SAN FRANCISCO — It can be foolhardy to buy into spring training stats, good or bad, especially for veterans.
The same caveat goes for early season results, the sample size way too small to put too much stock into it either way.
But both in his look and his actual production, Giancarlo Stanton put together about as good a spring as the Yankees could have hoped for — most significantly, while staying healthy. And now he has carried that into the early days of the regular season, continuing to offer encouraging signs about what kind of impact he might provide the Yankees this season if he can continue to stay on the field.
“He’s locked in,” Cody Bellinger said before the Yankees wrapped up their series against the Giants on Saturday. “I feel like he’s been locked in all spring and carried it over into the regular season. Just the quality at-bat and hitting the ball hard.”
Entering Saturday’s game at Oracle Park, Stanton was 4-for-8 with a home run in the first two games of the season. He also even made an impression with his legs — no small feat — scoring from second on José Caballero’s single to left field on Opening Day. Later in that game, he smoked a 114.4 mph RBI single off Giants ace Logan Webb.
Lighting up Statcast is nothing new for Stanton, but it is a continuation of how he looked toward the end of camp. In the final week of games, he was hitting just about everything with exit velocities in excess of 100 mph, prompting Aaron Boone to say, “If we can just bottle this up and move it north …”
So far, so good, and not just in the actual results.
“Really good [at-bats],” Boone said Friday after Stanton homered in a 3-0 win. “He’s disciplined and develops his plan and goes up there and is executing really well. Even first at-bat where he strikes out, I feel like, man, he’s got the right thought, he’s got the right plan, it didn’t line up. Then he hit a ball pretty good to right and then got the wrinkle in the zone that he stuck [for a home run]. He’s in a good place.”
This is the kind of impact Stanton delivered regularly last season — one of his best as a Yankee, besides the fact that it did not start until the middle of June as he waited for the excruciating pain from his tennis elbow in both arms to subside.
In 77 games, he hit .273 with a .944 OPS and 24 home runs, good for an 8.5 percent home run rate — the same mark he had in his NL MVP season in 2017.
The 36-year-old is still playing through pain and managing his elbows on a daily basis, but he has found a way to keep them in check while not affecting his ability to inflict pain on baseballs. And while no one is expecting Stanton to return to his MVP form at this stage of his career, the Yankees would certainly sign up for this version and keeping him on the field, which has been far from a given in recent years.
Because when Stanton has been healthy, he and Aaron Judge have formed one of the more fearsome duos in club history. They each homered in the sixth inning Friday, marking the 60th time they have gone deep in the same game — with the Yankees 53-7 in those games.
The 60 games in which they have homered together are the second most by a pair of teammates in Yankees history, trailing only Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth (75 times), according to the Elias Sports Bureau.