2025 Player Preview: Giancarlo Stanton

by EJ Fagan

February 2025

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NOTE: The following comes from EJ Fagan's substack page and is shared with permission. This was published a few days ago so the stats don't include the last few games.

Please check out EJ's substack page for more great articles.

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Do you ever get that feeling that you are crazy? When people that you respect say something that you believe to be objectively, obviously, undoubtedly false?

That’s how I feel when I hear baseball commentators talk about Giancarlo Stanton.

Giancarlo Stanton is not a good major league baseball player, and has not been one for a long time. He has been a negative WAR player over the last two years, hitting .213/.287/.449 as a strict DH over the last two years with some of baseball’s worst base running.

He is not a future Hall of Famer either. Even if he holds on long enough to crack 500 home runs, Stanton is going to end his career below 50 career fWAR. He would be one of the worst position players inducted on the writer’s ballot in a long time.

Stanton is a fringe MLB player who has a guaranteed spot on a contending team’s roster only because he has a massive contract that the Yankees don’t want to eat yet. He’s an albatross around the Yankees neck, constraining their ability to build a flexible roster since almost the minute he arrived. He is almost guaranteed to go down as Brian Cashman’s worst trade. He still has three years and $96 million left on his contract, with some being paid by the Marlins.

I get it. He hits the ball hard. I too enjoy it when Stanton ropes an absurd line drive home run. But you know something? Those count just as much as a 100 mph fly ball over the fence.

But, I accept that Giancarlo Stanton will be the primary Yankees DH in 2025. Even ignoring Postseason Stanton, he was just good enough to justify playing time next year. And the Yankees really don’t have a Plan B.

If he could achieve his .351 xwOBA, Stanton would be a great DH even with his other faults. But he can’t. Stanton has undershot his xwOBA pretty much every year with the Yankees.

Stanton’s terrible speed and outlier exit velocity might just break xwOBA. His best hope at this point is something closer to his .330 wOBA in 2024, his highest since 2021. That’s basically average for the DH position today.

There’s not a lot of good news in his game log either. Stanton was pretty much the same mediocre close-your-eyes-and-swing guy all season.

A year ago, I predicted that Stanton would be a part-time player by May. I was wrong. Stanton was coming off a disastrous 2023 season where he pretty much only hit lefties. I expected his decline to continue, but his numbers against lefties were still very playable. To his credit, he lost some weight and made the adjustment, and he actually had a reverse platoon split in 2024. That’s too bad, because the Yankees sure could use a lefty masher right now.

What about Playoff Stanton? My analytical instincts have a lot of trouble trusting Stanton to just turn it on every October 1st, but he keeps doing it. He’s a career .265/.331/.662 hitter in the playoffs in 172 plate appearances. Maybe he has a unique ability to punish tired pitchers late in the season, I don’t know.

Bottom line: if Stanton just replicates his 2024 performance, he’s fine. Is he good? Not really. It would have been nice to try and get a bargain on a mostly-DH like Anthony Santander over Stanton, but that bird has flown for now. My worry is that he’ll decline further, but occasionally hit the ball hard enough to fool us all into thinking he’s actually good.

My hope is that the Yankees aggressively rest him, allowing Aaron Judge to DH two or three times a week. Maybe Stanton can capture some more of his playoff magic with a little extra rest.