What’s wrong with Giancarlo Stanton?

Let’s cut to the chase: after going 3 for 5 in the season opener against the Blue Jays with 2 home runs and a double, Stanton has been awful. Before the Red Sox Series he has gone 4 for 37 with only one extra base hit (a home run) and 5 walks. He now has the notorious distinction of being the only Yankee to have two five strikeout games in one season, while taking only ten games in pinstripes to do so.

So is this a slump or signs of an ongoing problem the Yankees and Stanton must face? Stanton has gone 5 for 13 with a triple, a double, and three strikeouts in the Red Sox series which seems to bode well but again even the worst slumps have good games interspersed.

As a disclaimer, the hardest problem with analyzing Stanton so far is the small sample size. Batting numbers begin to shape up around 100 plate appearances and Stanton is barely halfway there.

But looking at what we do have, we see that Stanton has a BABIP of 0.360 (Stanton has a career BABIP of 0.316 and 0.288 in 2017). This does not sound too good for Stanton but before the Red Sox series (in which 3 games can drastically change statistics this early in the season) his BABIP is an awful 0.211: a sign of things generally looking up for Stanton and the Yankees, and possibly the regression back to the norm.

And BABIP does not explain at all the strikeouts Stanton has accumulated. While no longer the cardinal sin it has been in the past, without the Home Runs or even hits, the strikeouts are not a good sign. Stanton now holds a formidable walk rate of 11.5% but an atrocious, even for today’s standards, strikeout rate of 42.3%. Stanton holds a career strikeout rate of 27.9% and had a career low of 23.6% in 2017.

The most obvious difference in his plate discipline is an abysmal 69.1% z-contact rate. The average hitter makes contacts with pitches in the zone about 80% of the time. He is only chasing 32% of the time, matching career averages, and is letting 33.3% of strikes get called, also average. It seems he has no new issues identifying strikes from balls but seems to be having issues getting to the ball. His O-Contact% is also lower (though not as bad as his Z-Contact) than normal.

So what could be going on? Is he being to violent with his swings? Going for broke and missing? Is it too cold?

It’s important to note half of the Yankee’s games have been in bad weather. Snowing/under 45 degree weather, rain. Terrible weather to even be outside let alone playing baseball. Power hitting especially is notoriously hard in the cold. The Red Sox dealt with that last year playing in an abnormal number of games in the cold, and hitting an abysmal 15 home runs as a team in all of March and April. Stanton has never seen this much cold weather in sunny roofed Marlins Park.

The other two questions can be addressed by looking at his mechanics.

Lets take a look at this strike out against the Orioles (in a game that was even crazier)

A perfect example of what we found that he’s struggling with: making contact with balls in the zone, and better yet a fastball.

Stanton seems to bail out, with little to no rotation on his hips/torso.

Another fastball in the zone that Stanton misses. This swing he’s much more violent with a completely erratic bat path.

Compare those swings to this video (which admittedly is a batting practice home run with much better video both being at a better angle and with a high speed camera). Notice how Stanton drives his upper body backward for as long as he can.

All this energy is locked up in his body and combined with his brute strength, he can get insane bat speed. While I do think he can pull it back even more, (I still see some rotation to be had in his upper body) this would be really the difference between a 475 foot home run and a 485 foot home run.

And not to even mention that bat path.

Lastly we see that teams have attacked Stanton with more sliders which already a weakness in the past. He has been abysmal against the slider this year, a pitch he sees 23.6% of the time. It also doesn’t help he hasn’t been hitting the fastball as well as he did last year (although this can still be attributed to weather). He is playing about the same against his career against other different pitches.

Ultimately this is too small of a sample size to judge Stanton on. He has had bad luck before the Boston series, and the cold weather won’t last forever. The transition to American League pitching will continue, and once he fixes that path he’ll be driving fastballs down the line. Yankees fan should not worry Stanton will be back soon enough if not back already.

Malik Chambers contributed to this story.