The ball soared high and mighty, 111 mph off the bat, launched at a 34-degree angle, 420 feet into the left-field bleachers. You might call it a Stantonian blast, if only John Sterling hadn’t thought of it first.
Of course, there’s more to hitting a home run than that.
“Definitely I’ve got to relearn how to jog around the bases a little bit,” Giancarlo Stanton said, flashing a grin, late Saturday afternoon.
Stanton’s second homer of his second Yankees season came awfully late, yet in helping his club post a 7-2 victory over the Blue Jays at Yankee Stadium, it delivered promise and potential: With less than two weeks before the postseason begins, what if the good Stanton can report for that duty?
That Stanton could cover up more than a few pinstriped blemishes.
“It’s always good to get some results in your first few games back,” manager Aaron Boone said of Stanton, who also doubled before leaving the game, as planned, after six innings. “I feel like he’s stringing some good at-bats together. Hopefully he can continue to build and get into a nice rhythm here as we get ready for October.”
Now with a dozen games on his 2019 ledger, Stanton owns a .300/.417/.525 slash line, compiled via three games in March, six in June and now three in September. In between those stints, he accrued enough injuries to qualify as a seemingly incurable patient of the week on “House.” He still undergoes treatment for the right knee sprain that felled him most recently, he said on Saturday, explaining, “I’ll have to do maintenance all the rest of the year. Just keep that up, keep my strength up and go out there with all I’ve got.”
Even if all he’s got can’t replicate the 2017 Stanton who won National League Most Valuable Player honors, or even the guy who put up a very solid inaugural campaign with the Yankees last year, a great gap exists between those players and the one who stunk it up against the Red Sox in the 2018 American League Division Series. If he can just be closer to the regular-season version of ’18, then the Yankees can work with that.
They can work with that because Saturday went down as a rare day in which Yankees head athletic trainer Steve Donohue didn’t have to hit the field to check on an ailing player. Gleyber Torres, who left Friday’s game early, reported that he felt fine after an MRI exam on his right hamstring came back negative, a rare dose of good news on this front.
The status of plenty other players remains either tenuous or just bad, however, and when you add in the terrible situation surrounding Domingo German, set to miss the entire postseason because of a domestic violence investigation, this Yankees team will hardly be whole for the most important games.
That Stanton’s first at-bat of the day ended with a very questionable called strike three that prompted the quick ejections of both Boone and his hitting coach Marcus Thames touched on another touchstone of this Yankees season: tension with the umpires.
That ongoing feud and the team’s ability to overcome so many devastating injuries led to “Savages” being the perfect nickname for this group.
Can Stanton be a lead Savage, perhaps the highest-compensated Savage ever? First let him play nine innings in left field, an assignment he intends to complete this coming week. Nevertheless, you can’t un-see a moon shot like the one he contributed here. The idea that the Yankees would be better off without him in the playoffs went on the shelf when Aaron Hicks and Mike Tauchman did the same, with Cameron Maybin ailing, too.
The pressure will be higher next month, the pitching better. Still, when he’s so much as close to right, Stanton can clear those hurdles and then some. It’s on him to make his many skeptics in the stands relearn that reality.