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Not very way back actually, not quite even three years in this case.
But I thought back to the existence of this thread upon hearing that Giancarlo Stanton turned 31 on Monday.
Part of the populace melted down over the news that Stanton was headed to the Bronx: crying FIX!!; demanding that the Commissioner nix
the deal; just generally crying the blues.
Part of what I wrote at the time was -- ... how this works out is going to depend a lot on whether the Yanx get 2015 & 2017 version of Stanton where he clocked in 150 games/year
and a 975 OPS or the 2013-2014, 2016 model where he averaged 103 games/year at more like 850
Not that the lesser version represents a hole in the lineup or anything, but at $30 million per for the foreseeable future as he starts to get into his 30s it's like the situation we discussed
this summer with Pujols and maybe even Miggy Cabrera depending on whether his 2017 season was an outlier or merely the direction of things to come.
Now with seven more seasons to go in his deal, the one he decidedly did NOT opt out of a few weeks back, this question doesn't yet have a final answer but what they've gotten so far
is closer to the bad Stanton than the good one. His 914 OPS as a Marlin and the 1007 in the MVP year he was traded off of led to an OPS of 860 as a Yanqui which makes it seem like
maybe they 'bought high'. And after his one good/full season in the Bronx he's followed that up with two essentially non-existent ones [72 & 94 PAs] due to injuries.
It's hard to predict injuries of course. With Stanton it hasn't been one recurring thing that indicates he's falling apart and therefore prone to more of the same. With him it seems to
be more like a string of unrelated maladies that could be looked at just flukey rather than endemic. But those problems do seem to follow him; in Ten ML seasons (not counting his
partial season call-up year) he's failed to play half the games in three of them and missed at least 25% or more in three others.
Anyway, it's one of those fun wintertime threads we sometimes have around here, even if half the folks there aren't around much lately.
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