How many home runs would a healthy Giancarlo Stanton have hit with the altered baseball?
Stanton has been limited to nine games this year due to injury, but we tried to provide an answer all the same
•
2 min read
On Wednesday night, Major League Baseball set a new single-season home-run record. That is but one of countless homer-related records that have either been shattered or are endangered with two-plus weeks remaining in the regular season. This has been the season of the home run, albeit due in large part to an altered baseball design that permits better, further flight.
Depending on your perspective, there are either myriad shames about this season or there is just one -- that New York Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton was sidelined for most of the year, preventing him from contributing to the league-wide dinger derby. We're not sure which way we lean at this point, but we do know that Stanton's home-run total is likely to linger as a great "what-if" from this year, regardless of what happens over the rest of the season.
Stanton is, of course, one of the game's preeminent sluggers: a marble statue of a Greek god made corporeal and given a bat as his holy instrument of destruction. Let's cut the Grantland Rice nonsense and shoot straight: the man is a home-run hitter's home-run hitter. As such, we wanted to estimate how many home runs Stanton may have hit this season if he had remained healthy, as opposed to being limited to just nine games due to various ailments.
There are a lot of ways of accomplishing this goal. We chose a fairly rudimentary one, but one that nonetheless should give us an OK estimate. Essentially, we took the home-run per plate appearance percentage of the seven best non-Stanton home-run hitters from 2016-18 then compared it to their rates in 2019. We then applied the median improvement to Stanton's rate. The thinking being this gives him the benefit of the juiced ball's effect on elite power hitters.
Below are the results. We've included what Stanton's season would have looked like had he maintained his 2016-2018 homer rate, as well as what would've happened if he had simply received the league-wide boost, as opposed to the elite slugger boost.
| Split | HR/PA | 500 PA | 550 PA | 600 PA |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Stanton 16-18 | 6.64% | 33 | 37 | 40 |
Stanton w/ MLB boost | 7.18% | 36 | 39 | 43 |
Stanton w/ slugger boost | 7.25% | 36 | 40 | 44 |
Because Stanton once homered 59 times in a season, that 44 figure might feel unimpressive. Keep in mind though that in addition to being the second-most of his career, it would also put him one behind Mike Trout, who leads the majors with 45 homers in 600 trips to the plate. It's possible that Stanton would've had an even better season, but 44 in 600 is good all the same. (For those wondering, Stanton would have projected for 47 homers in 650 plate appearances using the slugger boost.)
It's also possible to implement a more sophisticated approach to this question -- like by using home runs per flyball, or compiling a group of more similar batters to Stanton using various ball-tracking measurements (e.g., exit velocity and launch angle). Still, this was meant to be more of a fun exercise than one that stands the test of scientific rigor.
Stanton, by the way, is expected to return to the Yankees lineup next week, perhaps as early as Tuesday, when New York begins its final homestand of the season. Here's hoping he makes up for lost time and provides us with a few memorable home runs before the year concludes.
