Giancarlo Stanton’s Legendary Power Is Unmatched, Both In The Statcast Era And In Tall Tales
Image credit: Giancarlo Stanton (Photo by Nick Cammett/Getty Images)
When Giancarlo Stanton was coming up through the minor leagues, the stories he spun were more important than the stats.
Stanton, who clubbed his MLB postseason-leading fifth home run on Saturday night to help send the Yankees to the World Series and claim ALCS MVP honors, hit 89 home runs in just 324 MiLB games on his path to the big leagues. He hit 39 home runs for Greensboro in 2008. He hit 21 in just 53 games at Double-A Jacksonville in 2010 to earn a promotion to the majors.
It wasn’t the number of home runs but how he hit them that anyone around the minors at that time remembers.
There was the home run at Huntsville that cleared a 60-foot tall scoreboard in left center field, the fence nearly 400 feet from home plate where Stanton hit it out. At the time, Stanton called it the furthest he’d ever hit a ball.
It was only one of several monumental home runs. Find a fan who saw Stanton hit in 2008, 2009 or 2010 and there’s a pretty good chance they have a story to share.
Stanton, Bryce Harper and then Joey Gallo a few years later, were the last in a long line of sluggers that stood out because their feats could only be described and estimated. Minor league teams weren’t broadcast on TV consistently. There was no Trackman to measure the exit velocity of Stanton’s latest blast and compare it to his other best home runs or to Harper’s bombs 600 miles away.
Much like the Mickey Mantle home run at Griffith Stadium that seemed to add another 10 feet of distance every time someone described it, these home runs were partly real and partly the kind of tall tale that make baseball a sport that often gets even better in the retellings.
We don’t have that any more. I’ll raise my hand and admit I’m part of the group ruining it. Nowadays, long home runs, even in the minors, are quantifiable. We will have video of them. They will be measured by Trackman radar. We know exactly how hard they were hit and how far they were estimated to travel.
There’s something we’ve gained with this. I can tell you that the Angels’ Jo Adell hit a 514-foot home run that is the longest in Triple-A in the past two seasons. I can tell you that Chris Gittens and Jhonkensy Noel are the only two Triple-A hitters to hit a ball harder than 118 mph the past two seasons.
But we’ve also lost something. Once you can quantify something so precisely, you lose some of the storytelling and never-ending, unwinnable debates that were often a great part of being a baseball fan.
Back in 2010, I couldn’t tell you whether Stanton or Harper hit the ball farther at their best. I had to follow Joey Gallo around the South Atlantic League and Carolina Leagues if I wanted to get my own unforgettable moment of jaw-dropping power (he provided it with a home run at Winston-Salem that left everyone in the stadium, including me, picking their jaws up off the floor).
Forever going forward, we’ll know what was once unknowable. But this is where Stanton also stands out. Because he’s the last slugger of the tall tale era, and he has proven to have the best raw power of the first generation of the analytics era as well.
Stanton leads all active MLB hitters in home runs. He’s on pace to finish his career with over 500 homers. But the way he’s done it has carved out a niche all of his own.
There have been 87 home runs since 2015 estimated to have traveled 475+ feet. Stanton has eight of them. No one else has more than three. Stanton has one of three home runs estimated to travel 500+ feet, although Nomar Mazara’s 505-foot blast edges Stanton’s 504-foot homer for the longest in Statcast history.
There have been 122 balls hit 118+ mph since 2015. Stanton has 58 of those 122. Aaron Judge is second … with 14. There have been 23 balls hit 120+ mph since 2015. Stanton has 16 of those 23. There have been 11 balls hit 121+ mph. Stanton has six of those 11.
Stanton is 34 years old. He’s still a top-tier slugger, but his prime is several years in the past. Still, this year, the first in which MLB has kept official bat speed stats, Stanton has been swinging his bat the fastest of any major leaguer with an 81.2 mph average. Oneil Cruz is second at 78.6 mph. Only 11 hitters average more than 76 mph. Stanton’s bat speed stands alone, and his tendency to swing as hard as he can almost every swing also makes him unique.
If you want to argue that Stanton hits the ball harder than any other slugger in MLB history, you can make a good case, but that’s one we can never answer. Maybe Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron, Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds had bigger power.
But if you want to argue that Stanton hits the ball harder than anyone else in the Statcast era, that’s an indisputable fact. The biggest and baddest slugger of the final days of the tall tale era has proven that the tall tales were true.
