As the party died down in the Yankees clubhouse and workers removed the plastic wrapping from the lockers, Pat Roessler64, leaned against a wall and smiled. The Yankees’ assistant hitting coach had managed to stay dry until a few minutes earlier, when Juan Soto his t-shirt soaked in ice-cold alcohol.
“You don’t get a lot of it,” said Roessler, a lifer at all levels of the major and minor leagues. “You have to enjoy it.”
It turned out that a man exactly thirty years younger was standing quietly on the other side of the room, scrolling on his phone, with his thoughts in a similar place.
‘The window is not open forever’ Giancarlo Stanton said when approached.
An introvert and serious person, Stanton was not above squirting and cuddling and doing all the things a baseball player does after his team wins a division title. But now he was back in his natural, more reflective state.
“You have to enjoy the special times,” he said. “And the opportunity to do something special.”
When Stanton came here from Miami after a 2017 season in which he hit 59 home runs and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award, he hoped to be the final piece of a championship puzzle. Aaron Judge had just won the American League Rookie of the Year. The term “baby bombers” floated around a team that was as fresh and new as anything fans had enjoyed since the mid-1990s.
It wasn’t supposed to take seven years for a World Series to happen. Stanton did not intend to suffer so many injuries during production.
When asked if time and adversity had made him hungrier than ever this year, Stanton’s eyes widened. He nodded. “Oh,” he said. “Certainly.”
But Stanton stood in this room with his play in a much better place than he was a year ago, when he was batting .191, running the bases with trepidation and entertaining premature speculation that his days as a productive player were over.
With the Yankees out of the playoffs in the fall of ’23, Stanton split time between Miami and his native Los Angeles. He trained incessantly. Friends of his around the Yankees saw him going to, if not a dark place, a place of such deep focus that it could have been mistaken for darkness if you didn’t know him well.
“Back to the drawing board,” Stanton said, summing up his thinking during those days of frustration. “You’re actually starting all over again. Delete what needs to be deleted. Add what needs to be added and evaluate every aspect.”
He showed up to spring training with a leaner frame and an edge. He didn’t like the necessary questions about GM Brian Cashman‘s offseason comments that injuries were “part of his game.” He didn’t want the writers to call him a “stand-up guy,” or anything other than a productive player on a great team.
In years past, the Yankees had given Stanton a day in their pavilion, where the Judge/Cole/Soto-level celebrities made introductory remarks. This time in Tampa it was a locker room scrum, an optic that underscored his need to regain his status as the Yankee star he came here to be.
Now it’s late September and Stanton has 27 home runs and a .781 OPS. Not his MVP-era numbers, but much better than what the Mets got from their designated hitter, for example. JD Martinez. And proof that it indeed did not go to the scrap heap last year.
He missed more than a month this summer due to a hamstring strain. Frustration over that injury — not to mention the desire for success in October — was top of mind for Stanton after the victory celebration.
“I don’t think satisfied is the right word [to describe his comeback season]because there’s a lot of baseball to play, and that’s important,” he said. “I mean, I’m tougher on it. I would rather not have missed that month or whatever it was…’
He walked away.
There have been many victories in his time as a Yankee, from playoff home runs to quiet dignity despite booing, to the authentic friendship and mutual respect with Judge that Derek Jeter And Alex Rodriguez were never able to find them here.
And the fact that he wanted to make himself a slugger again last offseason? The player who homered and drove in four runs in the 10-1 rout of Baltimore that sealed the AL East?
“Yes,” Stanton said. “If I’ve been there, I’m happy with it.”
Then he added: “But we can always do better.”
