Will Giancarlo Stanton Deliver a Cooperstown Speech?

Statcast released bat tracking data to the general public this week, and having looked at the numbers in full, it’s hard not to have Giancarlo Stanton on the brain. It’s also hard not to have some mixed feelings about the gargantuan slugger. His power is awe-inspiring, whether it results in line drives that the cameras have trouble keeping up with, casual bombs that touch the clouds, or (and this is my personal favorite) the 121-mph quarantine-era blast that went along with one of the loudest expletives uttered on television in baseball history:

But amidst all that festive sphere-crushing, there’s also a note of sadness. Stanton’s 59 home runs in 2017, his age-27 season, brought his career total to what was then the fourth-most home runs through that age (Mike Trout has since surpassed it). It felt a bit like a warning shot across the bows of Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth, all of whom had fewer home runs at that point in their careers. And as much as seeing him trade in Marlins teal for pinstripes annoyed me as an Orioles fan, there was something narratively satisfying about Stanton heading to the House that Followed the House That Ruth Built, to succeed where Griffey and A-Rod hadn’t and claim a home run crown of his own. Since then, however, Stanton has only hit 144 homers and, thanks to myriad injuries, has only appeared in 140 games in a season once. With 411 homers and a 35th birthday that falls a couple of weeks after this year’s World Series, the question has now become whether he’ll even get to 500 homers, not 714, 755, or 762.

It was no surprise to see Stanton rank so highly in the new bat tracking data. After all, his peak exit velocities have been well chronicled, and of the players with 25 homers in the Statcast era, he takes the cake for having the highest average exit velocity on his long balls. Stanton has been healthy this year and is on-pace for the most homers he’s hit since that 2017 season, but the reality is that he’s a far more limited player than he once was. Nobody would ever confuse Stanton for Joey Votto or Juan Soto, but he used to draw more walks and hit for a better average. And while it’s hard to remember now, he also had some real defensive value when he was young; the Giancarlo Stanton of 10 years ago could have faked center field a bit if the Marlins had had the need (though with Marcell Ozuna and Christian Yelich on the roster, they didn’t).

Just to give you an idea of what could have been, I re-ran Stanton’s 2018-2023 projections at every point in his career through 2017. I’m only going to use the current model, not the ones contemporaneous to those years, since my goal here isn’t to validate ZiPS but to get an apples-to-apples comparison of how the type of player Stanton was projected to be has changed. For seasons after 2017, Stanton’s actual performance is mixed into the projection, so the eerie accuracy you’ll see after 2023 is due to ZiPS knowing what actually happened rather than any magical omniscience on the computer’s part. I’ve also included Stanton’s projected final career WAR, home runs, and hits after each season. The projection for the 2020 COVID season is truncated:

You can see how quickly Stanton’s career expectation eroded during his Yankees years. At the time of the trade, ZiPS saw him fighting with Ruth; after last season, it has him dueling with Fred McGriff. There’s nothing wrong with being the Crime Dog, but for a player who had such a great start to his career, and who has as much raw power as Stanton has, it feels rather underwhelming.

Stanton not being completely cooked this season has led to a modest uptick in those career numbers — the average projection now gets him over the 500 homer mark, with 513. But “not being done” and “being good” are two very different things. Stanton is hitting homers and has avoided the injured list, but he’s only gotten back to the limited version of himself we saw in 2021 and 2022; this isn’t some late-career renaissance, at least so far. It’s impossible to completely contain Stanton’s power, but pitchers have gotten better at nibbling just around the strike zone. Stanton now makes contact with pitches out of the zone at a higher rate than he did in his prime, while also making contact with fewer in-zone pitches, and the combination has served to contain the damage to only the occasional 118-mph humiliation.

Will it be enough to make it to Cooperstown? Short of a more impressive resurgence, I can’t see myself voting for Stanton. I just don’t think there’s enough separation between him and Nelson Cruz, though Stanton is aided by not having a PED suspension on his record. While I’m obviously more of a stathead than the average baseball writer, I expect the median Hall voter to be more statistically inclined in eight or nine years than they are now. ZiPS doesn’t project Stanton’s final JAWS score to budge by career-end, leaving him around 40th all-time among right fielders, in the neighborhood of players like Jack Clark, Rocky Colavito, Rusty Staub, and Dave Parker, none of whom came close to induction (though the Cobra hovered around 15% of the vote for 15 years). There’s always the Veterans Committee, but even I don’t like to attempt to project what that motley crew will do in any given year. Plus, the organization of the committee will probably be overhauled half a dozen times in the next 20 years.

Regardless of what the fates have in store, Stanton will have finished with a career that nearly every big leaguer would be proud to have, and those of us still around in 50 years will still be talking about his moon shots, whether or not he ever gives a speech on a hot summer day in upstate New York.