.094 OPS and nine strikeouts, which is much more in line
with his career standard.
Is there any question he’s pressing? Yankees manager Aaron Boone appeared to acknowledge as much when he said after Tuesday’s game he’s considering moving Stanton from his usual No. 3 spot in the lineup, though not much further down.
Right now, Stanton’s not doing much offensively to help the 8-8 Yankees, let alone teaming up with the equally massive Aaron Judge to become the modern-day version of the M&M boys, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris.
Stanton’s two five-strikeout games, bookending New York’s first homestand, made him the third player ever to whiff five times twice in a season. Nobody had done it twice in a month, not to mention a week, like Stanton.
That was part of a troubling early spell that has shown Stanton both expanding his strike zone — his swings at bad pitches increasing from 27.4% last year to 32.2% this year — and often missing pitches in the zone. Compared to 2017, his contact rate in the zone has dropped an eye-popping amount, from 81.5% to 67.9%, by far the lowest in his career.
Most notably, Stanton is missing fastballs over the plate, the very pitches he would be expected to crush. According to Baseball Savant, Stanton is whiffing on about twice as many four-seam fastballs as he did in his 2017 National League MVP season.
It should come as no surprise then that his strikeout percentage has shot up from a career-low 23.6 to a careerworst 38.7.
Now, before Yankees fans get all apoplectic over the notion their club is stuck with a player who’s owed $295 million over the rest of his contract and can’t hit the fastball, they should keep a few facts in mind.
For one, Stanton’s just 28, so it’s unlikely he has lost his skills overnight. For two, he’s adjusting to a new league, a new team, a new city, a new position (left field and DH) and a heightened lev- el of scrutiny. That’s a lot to throw at anybody, even a player whose chiseled
6-6, 245-pound physique makes him appear superhuman.
It’s also worth remembering Stanton has gone through miserable stretches before, though they don’t tend to be so clearly split between home and road venues.
In a 29-game period between May 7June 15, 2016, Stanton had an almost incomprehensible slash line of .118/.211/
.216 (batting average, on-base percentage and slugging).
He eventually snapped out of it and delivered a .305/.371/.621 line in July, with seven homers.
And of course, last year with the Miami Marlins he produced a monstrous second half that featured 33 home runs and 74 RBI in 73 games. His OPS split for the season was 1.104 at hitter-unfriendly Marlins Park and .923 on the road.
Then again, that was amid the comforts of a familiar environment in Miami, the only baseball home he had known since breaking into the majors as a 20-year-old in 2010.
Hall of Famer Billy Williams is reputed to have said, “A slump starts in your head and winds up in your stomach.”
Stanton is experiencing a massive stomachache, and the rough treatment from the home fans is hardly serving as antacid.