Kuzul

Looks like Giancarlo Stanton is OK.

After a broken hand cut short his 2015 campaign, the Miami Marlins slugger returned with a bang in his team’s season opener against the Detroit Tigers on Tuesday.

Justin Verlander entered the bottom of the sixth inning with a no-hitter intact, but Stanton put two on the board with a monster blast to left field.

It was the 26-year-old’s first dinger in a long while, per MLB.com’s Joe Frisaro:

You have to figure there’s more where that came from.

[MLB.com, Twitter]

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

In 2016, baseball fans can still think about Giancarlo Stanton the way basketball fans thought about Stephen Curry circa 2012: With talent like that, just imagine what he might do with good health.

Basketball fans have certainly gotten their answer. But as for us baseball folk, Stanton’s if-healthy potential is still a topic for the imagination.

The injury bug has definitely had it out for the Miami Marlins‘ slugging right fielder. Due to knee surgery in 2012, a hamstring strain in 2013, a wayward fastball to his face in 2014 and a broken hand in 2015, Stanton has averaged only 115 games over the last four years. And with Opening Day of a new season just weeks away, a bad right knee has already slowed the 26-year-old.

However, this latest injury doesn’t sound serious. After returning to spring training action Sunday following a week off, Stanton gave reporters a thumbs-up.

“I felt relatively good,” Stanton said, per ESPN.com. “I was just getting in the swing of things again. Any time you can get in there and work on that is good.”

If Stanton is ready by Opening Day, he’ll enter 2016 with a list of things he doesn’t need to prove. We know he has a good eye. We know he’s a terrific defender. And in the past couple of seasons, he’s been a better baserunner than you’d expect from a 6’6″, 240-pounder who’s built like Lord Humungus.

So, let’s skip past those questions to the one we really want to see Stanton answer in a full season: How many dingers can he hit?

It’s all about Stanton’s power, man. Not that any of us really need to be reminded of that, but we’ll gawk like slack-jawed yokels at this video illustration anyway:

It didn’t even look like Stanton got all of that breaking ball, and he still sent it 484 feet. That’s what you can do when you have not only a body like his but the ability to make the most of it.

“He gets all of his body into his swing,” Hall of Fame slugger Andre Dawson told Joe Frisaro of MLB.com last season. “His hands follow his feet. He’s getting that out to the point where he makes the contact at the precise moment, which helps generate his overall strength.”

Even Stanton’s bad luck with the injury bug has only tamped down his power so much. He’s topped out at 37 home runs in two of the last four seasons, leading the National League in dingers on his way to finishing second in the MVP balloting in 2014. And among all qualified hitters, his .284 ISO (isolated power) since 2012 is the best.

With power like that, Stanton’s single-season home run potential far exceeds his high of 37. To that end, his 2012 and 2015 seasons offer some tantalizing clues. 

Stanton’s power was at its best in those seasons and could have led to some extraordinary numbers if he’d stayed healthy. With 37 homers in 123 games in 2012, Baseball-Reference.com calculated he might have hit 49 if he played in 162 games. With 27 homers in 74 games in 2015, he might have reached 60.

The latter is obviously an attention-grabber. Nobody has hit 60 homers in a season since Barry Bonds in 2001, and only two players have reached 60 outside of baseball’s steroid era. ‘Tis a sacred number.

But in a conversation about Stanton’s power potential, it’s a number that can’t be brushed off as an all-too-certain impossibility. Especially not after last year. The .341 ISO that Stanton posted in 2015 was easily a career best, and it didn’t happen by accident.

A career-low 34.8 percent of his batted balls were on the ground, which resulted in more power-friendly line drives and fly balls. He also pulled the ball at a career-high rate of 47.1 percent, allowing him to tap into power to left field that’s always been huge.

Also, Stanton just plain hit the ball harder than anyone else. According to Baseball Savant, he won MLB’s batted-ball velocity derby by a healthy margin:

1. Giancarlo Stanton: 97.7 mph
2. Miguel Sano: 94.5 mph

What’s most impressive is how Stanton did all this in the wake of that beanball to the face that brought an early end to his 2014 season. There was a lot of preseason talk about whether that would make him gun-shy against inside pitches, and pitchers played into that by pitching him inside more than ever.

But rather than let himself be intimidated, Chris Towers of CBSSports.com noticed early in 2015 that Stanton actually moved his stance in the box a bit closer to home plate. He then crushed inside pitches more than ever, and he benefited from the extra plate coverage by also crushing outside pitches more than ever.

As weird as it feels to say this about a guy who was the runner-up for the NL MVP in 2014, Stanton’s 2015 season looks like the moment when things clicked. Though his batting average and on-base percentage both regressed, his power production finally living up to his power potential made up for it. 

There’s also no ignoring that it happened in only Stanton’s age-25 season. If what we saw was him entering his prime, the possibilities for what he could do in the middle of his prime widen one’s eyes.

Which leads us to the question that inevitably comes up at times like this: “OK, where’s the catch?”

In the past, one of the big ones would have been Stanton’s home ballpark. He has to play half his games at Marlins Park, an aquatically hued bungalow that’s big enough to double as a parking lot for jumbo jets.

But not for long. The Marlins have taken a cue from the San Diego Padres, Seattle Mariners and New York Mets, and they are altering their fences to be less cruel to hitters. It’s a good guess that this will lead to an uptick in power at Miami’s home park.

With that problem possibly taken care of, the potential for what Stanton might do in his prime comes down to his own shortcomings. Apart from health, the big one is his tendency to strike out. 

In six seasons, Stanton has yet to post a strikeout rate under 26.6 percent, keeping him comfortably above the league average. And in 2015, not even his improved plate coverage could help him. He struck out in 29.9 percent of his plate appearances.

There may be a way for new Marlins hitting coach Barry Bonds—a decent slugger in his own right back in the day—to fix this, but he has his work cut out for him. Stanton’s 6’6″ frame is a built-in disadvantage due to the large strike zone it creates, and the nature of his swing also presents some complications.

Ryan Parker of Baseball Prospectus broke down how it’s a special sort of swing, in that Stanton’s athleticism allows him to make up for mechanical oddities that you don’t see in the swings of truly great hitters. But while one imagines that adjusting his mechanics could help him cut down on his strikeouts, the obvious fear is that he could pay for it with a loss of power.

As long as strikeouts remain a fact of life, Stanton is unlikely to be the most consistent hitter. Hitters who strike out a lot rarely occupy the great-hitter demographic reserved for those with batting averages over .300 and OBPs over .400. And though Stanton came close to those marks in 2014, his career .270 average and .362 OBP are truer reflections of his abilities as a pure hitter.

Stanton’s strikeout habit is also likely to limit his power, particularly in light of how it’s tied to his size. He’s not the first big slugger to suffer from a large zone and a less-than-efficient swing, and the ones who came before him have struggled to occupy the upper tiers of the home run record books. The single-season record for a 6’6″ or taller hitter is 48 homers, making that magic number of 60 homers out to be a reach after all.

But then, Stanton doesn’t need to hit 60 home runs to reach new personal heights in a full season.

If he can stay healthy and pick up where he left off in 2015, he could easily slug 50 home runs with an OBP in the mid-.300s. Add in good work on the basepaths and excellent work in the field, and you’re left imagining a one-of-a-kind slugger.

All he needs is a bit of good luck with injuries. And if nothing else, we can say he’s due for some.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Miami Marlins outfielder Giancarlo Stanton is Major League Baseball’s top slugger, but he is already struggling to stay healthy in 2016 due to a knee issue. 

Continue for updates.

Mattingly Comments on Stanton’s Injury

Monday, March 7

Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald noted, “[Marlins manager Don] Mattingly said he just wants to be cautious for now with Stanton,” adding, “Stanton didn’t make [the] trip to Viera due to soreness in [his] right knee.”

Stanton Unable to Shake Injury Bug

After an injury-plagued 2015 campaign, it is fair to wonder if durability will be a reoccurring problem throughout Stanton’s career.

The 2014 National League MVP runner-up played in just 74 games last season after suffering a broken hand, which essentially destroyed any hope the Marlins had of being a competitive team.

Prior to going down with the broken hand in 2015, Stanton was demolishing opposing hurlers to the tune of 27 home runs and 67 RBI in just 74 games. In fact, he was on pace for the best power season in Major League Baseball in nearly a decade, per ESPN Stats & Info:

Not only was Stanton putting up big numbers, but he was doing it in a way that nobody else in baseball was in terms of pure power, according to MLB.com’s Daren Willman:

There may be no more dominant force in baseball at the plate than Stanton when healthy, but he has never played in more than 150 games in a single season, and entering 2016, he had appeared in 123 or fewer in three of four campaigns.

The Marlins haven’t posted a winning season since 2009, and the last time they made the playoffs was in 2003, when they beat the New York Yankees to win their second World Series championship in franchise history.

Stanton and starting pitcher Jose Fernandez are the players who have been tabbed to end those droughts, but the progress has been slow.

Miami has a young roster with a lot of budding talent in terms of both hitting and pitching, but the team tends to go as Stanton goes. Without him in the fold, it becomes much easier for pitchers to handle the Marlins lineup.

Regardless of how much time Stanton misses, the Marlins will likely be in a bad way without him since nobody else on the team, or in Major League Baseball, can do what he does on a consistent basis.

Follow @MikeChiari on Twitter.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Imagine, if you will, the most feared slugger in recent baseball history taking pointers from the most accomplished slugger in all of baseball history.

Well, you can turn off your imagination now. That’s something that’s about to happen in Miami in real life, and it could mean great things for one Giancarlo Stanton.

Last Friday, the Marlins named all-time home run leader Barry Bonds their new hitting coach. It’s the former Pittsburgh Pirate and San Francisco Giant’s first coaching gig, and it looks like a tough one. He’s now in charge of a young lineup that ranked 14th in the National League in runs in 2015.

But, hey, at least said offense has Stanton, otherwise known as “the most feared slugger in recent baseball history” that we were talking about earlier.

Though Bonds said, via Joe Frisaro of MLB.com, that he’s looking forward to getting “in the trenches” with all of Miami’s hitters, his partnership with Miami’s star right fielder is the one that has everyone excited. That includes Stanton himself, who called Bonds a “genius” in an interview with TMZ Sports.

That about says it. We can debate how many of Bonds’ 762 career home runs came from performance-enhancing drugs, but it’s impossible to be unimpressed by his career .444 OBP or career 1.051 OPS. And even with the PED cloud, the mind fairly boggles at what Bonds did between 2001 and 2004. 

Of course, being great at hitting and being great at coaching hitting are not the same thing. In fact, Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight.com found there’s no reason to believe that Bonds’ track record will make him an especially great hitting coach. This according to the math.

However, Bonds isn’t entirely green as a hitting coach. He worked one-on-one with Alex Rodriguez and Dexter Fowler last winter, and they both had strong seasons in 2015. Bonds also drew rave reviews from Giants players when he was a special instructor at their spring training in 2014. Brandon Crawford was especially complimentary, and he’s turned into a dangerous hitter in two seasons since.

So, no. The Marlins aren’t going out on a limb with their hiring of Bonds. He should be able to make a difference.

If he plays his cards right, that could include nudging Stanton into the next level of excellence.

If Bonds is going to help Stanton, the first thing he needs to understand is where his help isn’t needed. 

Stanton definitely has power figured out. He’s a 6’6″ and 240-pound monster of a man, and he’s hit like one his entire career. Since 2010, he leads the National League in home runs despite significant time missed with injuries. He also leads his fellow NL’ers in isolated power and overall hard-hit rate.

Like any good slugger should, Stanton also takes his walks. He’s consistently posted above-average walk rates, and he’s been able to keep his chase rates reasonably low in each of the past three seasons.

But by now, everyone knows of Stanton’s fundamental flaw. He strikes out a ton, consistently posting strikeout rates around 30 percent. He owns a .270 career average and a .362 career OBP even despite that, but there’s no question that his whiff habit is the big thing in his way of being a truly great hitter. He’s pretty awesome, sure, but he’d be even awesomer if he put more balls in play.

Fortunately for him, this is an area where Bonds knows a thing or two.

Though Bonds is best known for his history-making power and laser-precise batting eye, he was also quite good at making contact. He wasn’t so much a great power hitter as he was a great hitter with lots (and lots and lots and lots, etc.) of power.

Mind you, Bonds did have one advantage that Stanton can’t possibly have. At 6’6″, Stanton has a naturally bigger strike zone to cover than the 6’1″ Bonds ever had to deal with. Unless Stanton can get Hank Pym to whip up some custom-made shrinking particles, there’s nothing to be done about that.

Also, there’s a matter of swings.

With consistently perfect mechanics and impossibly quick wrists, Bonds had a short and compact swing that confounded even physics experts. He could let the ball get deep into the hitting zone, giving him more time to read the path of each pitch. When you can do that, you’re not going to be swinging and missing all that often.

Stanton’s swing is different. It’s a stretch to call it a “long” swing, but one wouldn’t call it “short” or “compact” either.

For example, Bryan Cole of Beyond the Box Score used Zepp data to find that Stanton’s swing features inferior hand speed and overall bat speed than Mike Trout’s swing. Elsewhere, Ryan Parker of Baseball Prospectus has argued that Stanton’s swing is more a picture of athletic perfection than it is of mechanical perfection.

Despite that, Parker says he wouldn’t change Stanton’s swing. As it happens, Bonds also doesn’t seem to be in a rush to impose any drastic changes on Stanton.

“I don’t need to tell Stanton much. He’s a great hitter,” said Bonds last week, via Craig Davis of the Sun Sentinel. “All I need to do is tweak a couple little things here and there and keep him motivated to keep moving.”

So, then. No size, and no swing. That leaves just one thing that Bonds can impart on Stanton to help him cut down on his whiffs.

In a word: wisdom.

Bonds was more than a work of art, both physically and mechanically, when he was at the plate. If we take it from former Giants teammate F.P. Santangelo, he was also just plain smarter than most pitchers:

This is a difficult point to illustrate, but it should ring true to anyone who watched Bonds hit, particularly when he was nigh impossible to get out between 2001 and 2004. He never looked surprised by anything that came his way.

Of course, this sounds like a skill that would be difficult to pass on to others. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done, and Bonds has shown a willingness to at least try with his hitting pupils.

Take Fowler, for example. Hall of Fame journalist Peter Gammons wrote a feature at GammonsDaily.com on Fowler’s work with Bonds, which included conversations about pitchers and how to read them:

“It’s the thought process that is so helpful, but it has to be what I see in each pitcher,” Fowler said. “Barry talks to me about what to look for, but he always says, ‘Watch the games, study the pitchers for yourself.’” Which is similar to the help Greg Maddux always gave fellow pitchers, like Derek Lowe and Clayton Kershaw. Lowe, in fact, once said “my career took its best turn when Maddux taught me how to watch games.”

It’s a safe guess that Stanton already does plenty of his own studying. All hitters do to some degree or another. But it’s also a safe guess that Bonds could change how Stanton studies for the better, and that it could make him more than just an immense physical threat in the batter’s box.

And it’s not hard to see where this could benefit Stanton the most. 

For his career, Stanton owns a 1.237 OPS when he’s ahead in the count. When he’s behind in the count, his OPS drops all the way to .589. That’s not a struggle that’s exclusive to him, to be sure, but David Schoenfield of ESPN.com noted that it has a specific root cause. Where Stanton remains a dangerous fastball hitter even when he’s behind in the count, he gets killed by anything off-speed. 

If Bonds can teach Stanton how to anticipate when those pitches are coming, he could find himself becoming less of an automatic out against them. If that happens, the game’s most feared slugger will suddenly have another layer of danger.

That’s not a notion that the opposition wants to consider. With pretty good defense and baserunning talents to go with his thunderous bat and strong eye, a healthy Stanton is an elite player as is. If Bonds has the key to improving his contact habit, he’ll only become more elite.

Also, the Marlins will be owed some credit. They don’t have many bright ideas, but nobody should be surprised if hiring one of baseball’s most legendary hitters to teach hitting is an exception.

Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Miami Marlins All-Star outfielder Giancarlo Stanton has suffered a setback in his bid to return to the field from a broken bone in his left hand.

Continue for updates.

Scar Tissue Buildup Will Delay Stanton’s Return

Thursday, September 17

Doctors in New York told Stanton the following in regard to his hand, according to the Miami Herald‘s Clark Spencer: “The strength’s not there. Don’t overdo it. Do what’s manageable.”

Spencer continued: “And [Stanton] said the scar tissue won’t be gone anytime soon. ‘Not in a couple of weeks,’ Stanton said, understanding it might require the entire offseason for the hand to completely heal.”

The outfielder was originally supposed to be out for four to six weeks after undergoing surgery on his hand in late June. Unfortunately, the Marlins have been without the reigning National League MVP runner-up for a chunk of the 2015 campaign.

Amid heightened expectations after signing a new $325 million contract in the offseason, Stanton was an All-Star this year and has hit 27 homers to go with 67 RBI in only 74 games. Ace of MLB Stats highlighted how proficient Stanton has been in terms of dingers:

The Marlins entered Thursday’s game against the Nationals sitting 20 games below .500 (63-83). Considering Stanton’s 6.5 WAR mark in 2014, per Baseball-Reference.com, it comes as little surprise that Miami has struggled throughout his lengthy absence.

At this point, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to play him so late in the season. Miami figures to rest its franchise cornerstone until the team is certain he is fully recovered from his nagging injury.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

The injury affects us all. 

Giancarlo Stanton’s bad luck continued Friday night as he injured his left wrist whiffing on a swing against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The Miami Marlins knew their superstar slugger was hurt Friday night, but the extent of his latest injury was not known until Saturday morning, when it was confirmed Stanton has a broken hamate bone that will cause him to miss 4-6 weeks. Fox Sports’ Ken Rosenthal first had news of the severity, and ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian followed with specific details.

The news caused even casual baseball fans to shake their heads at the ongoing plague of bad luck attached to Stanton’s young career. Because of that bad luck, he played 150 games in a season just once in his six years with the Marlins.

Stanton, at age 25, should be one of Major League Baseball’s most marketable players with his cartoonish power, herculean build and electric smile. But once again, the game is deprived of his star power by an injury that seems freakish. And again, bad luck is halting a career that has already taken off but is having trouble reaching full altitude.

“Just on a swing my bat dug into my hand a little bit,” Stanton said after the game, according to Christina De Nicola of Fox Sports Florida. “Didn’t feel the greatest, so just get it checked out and know for sure what’s going on. I think it just kind of got worse and worse (during the game).”

Since the 2012 season when he was on his way to having a monster year, Stanton has been unable to avoid the debilitating injury. First, it was a knee injury and then an abdomen strain that sucked 39 games from his 2012 season. In 2013, it was shoulder, thigh and ankle injuries that cost him 46 games.

And we all should remember too vividly what happened last season. Stanton was hit in the face by a fastball last September that caused facial fractures and dental damage. The injury forced him to miss the final 17 games of the season, one in which he had established himself as a legitimate National League MVP candidate.

Like this year’s hamate bone, that HBP can be viewed as a freak injury.

Call it bad luck or call Stanton injury prone. Whatever you choose, this is not only bad for the player and the Marlins. This is bad for baseball, a sport that needs all its young stars to shine as brightly as possible while it tries to reach a younger, more diverse demographic that tends to gravitate more toward football and basketball.

Stanton, along with a player like Bryce Harper, would be the perfect pitchman for the sport. If only he could keep himself on the field long enough to put up truly eye-popping numbers in an era when offense is muzzled.

Stanton’s counting stats obviously suffer with his injuries. He has never eclipsed 37 home runs in a season, a total he’s reached twice. The first time he hit the mark was in 2012, when he played in just 123 games. The second time was last season before taking the fastball to the face.

This season, Stanton was already at 27 after going on a June home run binge that saw him collect 12 in a 21-game span. He, along with a handful of other players, could have legitimately chased the 50-home run benchmark. Stanton, and maybe a couple others, could have also had a real shot at 60.

With hamate fractures, there are mixed results when it comes to players returning with their power in tow. If Stanton comes out on the down side upon his return, baseball could lose one of its most dynamic power hitters for longer than this DL stint.

Stanton, who in the offseason signed a 13-year, $325 million contract extension with Miami, struck out three times Friday. His comments on his final whiff—the swing that put the baseball world on notice of a possible injury—could also apply to his latest wound being one in an already long line of frustrating ailments that have kept him from becoming the power-hitting demigod his talent certainly warrants.

“[The injury happened on] one of my at-bats prior, but this one was the icing on the cake,” Stanton said, per De Nicola.

The same line could be uttered by MLB and its fans who truly care about the state of the game and how it is marketed to the next generation. The sport has been sitting on an out-of-this-world season from Stanton for several years now, and the first half of this one seemed like it would finally give it to us. He had played in all but one game in 2015 and had been among the game’s elite hitters.

“It’s certainly not great news when you lose a guy that means what he means to this ball club and to baseball,” Marlins manager Dan Jennings told reporters Saturday, per Shandel Richardson of the Sun-Sentinel.

It’s unclear what this latest Stanton injury means to the Marlins, but it certainly could make them sellers at the trade deadline. Just as important, though, is the fact that baseball is once again deprived of a full season from one of its stars.

Maybe this is the last significant injury of Stanton’s career. Maybe he returns and is as good as ever, his power returning with him. Or, maybe not.

Right now, the game waits and sees, as we all do, with the hope that Stanton’s plague is nearing an end.

All quotes, unless otherwise specified, have been acquired first-hand by Anthony Witrado. Follow Anthony on Twitter @awitrado and talk baseball here.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Miami Marlins outfielder Giancarlo Stanton felt discomfort in his hand during a June 26 game against the Los Angeles Dodgers. That discomfort was a broken hamate bone, which landed Stanton on the 15-day disabled list June 27 and will sideline the star slugger for at least a month.

Continue for updates.

Stanton Reportedly Out 4-6 Weeks

Saturday, June 27

ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian (via SportsCenter) originally reported the diagnosis and recovery timeline for baseball’s home run leader, while Joe Frisaro of MLB.com added the outfielder would need surgery to repair the injury but noted the team doesn’t think there is ligament damage. Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports reported the team hoped the break was clean, which would mean the outfielder would be out closer to four weeks than six. 

The team announced outfielder Cole Gillespie was called up to the majors to replace Stanton on the roster.

“On the swing, my bat dug into my hand a little bit,” Stanton said after Friday’s game, per Clark Spencer of the Miami Herald. “Didn’t feel the greatest.”

Entering the evening, Stanton had been on a tear. Following Friday’s 0-for-4 showing, Stanton is still batting .344 with 12 home runs and 23 RBI in June. That’s wildly impressive compared to May, when Stanton batted a lowly .185 with nine home runs and 23 RBI. Thanks to his recent surge, Stanton’s season-long batting average has ticked up to .265. His 27 homers and 67 RBI continue to lead MLB. 

An MVP finalist in 2014, Stanton’s season abruptly ended in September after a fastball from Brewers pitcher Mike Fiers hit him in the face. He suffered multiple face lacerations and fractures, and he missed Miami’s final 17 games while recovering.

Despite the injury, Stanton and the Marlins agreed to a historic 13-year, $325 million contract that is the richest in baseball history. The deal represented a stark deviation from Miami’s modus operandi, which typically sees Jeffrey Loria’s club trade away its stars before offering them long-term deals.

Stanton’s standing as the game’s best power hitter and a beloved figure in the Miami area helped change the team’s approach. However, the Marlins are still not in a position to have him sit out for an extended period of time. His contract, despite it being back-loaded, makes the Marlins thinner in other positions they may otherwise have been able to fill.

Follow Tyler Conway (@tylerconway22) on Twitter.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

For Giancarlo Stanton, there will be no escaping the spotlight in 2015. There will be more eyes and, in turn, more pressure on him than ever before. 

In an environment like that, stars can either fade or shine even brighter. And provided you know how to read and comprehend headlines, you can guess which outcome is about to be discussed in this space.

Stanton, the 25-year-old right fielder for the Miami Marlins, has already shown he can handle being one of baseball’s best players. It feels strange to refer to his 2014 season as his big breakout knowing that he came into the year with a career .889 OPS and 117 home runs in four seasons, but that’s what it was.

Beyond leading the National League with 37 home runs and a .555 slugging percentage, Stanton also posted a career-best .395 on-base percentage, stole a career-high 13 bases and, according to the defensive metrics found at FanGraphs, played quality defense in right field. 

It all added up to 6.2 wins above replacement, which put Stanton behind only Andrew McCutchen and Jonathan Lucroy among NL position players. That captures how he went from being one of the game’s elite sluggers to being one of the game’s elite players, period.

The one tragedy of Stanton’s 2014 season is that it ended both prematurely and gruesomely by way of a wayward Mike Fiers fastball. But he escaped that incident without career-altering injuries—or, judging from his spring training dominance, any ill effects—and still finished second in the NL MVP voting.

After a season like that, the anticipation for Stanton’s follow-up season in 2015 would have been high enough even if nothing of note had happened over the offseason. But as you might have noticed, two things of note happened.

First, Stanton signed a 13-year, $325 million contract. And though the fine print puts quotation marks around the length and dollars of the deal, as ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark explains, officially it’s the biggest contract in sports history. Because of how these things work, Stanton must now look the part of the most expensive athlete ever.

Second, the Marlins followed Stanton’s extension by going all-in on returning to the postseason in 2015. They traded for Mat Latos, Dee Gordon and Martin Prado, and they signed Michael Morse. Now the Marlins look good enough to convince very smart people such as Grantland’s Jonah Keri and Michael Baumann to pick them to win it all in 2015.

The last time anyone actually expected anything from a Marlins team featuring Stanton was in 2012, but the situation now is different. The focus then was on new additions Jose Reyes, Mark Buehrle and Heath Bell. The focus now is on whether Stanton can carry this new-look outfit.

He’s certainly committed to the task. Stanton has often expressed his desire to win, and he recently told Joe Frisario of MLB.com that his sole focus for 2015 is to “just play the whole year and help the team.”

Nonetheless, what ESPN.com’s Buster Olney wrote in December still rings true:

What all of this means is that he’ll face far more scrutiny, far more pressure, than ever. In the past, a Stanton slump was like a tree falling in a forest — nobody heard it — but now everybody will notice. Look, his contract is so enormous that it will be impossible to match in production, and Stanton is known to be a smart guy who will understand that, and that nobody will ever feel sorry for him again.

But Stanton is stepping into a vortex in 2015, ready or not.

How well Stanton survives this vortex will depend on his performance. To live up to the hype and help the Marlins live up to the hype, he’ll need to show his superstar turn in 2014 was no fluke.

Thankfully, this is doable.

The one thing Stanton doesn’t have to prove to anyone is that his power is for real. Rating his power as an 80 on the 20-80 scouting scale might actually be underselling it, a point that he seems intent on making every time he hits one over the fence.

We really don’t need to, but let’s look at an example to illustrate the point:

So yeah, no. His power is not on the pile marked “Prove It” in 2015.

Rather, what’s front and center on that pile is the .395 OBP he posted last year. That’s astronomically higher than an average OBP (.314 in 2014) these days and 41 points higher than the .354 career mark he bore heading into 2014.

As such, it’s a mark that suggests he’s legitimately improving as a hitter. Thus does it compel one to ask, “But is he really?”

Oh, he might be. 

When Stanton first came into the league in 2010, he was basically Pedro Cerrano. Contact off his bat was loud, but he wasn’t wired for consistency. He struck out in 31.1 percent of his 396 plate appearances and walked in only 8.6 percent of those plate appearances.

Ever since then, however, Stanton has been making steady gains.

That’s most obvious when looking at his walks. He’s gone from an 8.6 BB percent in 2010 to 14.7 BB percent rates in each of the last two seasons, which is reflective of much-improved discipline. According to FanGraphs, he chased 34.3 percent of pitches he saw outside of the strike zone between 2010 and 2012. In the last two years, that figure has dropped to 30.8 percent.

Meanwhile, Stanton’s strikeout habit is rolling steadily downhill:

As the league’s strikeout habit has been getting worse, Stanton’s has been getting better.

Mind you, Stanton is never going to turn into a pure contact hitter. His giant 6’6″ frame may be good for generating power, but it also curses him with a big strike zone. And as Brooks Baseball can show, he hasn’t gotten the hang of cutting down his whiffs on breaking balls and off-speed pitches.

Slowly but surely, though, Stanton is doing himself a monumental favor by closing holes in his swing against the hard stuff.

Last September, Jonah Keri penned a piece that referenced how Stanton had largely stopped swinging through high pitches in 2014. Not surprisingly, a search on Baseball Savant revealed that most of the pitches he stopped swinging through were fastballs.

Elsewhere, another search on Baseball Savant revealed that Stanton finally achieved a balance between hitting both inside fastballs and outside fastballs in 2014:

It’s the improvement against outside heat that really stands out, and a closer look offers a hint at what made that possible. Stanton hit an awful lot of outside fastballs the other way to right field.

And that leads us to the biggest improvement Stanton made at the plate in 2014. Get a load of his before-and-after production to right field:

• 2010-2013: .856 OPS and 15 HR
• 2014: 1.057 OPS and 9 HR

Stanton always had the tools he needed to be an elite opposite-field producer. But for the first time in his career, he actually was in 2014.

On that note, I believe we’ve earned ourselves a look at another Stanton unreal dinger: 

Yes, good times. Now onward with the analysis.

Stanton’s superstar turn in 2014 wasn’t all about his hitting. He wouldn’t have qualified as one of the game’s elites without also contributing on the basepaths and on defense. And this is where things might look sketchy, as he doesn’t have much of a track record as a skilled baserunner or defender.

But it looks like that was due to circumstances beyond his control more so than to a lack of ability.

Stanton missed quite a few games with leg injuries between 2011 and 2013, most notably spending over 70 days on the disabled list with knee and hamstring injuries in 2012 and 2013. But in 2014, he was able to keep his legs healthy for a change.

As David G. Temple of FanGraphs observed, that provided us with our first real chance to see what Stanton can do on healthy legs. And beyond a stronger base to hit off of, that meant improved footspeed that served him well on the basepaths and helped boost his range in the outfield.

To the latter end, Stanton has already indicated that the good times are going to carry over to 2015 with this beauty of a grab on Wednesday night against the Atlanta Braves:

This, admittedly, is the only highlight Stanton has produced three games into the season. He started slow at the dish, collecting only one hit in his first 12 plate appearances against the Braves.

But rest assured, the highlights are coming. Stanton is coming off a year in which he was an asset in every phase of the game, and the talents that made that possible haven’t gone anywhere.

So all the extra people who will be watching this year? They’re in for quite the show. 

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference unless otherwise noted/linked.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com

Giancarlo Stanton has accomplished a lot in his young career, but this offseason he did something that seemed utterly impossible: He convinced owner Jeffrey Loria to put the Miami Marlins in a position to succeed. 

In November, Loria and the Marlins signed Stanton to the biggest contract in baseball history. The deal served as a $325 million domino that led to an offseason of free-agent signings and trades that made actual baseball sense, something Loria has a track record of ignoring.

In an exhaustive feature on Stanton, ESPN The Magazine‘s Tim Keown wrote that the Marlins star didn’t demand just the 13 years and the parking garage full of Brink’s trucks that came with the deal. Stanton required a commitment to success. 

“I’m not going to sign just any contract because I got hit in the head,” he said. 

The deal ended up including an opt-out after six years and the first no-trade clause Loria has ever granted. Those serve as protection for Stanton in case the front office doesn’t keep its promise to field a winner. 

But so far the organization has held up its end of the bargain.

Michael Morse, Ichiro Suzuki, Dee Gordon, Martin Prado, Dan Haren and Mat Latos all found their way to Miami this winter because of the new leaf the organization has apparently turned over. 

Now, for the first time since they started calling themselves “Miami,” the Marlins can also call themselves contenders.

Begin Slideshow

For a Major League Baseball superstar, the pressure is inherited with the title.

That much is a given. Whether it is a player’s past production or simply his price tag, the stars of the game are looked upon to be among the best. This becomes especially true when that player’s team is expected to win. There is little pressure on a player like Joe Mauer, whose season is not expected to dictate how his team fares.

However, for other players, the pressure is going to be turned way up this year. And the abundance of those players has grown now that there is an extra Wild Card playoff slot and since a team not believed to be a championship contender at the start of last season—the Kansas City Royals—came within one swing of winning the World Series. Now even star players on fringe teams are feeling the heat.

This season it is easy to go up and down rosters and find these players. The massive amount of turnover through trades and free agency this offseason makes this even more so since those superstars are now expected to live up to marquee billings for different franchises.

It was easy to pick out more than 10 players who fit this bill, but for round-numbers’ sake, here they are in no particular order (you can determine that at the barstool or water cooler):

Begin Slideshow