Alexander Wilson
Nobody in baseball is scarier to face when he is hot. That much has always been true about Giancarlo Stanton, and through the first three games of the 2026 season, the New York Yankees are getting a reminder of exactly what vintage Stanton looks like.
Saturday’s 3-1 win over San Francisco completed a clean series sweep and gave Stanton his third consecutive multi-hit game to open the year. Two more hits, one strikeout, and the same quiet menace in the box that makes pitchers nibble until they eventually have to come in with something hittable.
Will Warren kept things together on the mound with 4.1 innings of one-run ball, giving the offense just enough room to work. The Yankees held together. The Yankees swept. And the man hitting cleanup is starting to look like a problem for the rest of the American League.
What These Three Games Mean
Context matters here. Stanton missed the first 70 games of last season with severe epicondylitis in both elbows before returning in mid-June and essentially carrying the offense through the summer. When he finally got going, the results were extraordinary. Over 77 games, he posted a .273/.350/.594 slash line and a 158 wRC+, one of the best single-season marks of his career. That is not a decline-phase player. That is a force of nature who gets hurt too often for comfort.
The elbow issues are not going away. He said so himself during spring camp, matter-of-factly and without self-pity. Simple tasks are difficult. Certain movements hurt. He has learned to manage the pain and finds a way to show up because the alternative, sitting out and watching this team play without him, is apparently less tolerable than the discomfort. That kind of stubbornness is either inspiring or maddening depending on the day, but three multi-hit games to open a season suggests the management plan is working right now.
What makes this encouraging beyond the raw numbers is that Stanton is not just making contact in the early going. He is making hard contact, which is always the better indicator with a hitter of his profile. He does not need to hit .280 to be a difference-maker. He needs to hit the ball with force, and when he does, the ball goes places that most humans cannot reach. The lineup already has Aaron Judge generating fear at the top. When Stanton is right behind him as the cleanup hitter, opposing pitchers face an impossible equation. They cannot pitch around both of them. Someone has to get a fastball to hit, and when Stanton gets one, the results are rarely polite.
The Bigger Picture for the Yankees
The Yankees opened this season without Gerrit Cole and Carlos Rodon, two of their best starters, which means the offense carries a heavier burden through April and into May than it would in a healthy year. The rotation will hold things together most nights, and Will Warren has looked capable through his first turn in the order. But in the games that do get tight, in the late-inning situations where the score demands something extra, this team needs Stanton to be the person who provides it.
He is 36 years old and entering the final meaningful stretch of a career that has been brilliant and complicated and interrupted more times than anyone would have wanted. His service time situation means he can opt out at the end of this season and explore free agency if he chooses. What he probably wants more than anything is to win a championship in pinstripes before that window closes, which is the same thing the Yankees want from him.
Three games in, he looks healthy enough to do it. That is all anyone can ask for in late March, and right now it is more than enough.
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