As the party in the Yankees clubhouse died out, and workers removed the plastic wrapping from lockers, Pat Roessler, 64, leaned against a wall and smiled. The Yankees’ assistant hitting coach had managed to stay dry until a few minutes before, when Juan Soto soaked his t-shirt with freezing alcohol.
“You don’t get many of these,” said Roessler, a lifer at all levels of the major and minor leagues. “You have to enjoy them.”
As it turned out, a man exactly 30 years younger stood quietly at the other end of the room, scrolling on his phone, his mind in a similar place.
“The window isn’t open forever,” Giancarlo Stanton said when approached.
An introvert, a serious person, Stanton was not above spraying and hugging and doing all the things a ballplayer does after his team clinches a division title. But now he was back to his natural, more reflective state.
“You gotta enjoy the special times,” he said. “And the opportunity to do something special.”
When Stanton forced his way 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 American League Rookie of the Year. The term “baby bombers” floated around a team as fresh and new as anything the fans had enjoyed since the mid-1990s.
It wasn’t supposed to take seven years and counting to see a World Series. There weren’t supposed to be so many injuries for Stanton mixed in with the production.
Asked if the time and setbacks had made him hungrier than ever this year, Stanton’s eyes widened. He nodded. “Oh,” he said. “For sure.”
But Stanton stood in this room with his game in a far better place than it was a year ago when he batted .191, ran the bases with trepidation, and fostered premature speculation that his days as a productive player had ended.
With the Yankees out of the playoffs in the fall of ‘23, Stanton split time between Miami and his native Los Angeles. He trained ceaselessly. Friends of his around the Yankees saw that he went 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, summarizing his mindset during those days of frustration. “Start from scratch, really. Erase what needs to be erased. Add what needs to be added, and evaluate every aspect.”
He showed up at spring training with a leaner body and an edge. He didn’t love the necessary questions about GM Brian Cashman’s offseason comment that injuries were “part of his game.” He didn’t want to hear the writers call him a “stand-up guy” or anything but a productive player on a great team.
In past years, the Yankees had given Stanton a day in their pavilion, where the Judge/Cole/Soto-level luminaries give introductory remarks. This time in Tampa it was a locker room scrum, optics that underscored his need to regain status as the Yankee star he came here to be.
Now it’s the end of September, and Stanton has 27 home runs and a .781 OPS. Not his MVP-era numbers, but much better than what, say, the Mets received from their designated hitter, J.D. Martinez. And proof that he was not in fact headed for the scrap heap last year.
He did miss more than a month this summer with a hamstring strain. Frustration over that injury — not to mention the craving for October success — was top-of-mind for Stanton after the clinching party.
“I don’t think satisfied is the word [to describe his comeback season], because there is a lot of baseball to play, and that’s important,” he said. “I mean, I’m more hard on it. I would rather not have missed that month or whatever it was …”
He trailed off.
There have been many victories in his time as a Yankee, from clutch playoff homers, to quiet dignity in the face of booing, to the authentic friendship and mutual respect with Judge that Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez were never able to find here.
And the fact that he willed himself last offseason to be a slugger again? The player who homered and drove in four runs in the 10-1 rout of Baltimore that sealed the AL East?
“Yeah,” Stanton said. “When I’ve been out there, I’ve been happy with it.”
Then he added: “But it always could be better.”
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