Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton questionable for Opening Day because of  issue with elbows

TAMPA, Fla. — The Yankees’ postseason offensive hero is questionable for Opening Day.

“Tough to say,” Aaron Boone said Sunday afternoon when asked if Giancarlo Stanton will be ready for the start of the regular season. “I’m not going to put any time line on it.”

Boone said Stanton, who reported for spring training Sunday with the rest of the Yankees’ position players, enters camp dealing with the equivalent of “tennis elbow” in both elbows.

The positive?

It is something Stanton experienced toward the end of last season, including in October, when he hit .273 with seven homers, 16 RBIs and a 1.048 OPS in 14 postseason games.

“This is something that if we were full-bore in, we’d be grinding away probably,” Boone said, meaning the regular season. “But just want to make sure we give it the proper time and [put] ourselves in the best position throughout the year.”

Boone characterized Stanton, who has not played a full season healthy in the big leagues since 2018 — when he appeared in 158 games in his first season with the Yankees — as coming into camp “a little behind” the rest of his teammates.

“It’s [something] that he maintained and kind of played through, especially the second half of the year,” Boone said. “So we want to make sure that we give it as much time [as possible], so we’ll probably slow-play him a little bit .  .  .

“It’s just something we don’t want to rush, if we can get to a really good spot and know we’re going to have to probably deal with some maintenance with it throughout the year. Just won’t want to force anything too early.”

Boone did not delve too much into the specifics of that “maintenance.”

“I’ve never had tennis elbow, but essentially that’s what he kind of has in both [elbows],” Boone said. “Maintenance is just kind of treating it with the modalities that you have available to you. You play through some discomfort with it, but just trying to maintain it as best you can .  .  . Hopefully we’ve done things that will help him be in an even better spot. But we’ll see.”

Stanton came into spring training last year having completely remade his body. Conditioning has never been a problem in his 15-year career in the big leagues, but he had become frustrated with the slew of injuries, mostly to his lower body, that consistently landed him on the injured list from 2019-24. He showed up at last year’s camp leaner than he’s ever been, having shed about 15 pounds of muscle.

“Be a baseball player again,” Stanton said a year ago of what prompted the changes. “I just needed to be more mobile. A lot of setbacks [in 2023] kept me not moving the way I’d like to be.”

Stanton, who was in the clubhouse briefly Sunday morning and appeared as lean as he did the previous year, said early in spring training 2024 that there was “more running than in years past” when it came to his offseason.

“I gotta stay on the field,” he said. “I need to play, not be on the sidelines.”

Stanton still ended up on the injured list in 2024 as a left hamstring strain suffered toward the end of June kept him sidelined for about a month. He hit .233 last season but had 27 homers, 20 doubles, 72 RBIs and a .773 OPS in 114 games.

Then, as he’s done for much of his career with the Yankees, he took off in the postseason. He has hit .265 with 18 homers, 40 RBIs, six doubles and a .994 OPS in 41 career games.

“I think a lot of people even forget about how good his regular season was and how productive he was and how important he was to us ultimately scoring the most runs in the league,” Boone said.

“Like his presence .  .  . he missed the month, but in and around that, the other five months, he was such a presence, whether it was in that four-hole or five-hole, night in and night out. Like, he was a threat all the time.

“He’s huge for us. He’s big and he was big for us during the regular season behind, obviously, what Aaron [Judge] and Juan [Soto] were doing was historic, but his presence in the middle was big.”