Where Is Giancarlo Stanton's 2023 Season Going?

By Andy Singer

June 13th, 2023

Photo Credit: AP Photo/Gail Burton

Most fans are thoroughly fed up with Giancarlo Stanton, and while I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, I'm not going to say that I don't understand it. Stanton has one tool you can't teach: generational power. No one in the recent history of the game hits the ball as hard as Stanton does. Since exit velocity was first publicly measured in 2015, Stanton has ranked no lower than the 98th percentile on average exit velocity, and has posted the best max exit velocity in the sport in all 9 seasons it has been measured. Yes, that even includes injury-riddled campaigns, and therein lies the rub: Stanton is almost always hurt. Stanton's frequent lower body injuries have largely sapped his athleticism and kept him from consistently playing the outfield despite maintaining a reputation as a good defensive outfielder prior to arriving in New York. Despite making the loudest contact of anyone in baseball, Giancarlo Stanton has become the posterchild for everything that is wrong with the Yankees in every season since their surprise run in 2017.

Lost in much of the analysis of the Yankees' 2023 season to-date is that Giancarlo Stanton started the season plenty well. Through his first 13 games, Stanton hit .269/.296/.558, with 4 HR, 11 RBI, and 3 doubles. While Stanton had just 2 walks in his first 54 plate appearances, a stunningly low percentage compared to his career norms, he also was striking out less than at any point in recent memory, had an unsustainably low .270 batting average on balls in play, and he was even playing the outfield occasionally. To be frank, Stanton was one of the few shining stars of the Yankees' early season performance.

Then the inevitable occurred: Stanton got hurt. A hamstring strain sidelined Stanton for the better part of 6 weeks. The injury was typical for Stanton, and given the plethora of other injuries the Yankees were dealing with, losing Stanton for a significant period of time was a huge blow to the Yankee offense. That loss was more acute given that Stanton was hitting quite well before he tweaked his hamstring.

Stanton returned to the Yankees in the first weekend in June, and seemingly continued right where he left off, homering in hist first game back before doubling in his second game back. All of this happened against one of the best team's in the National League, the Dodgers, proving that Stanton could still come up big when the lights are the brightest. Following the series against the Dodgers, Stanton's season line stood at .271/.307/.593, good for a .900 OPS. With Judge joining the injured masses following a freak injury due to the worst wall design in Major League Baseball, the Yankees were counting on Stanton to fill the void in the top of the order.

Through 5 games in which Stanton has played without Judge, the results have been horrible: 1-14, 1 BB, 1 HBP, 4 K. Sure, we're talking about a miniscule sample size, but those who are frustrated by Stanton's inability to provide some stable offense for a Yankee offense in desperate need probably don't care about the volatility of small sample sizes.

Even I, the resident Optimist-In-Chief here at SSTN, really haven't been sure how to interpret Stanton's early play in 2023. While Stanton is probably not going to repeat his 2017 MVP season again, that doesn't mean he can't be an impactful bat. However, age-based regression can really take a toll on a hitter, particularly when injuries add up over time. Is that where Stanton is today, I wondered? Or is near-elite performance lurking?

A Cause For Optimism

In reviewing video, I didn't see anything particularly different in Stanton's swings from a mechanical perspective worth noting. However, something very interesting became clear when I started digging into the numbers. I started looking at Stanton's swing decisions and plate discipline numbers, because I was fascinated by his surprisingly low walk rate. Again, nothing really stuck out to me other than a jump in Stanton's zone contact rate (his contact rate on pitches inside the strike zone), a mark that is easily the strongest of his career at 80.4%. Combined with Stanton's continued ability to hit the ball incredibly hard, this is a very good sign, and brought me full circle back to the high-level numbers: Stanton is also striking out less than at any time in his career, at 21.8%. The last time Stanton's strikeout rate approached anything that good was in his 2017 MVP season, when he struck out in 23.6% of his plate appearances.

Is there a connection between Stanton's ability to avoid swings and misses and his overall offensive numbers? I dug into his numbers between 2017 and 2023 to find out.

First, let's look at Stanton's numbers from 2017 through 2022. In the plot below, I tracked Stanton's whiff rate (the percentage of swings on which Stanton missed the ball) against his wOBA, a strong measure of total offensive value at the plate (.316 is the MLB average). Here's what I found:

Chart Courtesy of Andy Singer, SSTN (Click to Enlarge)

For those unfamiliar with principles of statistical analysis, I plotted Stanton's whiff rate and wOBA for every season from 2017-2022 on a chart (whiff rate on the x-axis, wOBA on the y-axis). From there, I plotted a linear trendline in order to calculate how correlated Stanton's whiff rate and wOBA have been since 2017. The value used to determine this in statistics is R-Squared. In the simplest terms, an R-Squared value that equaled "1.0" would indicate that the two values are perfectly correlated, while values less than 1 are orders of magnitude less correlated. In this situation, Stanton's whiff rates and wOBA from 2017-2022 achieved an R-Squared value of 0.838, which means that the two statistics are strongly correlated (at least in Stanton's case).

In short, historically, the lower Stanton keeps his whiff rate, the better Stanton's wOBA is, generally. There are some small outliers in that pattern, but the overall pattern is strong.

What happens when we include Stanton's 2023 season in this calculation?

Chart Courtesy of Andy Singer, SSTN (Click to Enlarge)

Adding Stanton's 2023 season statistics to the chart throws the trendline completely out of whack (and yes, that's the technical term). One of these plotted points is very unlike the others: Stanton's 2023 season is an extreme outlier. Stanton is posting the lowest whiff rate of his career by far (30.4%) in 2023, yet he has the 2nd lowest wOBA of his career, a slightly above-average mark of .330, stronger only than his .326 wOBA in 2022. The last time Stanton posted a whiff rate that approached this level was his 2017 MVP season, during which he posted a stunning .411 wOBA.

Given the extreme outlier we see in his 2023 performance, it is clear that regression to the mean is coming for Giancarlo Stanton. The question remains: will that regression be positive or negative? Will it be his whiff rates that backslide, or will it be Stanton's wOBA that soars to match his current whiff rates? Stanton's detractors would likely expect the former, but that does not square with what established research shows about plate discipline stats: they solidify early, even in small sample sizes like Stanton's short 2023 season to-date.

I believe in Stanton's improved strikeout rate and career-best whiff rates. Combined with the fact that his batted ball numbers continue to be super-human, I think it is clear that significant positive regression is coming for Giancarlo Stanton. Yankee fans are not known for patience, but I believe the statistics strongly indicate that better days are ahead for Giancarlo Stanton in 2023.