Giancarlo Stanton's very real pursuit of 60 — and beyond

It has been quite the year Giancarlo Stanton has put together, particularl since the All-Star break. The tear the Miami Marlins slugger has gone on is more reminiscent of the work of Frank Castle than that of a mere Major League Baseball player. Since the July pause for the Midsummer Classic, Stanton has elevated his game to levels people long believed he was capable of, but it is still mesmerizing to see finally occur in real time nonetheless.

Although far from a slouch at the break — his 26 home runs were tied for the National League lead with Joey Votto at the time — what he has done since is astonishing both visually and numerically.

Since the season’s second half began on July 14, Stanton has hammered 25 home runs, just one fewer than he did in the entire first half. While his 51 home runs on the year are worthy of praise even he failed to hit another in the final month of the season, the fact that he still has an entire month to work with makes it that much more exciting to consider.

His 25 post-break homers equal the full season output thus far of the reigning NL MVP Kris Bryant and is within five of the full-season totals of noted sluggers Nelson Cruz, Manny Machado and Nolan Arenado. As for his peer atop the league leaderboard at the break? Stanton has moved out 18 homers ahead of Votto, who still has a shot a very respectable, but minor in comparison, 40 homers himself. As a matter of fact, since the second half dawned, Stanton has gone deep essentially once every other game and broke off a streak of six straight games with a long ball amid a larger run of connecting for 11 homers in 12 games from Aug. 4-15.

This outbreak made him just the fifth player ever to reach 50 home runs before the end of August and the first since Barry Bonds’s record-setting 2001 season. And remember, this is just discussing what he has done in the last 44 days. With September upon us, there are another 29 games ahead for the Marlins, which could make things very interesting and the Marlins must-see TV in order to find out exactly how far Stanton can push his total.

Stanton's scenario brings into focus one particularly interesting question: Will he end the season among the most impressive power campaigns of all time? Of all the players who have carried 50 homers into the season’s final month — Stanton, along with Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, Luis Gonzalez and Roger Maris — Stanton’s August surge has outdone nearly all of them. Only Sosa, who connected for 20 homers in June 1998, had a more prolific month at any point in the season than Stanton just concluded with his 18-homer August. His two-month total of 30 across July and August is greater than any consecutive months that Bonds put together en route to 73 in ’01. It's also greater than any consecutive total of McGwire in 1998 or 1999, Ruth in 1927 or Maris in 1961.

What do all those seasons have in common? They are each of the 60+ home run seasons in MLB history, which is the clear-sighted goal of Stanton at this point. Given that no player has ever reached the final month with the type of surge that Stanton is on, there's no telling just how many more bombs he'll launch.

At his current full-season trajectory, Stanton is on pace for 62 homers, which would narrowly see him pass Maris. However, that considers his first-half performance, which saw him hit seven home runs a month from April-June. But if his increased post-ASG break effort is put into play, his pacing increases well past the late '90s levels of home run immortality and toward the range of 68 to 70 home runs, a level that could put Bonds's record in his crosshairs.

Basically, to make the effort he would have to stay on his pace of hitting a home run once every 1.7 games,  the pace he's been on since July, as opposed to the one per every 2.6 games he has over the full season.

Checking in on history, Stanton's effort will need to be less Gonzalez and more than Ruth if he is to climb the mountain in full to be crowned the single-season home run king. In 2001, Gonzalez reached September with an identical total of 51 homers. However, over the next four weeks, he limped to a season-low month of six home runs before finishing with a relatively disappointing 57. Meanwhile, Ruth’s legendary flair for the dramatic was never on display more often than it was during the final month of his legendary 60-homer season. He clubbed 17 home runs in 28 games to set the single-season mark that stood untouched for 34 years.

The task ahead of Stanton to top the Bonds record of 73 is an additional 23 home runs in the next 29 games. It is a rate that Stanton has proved he can hit during his mid-August spree, but it is a sheer volume that would require both rewriting the single-month record books and doing so while staying remarkably locked in and free from fatigue.

Yet with that said, Stanton has accomplished one thing already, if nothing else. He has taken his status as the game’s greatest "what if" property and turned it into a fully realized reality. With the catastrophic injury bug staying out of his path for a full season, we have seen what he is fully capable of, and it is nothing less than historic. The rest of the season will not be dedicated to what he is potentially capable of; rather it will be the type of anticipation that still proves why there is nothing quite like a watching a once-in-a-generation slugger chase the grail of home run history.