PHILADELPHIA -- The Miami Marlins made a $325 million commitment to Giancarlo Stanton because of thrills like the one he provided Tuesday. In the fourth inning of a 7-3 loss to the Philadelphia Phillies, Stanton squared up a Jerome Williams cutter and drove it over the center-field wall and into the upper-tier visiting bullpen at Citizens Bank Park. The vapor trail culminated in 454 feet of high-arching, jaw-dropping glory.
If the home run served as a snapshot of the player Stanton is and most likely will be for the rest of his career, a sequence later in the game provided a glimpse of where he has been.
Three innings after Stanton's homer, Marlins reliever Mike Dunn sent Phillies outfielder Ben Revere sprawling with a fastball near the head. As the crowd buzzed, a TV camera drifted to right field for a shot of Stanton, who was experiencing a flash of recognition born of a harrowing ordeal.
It has been seven months since Stanton lay face down in the batter's box amid mournful silence at Miller Park after losing track of an 88 mph fastball from Brewers righty Mike Fiers and taking the pitch flush on the cheek. Stanton suffered facial lacerations, multiple facial fractures and dental damage in the incident, and he shared photos of his injuries on his Instagram account.
The Marlins showed enough faith in Stanton's recuperative powers to give him the biggest contract in baseball history in November, and any concerns they might have had about an emotional hangover have quickly dissipated. After a slow start, Stanton homered three times in five games against the Mets and Phillies, and he is rounding into top form. He is determined to play through the inevitable questions about the impact of the ordeal on his psyche.
"Letting it bother you is not an option," Stanton said. "That's my thought process. They're going to try to test your eyes a little more, throw high above the strike zone, and you have to be ready for that. That's where your competition level and your mind have to rise above that.
"It's not a fun time, so there will always be the acknowledgement of it. But at the same time, you don't care if you get hit in the face 30 times. The pitcher is trying to win the game and put food on the table for his family. You have to have that same mentality from the other side."
Stanton spent hours in the offseason hanging in against inside fastballs from a batting machine, and he had 48 Grapefruit League at-bats to work out the kinks. He still wears a batting helmet with a protective bar to guard his left cheek, and he has admittedly become more conscious of how other hitters react to balls high and tight.
"Seeing it on film, or from the outside looking in, people say, 'Turn your head,'" Stanton said. "They don't understand you have a third of a second to react. Not three seconds. Not one second. A third of one second. Even when you say that, no one can really relate to it until they actually stand in a cage and have a machine throw 95 mph and try to pick up the seams on it -- let alone [hit it] or try to catch it with a glove.
"I'll be hit again. If I play as long as I want to, it's 100 percent that I'll be hit again. I know it's going to be there, but you can't anticipate it or worry about them throwing up and in. Pitchers need to do that to establish themselves in general."
If Stanton needs some inspiration in his comeback, he can look to several players who kept plugging away through similarly traumatic experiences. ESPN.com spoke with three former big leaguers who took pitches in the face and shared their stories with vivid recollections that have withstood the passage of time. Judging from the examples set by J.T. Snow, Gary Roenicke and Kevin Seitzer, Stanton will be able to move beyond the Fiers incident and resume his prior career path. But he'll always remember that night in Milwaukee.
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J.T. Snow was born to play sports. His father, Jack, was a standout wide receiver with the Los Angeles Rams in the 1960s and '70s, and young Jack Thomas was a fifth-round draft pick of the New York Yankees. He spent four seasons with the California Angels before being traded to San Francisco, where his tenure as a Giant got off to a foreboding start. In a 1997 Cactus League game, Seattle's Randy Johnson threw a fastball that glanced off Snow's left wrist before striking him in the face. Snow returned by Opening Day and recorded career highs with 28 homers and 104 RBIs in 1997. He went on to play 16 seasons in the majors and now works as a special assistant with the Giants.
"I remember it like it was yesterday," Snow said. "It was my first spring training with the Giants. I had been sick at the beginning of the spring, and I missed three or four games, and I was switch-hitting at the time. And Randy was coming off a bad back the year before.
"He got me down 0-2, and then he went up and away, like he always did. He tried to come back in with a fastball, and it started off right at my head. I got my left wrist up, and the ball deflected off my wrist, and it hit me off my left eye. It was like somebody had punched me in the face. I looked at my hand, and there was blood everywhere, and I felt my eye swelling up. I had cracked the orbital bone, and I had to hang out for 10 days until the swelling went down.
"When my eyesight came back, they put me through a bunch of tests, and I missed most of the spring. Once I got back in there, it didn't really bother me. I thought, 'If I could get my wrist up on a pitch that was 97 [mph], my reactions are pretty good.' I didn't want to wear a face guard or a shield because I didn't want to bring attention to it. Plus, with my dad being an NFL player, he probably would have given me a bunch of crap for wearing it.
"My thought was, 'Just get back up on the horse.' Around the last week of spring training, I played in minor league games and hit third every inning. I did that every day, and I got like 60 at-bats in a week.
"I felt very fortunate that there were no lingering effects. The toughest time was about 10 days in, when the swelling began coming down. I didn't know if I was going to be blind or if I could see or play again. Luckily, I healed up pretty quick, but I still have a little scar above my left eyelash.
"Randy called me a couple days later to apologize, and he said something that sort of took me aback. I know it was nobody's fault -- it was just baseball. But he said sort of jokingly, 'You should stop diving into the plate.' I read somewhere that Randy had a history [of] not wanting to hit somebody and hurt them because he was so wild at the beginning of his career. That was always in the back of his mind. That comment just showed me he was still uncertain about it. But it didn't sit too good with me. I just said, 'Let's move on.' I saw Randy later, when he was with the Giants, and he never came up to me and talked about it or said anything.
"I've only seen it replayed a few times over the years, and that's enough. The thing that gets me is the sound of it. I can remember the sound of mine -- it was like I was hit in the face with a bag of quarters. It's just a bad sound, like a thud. It was the same with Stanton. You just hope the guy is OK.
"I think everybody is different. I had a background playing football, and it was my first year with the Giants, and I couldn't wait to get back out there and play. I knew after a couple of pitches that I was fine. I tracked the ball good, and I was like, 'If they come inside and hit me, they hit me.'
"You can tell if a hitter is having problems if he flinches on a pitch inside or his front shoulder starts flying open. We'll see it if it happens with Stanton. He'll know. But I think he'll be fine."
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Gary Roenicke hit 121 homers over 12 seasons with Montreal, Baltimore, the Yankees and Atlanta, but his career got off to an ominous start. In the second game of his first full season with the Orioles (1979), Roenicke took a fastball in the face from Lerrin LaGrow of the Chicago White Sox. Roenicke returned a week later wearing a helmet with half a face guard from a Baltimore Colts football helmet attached for protection, and he hit a career-high 25 homers. He retired in 1988 and spent years in the game as a scout.
"It's different with the new ballparks today," Roenicke said. "In the old ballparks, they didn't have that real big hitting background. We were in Baltimore, and it was windy. There were no leaves on the trees, and I had shadows to deal with too.
"My memory isn't great, but do remember this: LaGrow threw a fastball down the middle, and I saw it leave his hand and then lost it until it crossed home plate. So I took it. The next pitch, I saw the ball leave his hand, I lost it again, and then I saw it right at my face. I must have jerked, so it got my lip. If I hadn't flinched like that, I probably would have lost some teeth and broken some bones there.
"It's hard to describe. A lot of people think it looks easy on TV -- especially from the center-field camera. But when you're standing there and the ball is coming in at 90 mph, it's hard to get out of the way sometimes. We're talking about fractions of seconds, and once the pitcher lets it go and it gets to the catcher's glove, there's not a lot of reaction time.
"I went down, and I was on my elbows. My hands were up in my face area, and I pushed myself up to see what the heck was going on, and a steady stream of blood was just pouring into my brand-new white batting gloves. I covered back up again, and I figured, 'He must have got me in the nose if there's that much blood.' The whole area was numb.
"I walked off and went into the clubhouse, and our trainer, Ralph Salvon, was great. He said, 'Gary, it's not going to be a problem. We'll stitch you up and you'll be fine.'
"It's the only time I've ever been in an ambulance. I rode to the hospital, and they put something on my face, and someone asked me, 'Do you mind if I shave your mustache?' They gave me a couple of shots of Novocaine, and I actually fell asleep while they were putting 25 stitches in my mouth. I couldn't eat for three or four days, so I had a straw with a shake and maybe some eggs so I wouldn't lose too much weight. I survived on that for three days, and I was finally able to eat peanuts on the fourth day. That was my first solid food.
"I showed up at the ballpark on the fourth day, and I took batting practice, and they took the face mask off a football helmet and cut it so it didn't go all the way around. Then they screwed it onto my ear flap. That's what I wore.
"My first at-bat back was against Mike Caldwell, who was a finesse lefty with Milwaukee. The first pitch he threw me, I bailed. Lee May was our veteran designated hitter, and he said, 'Gary, when I saw you do it, I said, 'There's another guy whose career is ruined.' I hung in there and got a hit, and I continued to wear the mask that year and in 1980 because it gave me confidence. I tried to take it off in spring training, but mentally, I still wasn't good enough to go up there without it.
"Frank Robinson was one of our coaches that year, and Lee was a veteran hitter, and they kind of calmed me down and said, 'It's like riding a bicycle. You have to get back up there. You're too young to let this get to you.' It was just the kind of calming words you need from veteran guys.
"There's a challenge you have to overcome. We tell kids in Little League, 'Don't be afraid of the ball.' Now you step up to the major leagues where you've been playing since you were a kid, and it's the same process: 'I cannot have fear here.' It's hard enough to hit a baseball. When there's some kind of fear involved, you're making it really hard.
"The best advice I would give someone is, 'You can't let this affect you. Get your concentration level up. Know what the pitcher throws. Know what you're looking for, and know the situation.' You try to think of all these other things, except for what happened to you in the past.
"Stanton is such a gifted player. He has unbelievable power. I had to get on top of the plate and pull the ball to hit home runs. He's so strong, he can get off the plate and hit it out to any part of the ballpark. He doesn't have to go up close to the plate and try to pull the ball.
"One thing that helps hitters is these protective devices they make. It's kind of a security blanket. You feel better and more confident that there won't be the same damage if you get hit up there again. I'm sure Stanton will take his off eventually. But it's different for every person. It took me two years. He might have it completely off in another month or tomorrow. Who knows?"
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Kevin Seitzer lived through the ordeal of getting hit in the head three times in his career -- by Jack Morris, Melido Perez and Scott Erickson. He began wearing a protective helmet known as a "C-flap'' in 1995. He retired in 1997 with a .295 career batting average, two All-Star Games and five knee operations on his résumé. Seitzer has worked in the big leagues as a hitting coach with several clubs, and he recently saw Stanton up close and personal in his current role with the Atlanta Braves.
"My fifth year in the big leagues, Jack Morris hit me in the helmet and knocked me out," Seitzer said. "I was leading off a day game in Kansas City. Real glare-y. The first pitch was a slider. The second pitch was a changeup. And I didn't see the next pitch out of his hand until it was about a foot from my head. I tipped my head down and took it right in the dome.
"Because I never really saw it, I had a hard time the rest of the season. Every time a pitcher wound up, I would think, 'Is this gonna be the pitch I don't see or I can't get out of the way of?' I literally jelly-legged for the rest of the year, and I swung when I saw the ball wasn't going to hit me. I was scared to death. I thought I was going to have to retire before I got past it.
"Fast-forward to Melido Perez hitting me in the face in 1994. I had six fractures in my cheekbone, and there were cracks all through the eggshell bone that your eyeball sits on. They said if I were to get pecked in the cheek, my eyeball would drop down inside my cheek if that bone dropped down.
"I got through the end of the season, and the next spring the clubby said, 'Do you want to start wearing the C-flap?' I said, 'No, other guys have been hit, and they didn't keep wearing it. I don't want to be a [wimp]. I won't do it.'
"A month and a half later, I'm in the Metrodome facing Scott Erickson. He had that real nasty, heavy sinker and a big sweeping slider. I'm like, 'OK, I think he's going to go slider.' He went heater up and in, and I never saw it. It got me right in the temple. It didn't break or fracture anything, but it hurt way worse than the one I took the year before. After the second one, I said, 'All right, I'm wearing the protection. I'm not going through this again.' So I wore it the rest of my career.
"I have a hard time to this day watching guys get hit. When I see a ball from the dugout up around a guy's head, I'll have this quick twitch cringe. I literally used to yell at times. When you see that stuff and you've been there, it's not fun. Watching that Oakland-Kansas City deal, and Kelvin Herrera is throwing 100 mph and saying he's going to throw at Brett Lawrie's head -- are you kidding me?
"It's like watching a catastrophic event over and over, where people get hurt really bad. The Stanton thing was tragic. When the Marlins gave him $300 million without knowing he could come back, I was like, 'Oh my.' But we've seen him in two different series now, and he looks great to me. I'm really happy for him because that's not something you want to live through.
"I don't think teams will do anything different with him than they've done in the past. He's a guy you have to crowd hard in and then go soft away. It's just normal pitching to try to get good hitters out. If you let that dude get his arms extended, he can hit balls 200 miles.
"I think he's fine. When hitters wear the C-flap, people say, 'Look, he's still scared.' No, it doesn't mean he's still scared. It means he wants some protection in case it happens again. It lets Stanton hang in a little longer on right-on-right breaking balls, just in case he's wrong and it's not a breaking ball. That's how I ended up getting popped twice. I was thinking, 'This guy is probably going to throw a slider here.' Wrong. See you. Hospital, here we go.
"I can only tell people from experience what worked for me. I got my strength from God because I couldn't do it on my own. I remember being jelly-legged before I was a Christian, sweating in bed and wondering if the next day would be the one where I didn't see the ball again. God gave me the strength to get past it twice and talk about it. I'm not a Bible-thumper or a crazy Christian dude. I'm a guy who had lot of issues and problems, and the Lord directed me and gave me strength to get through stuff like that.
"I know there are a lot of tough people in this game. I felt I was pretty tough when I played too. But I know what it did to me mentally and emotionally. When it happens, it hurts. But it wasn't just the pain. You think, 'That could have killed me right there.'"