Like the match in yankees The clubhouse was extinguished and workers removed the plastic wrap from the lockers, Pat Rössler64 years old, leaned against a wall and smiled. The Yankees assistant hitting coach had managed to stay dry until a few minutes earlier, when juan soto He soaked his shirt with ice cold alcohol.
“You don’t get many of these,” said Roessler, a veteran at every level of the major and minor leagues. “You have to enjoy them.”
As it turned out, a man exactly 30 years younger was standing silently at the other end of the room, scrolling on his phone, his mind in a similar place.
“The window is not open forever” Giancarlo Stanton He said when he approached him.
Stanton, a serious introvert, kept spraying, hugging and doing all the things a baseball player does after his team. win a division title. But now he had returned to his natural, more reflective state.
“You have to enjoy the special moments,” he said. “And the opportunity to do something special.”
When Stanton arrived here from Miami after a 2017 season in which he hit 59 home runs and won the National League Most Valuable Player Award, he expected to be the final piece of the championship puzzle. Aaron judge he had just won the American League Rookie of the Year award. The term “baby bombers” floated around a team as fresh and new as anything fans had enjoyed since the mid-1990s.
It wasn’t supposed to take seven years and counting to see a World Series. Stanton wasn’t supposed to have so many injuries mixed in with production.
When asked if time and setbacks have made him hungrier than ever this year, Stanton’s eyes widened. He nodded. “Oh,” he said. “Safely.”
But Stanton was in this room with his game in a much better place than it was a year ago when he hit .191, ran the bases in fear and fueled premature speculation that his days as a productive player were over.
With the Yankees out of the playoffs in the fall of 2023, Stanton split his time between Miami and his native Los Angeles. He trained incessantly. His friends around the Yankees saw that he went, if not to a dark place, to a place of concentration so deep 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 frustrating days. “Start from scratch, really. Delete what needs to be deleted. Add whatever needs to be added and evaluate each aspect.”
He showed up in spring training with a leaner frame and an edge. He didn’t love the necessary questions about GM. Brian CashmanThe off-season comment that injuries were “part of his game.” He didn’t want to hear the writers call him “a stand-up guy” or anything more than a productive player on a great team.
In previous years, the Yankees had given Stanton a day in their pavilion, where Judge/Cole/Soto-level luminaries give introductory remarks. This time in Tampa it was a locker room fight, an optic that underscored his need to regain his status as the Yankees star he became.
Now it’s late September and Stanton has 27 home runs and a .781 OPS. They’re not his MVP-era numbers, but they’re much better than what, say, the Mets received from their designated hitter. JD Martínez. And proof that it was, in fact, not destined for the scrapheap last year.
He missed more than a month this summer with a hamstring strain. The frustration over that injury, not to mention the hunger for success in October, was top of mind for Stanton after the decisive party.
“I don’t think satisfied is the word (to describe his comeback season), because there’s a lot of baseball to be played, and that’s important,” he said. “I mean, I’m tougher on that. I would rather not have missed that month or whatever…”
He stopped.
There have been many victories in his time as a Yankee, from the decisive home runs in the playoffs, to the quiet dignity in the face of boos, to the genuine friendship and mutual respect with Judge that Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez We could never find it here.
And the fact that last offseason he set out to be a slugger again? The player who homered and drove in four runs in the 10-1 rout of Baltimore that sealed the American League East Division?
“Yes,” Stanton said. “When I’ve been there, I’ve been happy with it.”
Then he added: “But it could always be better.”