Winning the 2017 National League Most Valuable Player Award might have been the worst possible thing for Giancarlo Stanton. For all it did was heighten the expectations around him in 2018, his first season as a member of the New York Yankees.
“We’re like .500 after 14 games,” Stanton told Marc Carig of the Athletic about when he realized that the Bronx wasn’t anything like Miami. “And it’s like, the world’s going to end.”
To be fair, Stanton was off to a dreadful start. But as I noted back in April, it wasn’t the first time the Yankees had seen a big-time superstar struggle mightily in his first 14 games as a member of the Yankees.