If you watched a baseball game last night that wasn't between the Cardinals and the Marlins, you watched the wrong damn baseball game. That's because the game you watched didn't have Giancarlo Stanton in it, who turned the evening into his own personal highlight factory.
Stanton finished the night with two home runs, three RBI, and one outstanding catch in right field. But he did more than just play a great game, he entertained. He played the kind of game that left everyone who saw it with an impossible-to-wipe-away grin on their face.
Everything built perfectly. Stanton started out with an opposite-field home run in the first inning, an impressive blast but the kind of thing that's become rather routine for him. Then came the second dinger, an absolute fucking bomb that traveled 468 feet and one-hopped the glass wall backing the left-field concourse. Watching the highlight, you can sense everyone in the stadium losing their minds at that homer. The announcers are just carrying on like maniacs, and the guy at the 1:08-mark of the video above looks like he just did two lines of coke and then found out that he won the lottery.
And then came the finale, an absurd diving catch that Stanton had to lay out for in front of the right-field wall. The crowd went nuts again, and at this point even Stanton couldn't help but express a little bit of astonishment at himself. Notice the sheepish, shrugging face he flashes while throwing the ball back into the infield.
Marlins games are supposed to be shitty and depressing, featuring a sub-.500 team playing out the season in a billionaire's publicly financed, empty funhouse. It takes a player like Giancarlo Stanton, who possesses the most satisfying power stroke in the league and has clubbed seven homers that traveled at least 450 feet (more than any other team), to turn them into something greater.