Giancarlo Stanton's Explosive Yankees Debut Shows How Scary He'll Be in NY

His first swing. He homered on his first swing.

Of course he did.

Baseball is supposed to be unpredictable. You don't know what's going to happen, and that's why we love it.

That's what we tell ourselves, anyway. But from the day in December when circumstances brought Giancarlo Stanton and the New York Yankees together, we did know what was going to happen.

Stanton was going to hit home runs. Plenty of them. It was a given, in that lineup and in that ballpark, for a guy who almost made it look easy when he hit 59 home runs last season with the Miami Marlins.

Sure enough, one swing, one home run, in the first inning on Opening Day. Sure enough, another home run, one that went even farther, in the ninth inning of the Yankees' 6-1 win over the Toronto Blue Jays.

Wow. And wow.

"Get used to it," David Cone said on the YES Network broadcast.

Yes, get used to it.

Get used to opposite-field home runs that leave the bat at 117.3 mph, as MLB.com's Statcast said about Stanton's first Yankees blast. It was the hardest-hit opposite-field home run ever recorded by Statcast, according to a tweet from MLB.com's David Adler. It was also the hardest-hit home run recorded at Rogers Centre, according to a tweet from MLB.com's Gregor Chisholm.

Get used to home runs that soar into the second deck in center field, as Stanton's second home run of the day did.

Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

We try not to get too overwhelmed by what we see on Opening Day. We remind ourselves it's only one game of 162 and guys like Alejandro De Aza, J.P. Arencibia and Chris Shelton had two-homer games on Opening Day.

But there's another guy on that list, too, a guy named Roger Maris. He came to the Yankees on Dec. 11, 1959, in a trade with the Kansas City A's. He homered twice on Opening Day, went on to hit 39 homers that year and a record 61 the year after.

Stanton arrived exactly 58 years later, on Dec. 11, 2017. We don't know for sure how many home runs he's going to go on to hit, but it's a safe guess it's going to be plenty. His spring emphasis on hitting the ball the other way is only going to help because of Yankee Stadium's short porch in right field. His spot in the lineup, right behind Aaron Judge and right in front of Gary Sanchez, is going to help, too.

The one question was whether he'd feel more pressure playing for the Yankees, and, to be honest, that's still a question. Two Opening Day home runs should make Stanton's Monday Yankee Stadium debut a touch less pressure-filled, but there will be slumps and questions.

He knows that.

"My biggest challenge, I told myself, was to be calm," Stanton told Meredith Marakovits after the game on YES Network.

Tom Szczerbowski/Getty Images

The challenge will be bigger for Yankees opponents. The excitement will be greater for Yankees fans and for Stanton's teammates.

"Every time he comes up, you think he's going to pop one," Marlins first base coach Perry Hill told me, for a Bleacher Report story I did in August, when Stanton was nearing the end of a stretch in which he hit 16 home runs in a 21-game span.

He hits home runs. It's what he does. He's been in the major leagues since 2010. Thursday's game was the 987th of his career. The two home runs gave him 269 in his career.

My trusty calculator says that means he homers once every 3.7 games.

Thursday was his first game as a Yankee. He hit two home runs.

I don't need a calculator to work out that ratio.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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