Giancarlo Stanton and the spectrum of emotions

It’s unavoidably ghoulish that you’re reading this because Giancarlo Stanton is a star. I’m writing this because he’s a star. If a bench player were hit in the face with a pitch, it would pass by mostly unnoticed unless the injury were serious enough to warrant a few stray, “What baseball needs to do to protect players” columns. Because it’s Stanton, we care.

It’s ghoulish because we’re talking about a human being with emotions and nerve endings, and the most important part should be that it happened at all, to anyone, and that they come out okay. It’s unavoidable because, no, no, no, not Giancarlo Stanton dammit, no.

There was a narrow range of emotions surrounding the incident. This video does a good job collecting them:

There’s ...

The obvious one. The camera cuts to a shot of Stanton’s dad and aunt, who just happened to be at that particular game, 1,270 miles from where he usually plays. Every shot includes an ashen, helpless face. Casey McGehee is kneeling down, taking a quick peek every couple seconds, then realizing he shouldn’t have done that, then peeking again before realizing he shouldn’t have done that. You can see the fear of every single person who watched Stanton wheeled off on a stretcher, seemingly unconscious.

When the fear of the short term wasn’t enough, the ghastly long-term implications started raking everyone’s thoughts. The mind didn’t want to waste time putting the fear in the form of a question, it just spit out names. Dickie Thon. Paul Blair. Tony Conigliaro. The last name is the one you’ll find on every search for greatness before a player turns 23. It’s always the same names on that list: Ott, Cobb, Griffey, Trout, Stanton.... And Tony C., whom you actively avoid thinking about in that context, the what-if you hope will go away if no one pays attention.

I don’t know what kind of fear was going through Stanton’s mind. I hope I never know.

Then there’s the fear of Mike Fiers, helpless and empathetic, guilty and blameless. Every pitcher in the majors has had one get away from him at some level. Not all of them have the luxury of taking the Rafael Betancourt route, working the outside to the point where he can go a decade without hitting anyone else. Most pitchers have to throw inside, often. They just have to take the chance of rolling triple ones, like Henry Waugh, every time they do it. When it happens, there’s thick, enveloping fear.

But the pitcher can’t stay here, in fear. He has to get dragged into ...

Around 2:00 of the above video, Mike Fiers is angry. He just sent the face of the Marlins, if not baseball, off on a stretcher, and he’s the one who’s angry?

Well, yeah. We have the luxury of analyzing the video the next day. We have the luxury of sitting back and examining everything as it happens, too. Fiers had a syringe of emotions jabbed into his frontal lobe, and his brain started spitting out characters and thoughts like a malfunctioning dot-matrix printer. Fuck me? Fuck me? I wasn’t trying to do anything. Fuck you. Fiers didn’t know if he was being accused of theft, for taking the brilliant career away from a young star, or if he was being accused of attempted murder. He didn’t to have time to process the exact reasons he was being screamed at. But he felt the implicit weight of those specific accusations as the Brewers came out of the dugout. Look at him, inconsolable, angry, and confused, around 2:15.

There’s the anger of McGehee, who, remember, was one of the first on the scene, who saw the gore. He’s livid at the umpires, apparently, for calling the pitches strikes. He needs to be mad at someone.

There’s the anger of Tommy Hutton, Marlins color commentator, who unconsciously attempted to be the voice for every fan wondering how to cope and failed. The nicest way to describe how I felt about him before Thursday night is to note that when I checked in with a Marlins/White Sox game last year, it took me .001 seconds to decide that I’d rather watch the White Sox telecast. Hutton was calling for blood, for retaliation. He screams “Let’s go!” unironically when the Marlins spill out onto the field, as if that’s going to fix Stanton’s broken face.

There were certainly people cheering along with him at home, though. It’s not like that’s a strange reaction to a horrific event like this. It’s just the most unfortunate.

Really, that should read “Pain,” even though pain isn’t an emotion. Throughout this whole mess, there was a guy bleeding somewhere in an ambulance or hospital.

It’s the dental damage that bothers me the most, for some reason. I’ve seen the terms “stitches” and “facial fractures” in a baseball context before. I don’t remember “dental damage.” That was the update that stuck in my head for the rest of the night.

I did not need the extra information, dammit. But I figured I’d pass it along to you because I had to read it.

This is the best part: The despair was limited to the game, for the most part. Stanton is out of the hospital already, indicating that X-rays and CAT scans didn’t show anything that was obviously life-altering. There’s always the risk of enigmatic, persistent concussions, and there is the possibility of mental obstacles for him to overcome for the rest of his career. Some players can get back in the box an hour later, like nothing happened. Some players look for errant inside fastballs first, pitches to hit second, for the rest of their careers. There isn’t a statute of limitations on the sadness.

From what we know now, though, it was contained within the game, a sister emotion to the fear. Those two became the dominant emotions for the rest of the game, so much so that when Carlos Gomez got hit later in the game, there was no point going back to anger. That’s Gomez, remember, who can turn instantly into a ruptured water main of emotion when he feels slighted. He just took his base, calmly and sadly.

Following the HBP, for the rest of the game, cameras caught players in moments of dreadful contemplation. After all the other emotions were sucked out, there was just a morbid sadness.

Again, it looks like Stanton will be okay. We won’t know if he actually will be until next spring, if not next June, if not two years from now. If he has a down year, how do you separate the causation from the correlation? He should be allowed to have “one of those years” just like everyone else, except he won’t be. The only way to feel better about this is when Stanton comes back and hits dingers real far-like, over and over again, just like we’re used to.

I didn’t think I could enjoy those dingers any more than I already did. I was wrong. There’s apparently a way to enjoy them a lot more, so much more.

I can’t wait to see those danged dingers.