Written by Will Leitch at SportsOnEarth.com
One of the most backhanded compliments you can give someone is to tell them they “have potential.” This accomplishes two things. First, it lets them know that whatever place in life you think they should reach is a place they are not currently at and therefore they are, by definition, underachieving. Secondly, it puts pressure on them to make sure they reach whatever imagined place in the world you’ve decided they can reach; from then on, every time you look at them, they can’t help but wonder, “Do people think I’m a failure right now?” It’s a passive-aggressive finishing move.
In sports, we take this ritual and make it an inextricable part of watching the games themselves. Nobody cares if Starlin Castro or Didi Gregorius hit homers during a random Saturday game, but when Tyler Austin and Aaron Judge do it in the first two at-bats of their career, the whole Bronx loses its mind. Their homers mean more because we believe the homers now represent so much more later. From now on, Austin and Judge are going to be seen as The Future, and thus we are able to cast upon them glorious hopes and dreams that are untouched by the lingering inconvenience that is reality. They have Potential. Potential is limitless. But reality has a ceiling.
Giancarlo Stanton is one of those rare unicorn baseball talents who looks like he’s going to hit a home run every time he comes to the plate. His monstrous homers are the ones people remember, but I’m always more impressed when he hits a pitch for a home run that no other human could hit for a home run.
That’s from Sept. 11, 2013, and that’s a pretty good pitch from Mike Minor. Low, slow and a little outside: You’re not supposed to hit that for a home run, and you’re definitely not supposed to launch that thing into dead center, and then into outer space. You see a home run like that, and you wonder what exactly you are supposed to throw. It feels like Stanton could hit anything out. It feels like whatever you pitch to him, he will make you pay.
This is not what Stanton does, of course. Not only does he not hit a home run during every plate appearance, but in fact, for a month this season, he was the worst hitter in baseball. He rebounded from that and started launching shots like this soon after.
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