Yankees Mag: It Don’t Mean A Thing If You Ain’t Got That Swing

When James Rowson began working with his players upon the official start of Spring Training this past February, the Yankees’ new hitting coach was overwhelmed by the bounty of talent in his charge. In Aaron Judge, he had the American League single-season home run record holder. Juan Soto? Only perhaps the most complete hitter in the game today. Not to be overlooked were the grinders -- names such as Alex Verdugo, Anthony Volpe, Gleyber Torres -- just go down the list, and have a blast. Rowson sure did.

The hitting coach looked around the room and saw a lineup, one through nine, that would scare any pitcher. Not to be overlooked was the team’s designated hitter, Giancarlo Stanton, the titanic slugger looking to rebound from an overwhelmingly frustrating 2023.

“He came in with a mission,” the hitting coach said in March. “That’s Big G. You watch him, his work ethic is relentless. He went out a couple days ago and did some work off the pitching machine and was out there for an hour, just focusing until he got it right.”

Stanton, Rowson notes, is extremely process oriented, always toiling in pursuit of greatness -- both toward personal success and the resulting team achievements. But the 34-year-old former National League MVP understands that baseball fans care more about what you do than how you do it, and he knows that his 2023 numbers -- a .191 batting average and .695 OPS, by far the lowest marks of his career -- gave plenty of credence to questions wondering if Stanton’s time as a fearsome hitter was up.

“This is a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately environment,” Stanton says. “I haven’t had the best year and a half or so out there. So, I guess you forget quickly.”

With Stanton, “lately” takes on some added weight; he’s able to change fortune that quickly. Often streaky, the slugger knows how different things look when he’s on compared to when he’s not. He can have weeks or months when he mashes balls to parts of baseball stadiums that the vendors don’t even visit, and stretches when he appears to be flailing helplessly at the breeze. He can put on a show when he’s hot or attract boo-birds when things are not. “They look very bad,” Stanton says of his less-excellent swings.

And Stanton, himself, knows it better than anyone.

Usually, when he retreats to his native California for the offseason, Stanton works like a Hollywood editor, poring over video of all his swings. He can find great moments in the rough patches; he can find miserable, laughable swings during heaters.

But this past winter?

“I don’t think I looked at one swing from last year because that just wasn’t me,” Stanton says. “I didn’t want to take any visual moment from last year.”

So, he ignored the ugliness and set about rebuilding his body, re-evaluating his process … everything he could do to put 2023 in the past. But a guy like Stanton can only change so much. And for all the focus on the revamped body that the masher brought to Spring Training, Stanton’s value in 2024 might come down to the one thing he can’t change, the very thing that makes him the ultimate baseball unicorn.

***

The entire premise of what you’re about to read is fairly ridiculous, but you’re just going to have to deal with it for a little while. Because on June 4, after Stanton’s eighth-inning home run turned a tight, 3-1 contest into a comfortable four-run lead over the Twins, there was an incredibly strange sentiment everywhere from the Yankee Stadium press conference room to the home clubhouse to the copy getting published online and in print.

Was baseball’s active home run leader being overlooked?

Let’s back up.

Stanton, as mentioned, knows that his misses can look ugly. As a DH, there are only so many ways that he can contribute, and when he’s not hitting, there’s not much upside. Last year, the ugly whiffs came all too often, so when he came out of the gate a bit slow this year, with just three hits in the team’s first eight games, it wasn’t only the hyper-online critics who were losing patience, no matter how many positives manager Aaron Boone and Rowson were able to see in Stanton’s process.

“I mean, that’s G, man,” Boone said after the eighth game, a 3-0 loss to Toronto in the team’s home opener and Stanton’s sixth start of the year. “He can be streaky like that, and once he gets it going, hop on. … He’s in the at-bats, not overly chasing. So, you’ve just got to ride with it a little bit and have him catch fire. He looks healthy; he looks strong. He’s firing well, just not getting any results yet.”

The next night, Stanton went 3-for-4 with a homer; the day after that, he contributed a grand slam in a win that ran the Yankees’ record to 8-2. Over the next two months, the Yankees surged to the top of the American League, winning series with abandon and mashing balls to all corners of major American cities. Judge and Soto were doing Judge and Soto things. Volpe, in his second year, was getting on base every day. Verdugo was a dawg, Oswaldo Cabrera a good-luck charm, the catchers reliably outstanding. And on the other side, the pitching, even without ace Gerrit Cole, was lights-out.

And over there, right in the middle of the lineup, but somehow out of the spotlight, stood Stanton, whose home run tally stood at 15 after that June 4 performance. Combined with Judge and Soto, the trio was the first in Yankees history to each have 15 homers in the first 62 games. Yankees history, you’ll remember, features names such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle. Just so we’re clear …

Matt Blake, the Yankees’ pitching coach, has the good fortune of not having to game plan against his own team’s lineup. But, as he acknowledges, Stanton can present a challenge when building a strategy among pitchers who only have so many bullets in their chambers. “I mean, it’s an MVP player in your lineup that’s as well known as anybody in the league,” Blake says, “and he’s probably not out of your mouth in the first three or four guys.”

As a reminder, “Big G” is 6-foot-6 and weighs about 245 pounds. With that June 4 blast, he had clubbed 417 long balls -- 39 more than Mike Trout -- since debuting in 2010. He once hit a 504-foot home run, and he’s known for mixing blasts that can menace air-traffic controllers at local airports with low-launch-angle lasers that seem capable of mowing grass.

Overlooking Stanton sounds like spending a week in Paris and never noticing the Eiffel Tower.

Lest you sense a straw man argument brewing, let’s look back at that June 4 night. “Big G’s got 15, and you try not to take them for granted,” Boone said. The next morning, it was clear he wasn’t the only one thinking that way.

Here’s columnist Joel Sherman, in the New York Post:

“He is basically an afterthought on this club -- an afterthought with 15 homers.”

Or how about the Bergen Record headline:

“Just off centerstage, Yankees’ Giancarlo Stanton is making an impact.”

Then there was the bold header in the Star-Ledger:

“Yankees say Giancarlo Stanton is quietly having great season. Are they right?”

Well, of course they were right. The numbers spoke for themselves, after all. But more than that, “He’s been a threat every day,” Boone said on June 4. “When I was asked about G, maybe a week into the season, when he was off to a slow start or whatever, to me, I felt like he was in the fight in at-bats, day in and day out. So, I felt like, No, he’s in a good spot, he just hasn’t gotten results or hasn’t connected yet at a high level. Since jump, I feel like he’s been on time and on balance.”

The key, though, isn’t what, if anything changed. More likely, it’s what hadn’t.

***

The old adage says that every time you watch a baseball game, you’ll see something new. More locally, Yankees fans spent a generation-plus being reminded that they can’t predict baseball. With new data becoming more prevalent every day, that’s more true in 2024 than ever before. Look deep enough into the numbers we all now have access to, and you’ll see that even events that look familiar can still be one-time feats.

When MLB added bat speed metrics to its Statcast offerings this past May -- relying on new, incredibly sophisticated high-speed cameras in every ballpark that could break swings down into a level of detail never before possible -- it wasn’t a surprise to learn that Giancarlo Stanton swings the bat very hard. Before there was the data to back it up, baseball fans probably would have placed Stanton at or near the top of the list of the game’s hardest swingers, to say nothing of the scouts that train their eyes over a lifetime watching swings.

But Stanton does more than swing hard. He all but laps the field, whipping his club at a laughably faster clip than even the second name on the list, Pittsburgh’s Oneil Cruz.

With the caveat that data only exists from April 3 of this year, there were 22 players with average swings of 75 mph or faster through June 4, from Austin Riley and Pete Alonso at 75.0, to Cruz at 77.9. Stanton was all the way at 80.7. Another way of looking at it: Cruz breaks that 75 mph mark -- which MLB set as the “fast” threshold -- 74.1% of the time; nearly three quarters of Cruz’s swings qualified as “fast.”

Only Stanton’s crossed the threshold more often. His percentage was 97.1.

“He gets his hardest swings off most often,” says Yankees pitcher Carlos Rodón. “That’s impressive.”

Rodón’s not alone in the Stanton fan club. Along with Judge and Soto, Stanton leads a charge of ludicrous-speed aficionados in the Yankees’ batting cage. Through June 4, Judge was tied for fifth in the Majors in bat speed, and Soto ranked 10th. But Stanton is simply on another planet.

“We were laughing yesterday before Big G’s homer,” says catcher Austin Wells, who has enjoyed his view of the power jolts all year. “The guy was throwing 75 mph curveballs, and I was like, ‘I think he swings the bat faster than that.’”

Again, it’s not that any of this is unforeseen. No one was surprised to learn that Stanton has impressive bat speed. But while teams and players have long had access to proprietary objective measures, the numbers are now there for everyone to see, easily found online and constantly referenced in broadcasts. And for all the attention that the raw speed numbers drew when MLB began releasing the metrics, there’s also gold to be mined from the newly available data on bat path and swing length.

For starters: Faster swings offer better results. Per MLB’s data, fast swings through June 12 produced, on average, a .309 batting average and a .611 slugging percentage. Swings below 75 mph -- you know, the type that Stanton essentially never takes? Those numbers were .243 and .366, respectively. And as for the value of hitting a ball hard (and no one hits them harder than Stanton)? You’re talking about a difference of .482 to .215 in batting average, and .928 to .252 in slugging.

How to use it all? “My honest answer would be, ‘I don’t know,’” Rowson says. “Because I don’t know that they’ve done enough yet on that for me to be able to draw something from it.” But that doesn’t mean there aren’t juicy bits that can prove both delicious and nutritious. Stanton knows that a slightly slower bat speed with a slightly shorter path is equivalent to a slightly faster bat speed. And every batter simultaneously wants to figure out how to keep his bat in the strike zone for the longest time that it can possibly be dangerous. If those two ideas can seem paradoxical, then that’s what the next stages are about: figuring out how to use all of this in ways that aren’t destructive. (As Stanton says, a batter’s swing profile is not the type of thing you’ll fix with an in-game adjustment).

Indeed, it’s possible that the most useful information that will be gleaned by a hyper-focus on bat speed and bat path will be to understand pitching even better than we do now. Batting will always be reactive; a hitter can only respond to what a pitcher is doing. But to be able to rank pitchers by who induces the worst, most awkward and noncompetitive swings? To be able to recognize the pitches that miss bats by the greatest distances? And to take it a step further: When a pitching battery can go beyond the eye test and use that granular information about bat paths and batter reactions to build their game plan? That’s the dream, of sorts.

“All this is, really, is putting numbers to stuff scouts have been watching for 100 years,” says Mike Petriello, Major League Baseball’s director of stats and research. “You’re telling me a scout in 1940 wouldn’t have wanted to know which guy he was watching had the fastest bat? Of course he would.”

While the data -- and our ability to synthesize it -- mature, the numbers still allow us to better understand such a one-of-a-kind player as Stanton. “With that immense bat speed, he doesn’t have to be perfect,” Rowson says. “He can do some things when the timing may be a little bit off or he’s not perfect because he generates such bat speed in what he does. Mishits can go out of the ballpark.”

***

Offered a hypothetical chance to see data for any baseball player in history, Petriello immediately jumps at the fantasy of pointing the newest, most advanced cameras at the Yankees’ premier slugger a century ago.

“I can’t imagine not saying Babe Ruth,” Petriello says. “I know people want Barry Bonds, and that’s fine. But to me, Bonds’ greatness was as much about his Juan Soto-esque eye as it was about his ability to swing hard, although I’m sure he did that, too. I want to know, does Babe Ruth live up to the legends, or was he just better than, let’s say, the train workers he was playing against at the time.”

But as one of the main faces behind the new bat data rollout, Petriello has spent plenty of time this season thinking about Stanton. And in particular, wondering about things that the data won’t ever be able to tell for certain. Because Stanton is nearing his 35th birthday, and it’s no knock to say that a former MVP with more than 400 career homers could be on the back end of his career.

“So, is he swinging slower than he was when he was 25?” Petriello wonders. “Probably yes! We just don’t have the data to know. But what little data we do have indicates that there’s definitely an aging curve here. So, that’s actually really interesting to me, because if he is still swinging faster than everybody else now, what was he doing when he was 27 years old? Was he six miles ahead of second place back then? We’ll never know. But I’ve thought about that a lot. Like, God, what did that look like 10 years ago?”

Stanton is something of a savant when it comes to his own swing. He can talk comfortably about the different feeling in his hands when he cracks one with an epic exit velocity. He explains that offspeed pitches that he barrels up leave the bat freely, while hard fastballs offer more resistance. Those oppo shots, the ones he catches deep in the zone? He feels them a bit more than the majestic pull jobs. What about those times that he thinks he made perfect contact, but the numbers come in lower than expected? Then it’s time to go look at the video, see what he might have missed. Was his timing a bit off? Is there a problem with the bat? Did he not pick up the pitch exactly the way he wanted?

“You have to be very real with your outs,” he says, and that goes for both positive and negative analysis. “Like, you might have got out in a big spot, but if you hit the ball hard, hit it on the barrel, you did what you planned to do going into the at-bat, you’ve got to just be OK with it. I really look at timing. Was my timing there? Did I attack what I was looking for?

“You’ve just got to compress things. It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen to me, maybe, more than others. Whatever. That’s gone. That’s in the past. You still have strikes left. Do something with it.”

Even with that level of insight, this is all reactive, and Stanton has made a nice career out of being among the quickest to react. But there’s still the oldest sports paradox, the one that says that slowing things down can create more explosiveness. Sean Casey spent a few months working with Stanton last year after taking over as the Yankees’ hitting coach in the second half. Now back at MLB Network, he has been marveling at the way that a calmer, easier -- and yes, slower -- Stanton has been mashing.

“Everything this year is a little slower; everything is a little more relaxed,” Casey said during a June 5 MLB Central broadcast. “Tension is poison in the big leagues. If you’re not slow and relaxed, you’re going to be in trouble. Big G last year, confidence was a little down, I think. Everything was speeding up on him. And he was more jerky to the ball. This year, everything’s slow, he’s getting ready earlier. And it’s showing.”

It’s showing in a few ways. There’s the fact that, until late June, Stanton had spent 2024 healthy and available, at least until a hamstring injury sidelined him for a month. When he’s in the lineup, though, he’s mashing. And the team … well, it was impossible to argue with the early results.

There’s certainly a chicken-or-egg factor at play. The top four hitters in the regular Yankees lineup for much of the first half -- Volpe, Soto, Judge and Verdugo -- are punishing at-bats. “It’s just pressure,” Stanton says. “How much can we push the guy until he’s got to fall down?” If that stumble comes against the Yankees’ regular No. 5 hitter, the guy with more than 1,500 career hits and more than 1,000 career RBIs? Hard to argue with that strategy.

It has worked plenty this year; it certainly worked on June 4. Stanton’s first three at-bats were so strong -- blasted fouls, hard contact, you name it -- that Boone stood at his perch in the home dugout all but predicting Stanton would break through when he stepped to the plate in the eighth. The manager, who always believes in Stanton because he has the good fortune to watch the hitter more than almost anyone, recognizes that he has something truly unique in the middle of his lineup. “The guy’s a killer,” Boone says. Even, as he notes, that the “killer” Stanton might somehow be overlooked.

“I think there is some truth to it,” Boone says. “But again, I don’t think G cares either way about that. He’s on a mission, like a lot of us that have been here a while and haven’t hoisted that trophy. That’s what it’s about.

“And he’s been showing me who he is really since the day he got here.”

Jon Schwartz is the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. This story appears in the July 2024 edition. Get more articles like this delivered to your doorstep by purchasing a subscription to Yankees Magazine at www.yankees.com/publications.