Why are you not following the hottest player in baseball on Instagram?
The difficult thing about writing about Giancarlo Stanton -- Yankees slugger, workout warrior, Kit Kat chaos agent -- is that when you lay it out on paper, people are convinced you're pranking them.
A man standing 6-foot-6, 245 pounds, seemingly comprised of nothing but muscle, like he's less a human being than what would happen if the Atlas statue in front of Rockefeller Center suddenly started walking around? A man who spends his time casually pushing other human beings uphill, while holding weights for fun? A man with a jawline that cut could glass? A man dashing enough for Tiffany Haddish to (completely unprompted!) ask him out on national TV, and charismatic enough to somehow do the Rock eyebrow better than The Rock? A man who spends his summers launching baseballs into low orbit for the biggest team in sports and his winters traveling to exotic destinations or hanging with Michael B. Jordan and Donald Glover? A man with an artfully arranged scar on his left eyebrow, because even his imperfections somehow work?
Surely that man can't actually exist; that would be a glitch in the Matrix. And yet: He is very, very real, and every second you spend not following his every move is a second you're going to wish you had back.
He just walks around like that on a daily basis. Can you imagine! What in the world! No wonder he has the confidence to live the sort of life in which you go down to Cabo, hop into a pool apparently fully clothed -- hat included -- and caption the resulting photo "A Deputy in Serindipity" [sic].
(Relatedly: One of the best things about Stanton is how vaguely weird he is around the margins. You think you have him pegged, and then he throws up an Instagram bio that reads "Living a Lucid Dream."
But maybe you're not as extremely basic as I am. Fine -- here he is sleeveless atop a camel in front of the Great Pyramids:
He's also, not for nothing, a complete and endearing goofball:
Look, I don't really have much else to add here. I didn't prepare a speech. I just figured you should know that this man exists, and is kind enough to occasionally make himself available for public consumption. He's just there, like, all the time. Whatever you're doing at any given moment during the day -- work, errands, eating lunch -- you could be looking at Giancarlo Stanton instead, remembering that the rules of the universe aren't as rigid as you thought.
