50 homers for Mike Stanton

I have a new goal for my Marlins fan future. A few months ago the epitome of my Marlins baseball experience would have been to go to the opening day game at their new stadium. Maybe seeing them win the world series would be better. Now it has evolved, and my goal is to catch Mike Stanton’s 500th home run. No, that wasn’t a typo, after this week’s recent power display, I’m confident Stanton will reach that mark.

The 21 year-old slugger just belted his 50th home run last night in his 216th career game. Math time: let’s eliminate the end of this season as if it doesn’t exist, and say he hits 50 home runs every 216 games for the rest of his career and then retires at age 38 (that home run number is an underestimate for his potential between the ages 23-30, but maybe and overestimate for his performance over the age of 30). 50 home runs every 216 games is one home run every 4.32 games. And let’s also say he plays 140 games per year. At that quantity, he will play 2,380 more games (excluding the end of this year remember). That number, divided by 4.32, comes to just under 551 home runs. Barring an injury-marred career, I’m predicting that Mike Stanton will reach the 500 summit.

Stanton has hit home runs in three straight games, and has 28 on the year. On Monday, he went to left-center at Coors Field off of Kevin Millwood. The pitch was a hanging breaking ball that Stanton clobbered into the seats. The ball landed in a fan-less section and bounced up onto the concourse easily 500 feet from home plate. The blast was estimated at 472 feet, third longest in the big leagues this year.

That was supposedly the longest home run of his career, but I think the most impressive was one he hit last September. Here is the video of it. It appeared the ball hit off the folded up bleachers about 420 feet from the plate (given the 434 sign in center field). Tommy Hutton was certainly right after Stanton blasted it, he can hit 30 home runs by mistake. That’s the kind of power this kid has.

Stanton says he loves playing at Nationals Park, and he has numbers to show why. He has hit .435 with 8 homers in 12 career games there. He says it is because of the good batters’ eye, and can’t figure out any other explanation. I’ve said this before, but Stanton has homered in all three games I’ve seen him play in in Washington.

I plan to practice for catching Mike Stanton’s 500th home run by catching his batting practice homers at Nationals Park. Yeah, it’s a long shot I know, but it will be my goal until it doesn’t happen. It will  be a little while before he hits 500, though; by my calculations it could take until he is 35 or older.