Giancarlo Stanton Expected To Miss Four To Six Weeks

Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton is expected to miss the next four to six weeks of action, reports Brendan Kuty of The Athletic. The Yankees placed Stanton on the 10-day injured list yesterday due to a hamstring strain and recalled top shortstop prospect Oswald Peraza in his place, but it seems Stanton will miss a good bit more than the 10-day minimum. An MRI revealed a Grade 2 strain of Stanton’s hamstring, as ESPN’s Marly Rivera first reported last night.

With four homers and three doubles already under his belt in just 54 plate appearances, Stanton has had his power on display early. He’s walked in an uncharacteristically low 3.7% of his plate appearances but also fanned at just a 20.4% clip with a higher contact rate than usual. The resulting .269/.296/.558 batting line checks in 32% better than league-average, by measure of wRC+. Stanton’s four long balls trail only Aaron Judge among Yankee hitters, and his 11 runs plated tie the surprisingly productive Franchy Cordero for the team lead.

Unfortunately for the Yankees, absences of this nature for Stanton have become all too familiar. This is the slugger’s tenth placement on the injured list dating back to the 2019 season, and a whopping eight of those have come due to leg injuries of sorts. Dating back to ’19, Stanton has missed time with hamstring, quad, knee and Achilles injuries. In that time, he’s played in just 303 of 562 possible games (53.9%), including 13 of this year’s 16 contests for the team.

With Stanton once again sidelined for the foreseeable future, the Yankees will have some questions to sort out in the lineup. A combination of Judge, Cordero, Oswald Cabrera, Willie Calhoun and Aaron Hicks can be leaned on in the outfield, though Harrison Bader’s impending return also calls that group’s stability into question — particularly with the team now viewing Isiah Kiner-Falefa as a viable option in center field (five games, two starts in ’23).

The remaining three years and $30.5MM on Hicks’ contract has bought him an extended leash so far, and perhaps that’ll continue to be the case even when Bader returns. Before long, however, the Yankees will need to make some decisions in the outfield. It’s possible that further injuries will alleviate some of the urgency to do so, but otherwise they’ll certainly be on the clock when Stanton is ready in late May — if not later this month when Bader returns from an oblique strain.