Nearly every teammate was gone by the time Stanton dressed. The rolling laundry baskets had filled up around the room. The beat reporters had gathered their quotes and left the clubhouse to make deadline. If you talk to Stanton, you do it on his terms.
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As he pursued Babe Ruth’s record for the Yankees, Maris faced such relentless scrutiny from reporters that he lost hair along the way. As McGwire challenged Maris while playing for St. Louis, his batting practice became such a phenomenon that he said he felt like a caged animal. Yet Stanton is deliberately elusive.
“Hey, if the media starts asking about it, shut them out, don’t talk about it no more,” Frank Menechino, the Marlins’ assistant hitting coach, said he told Stanton recently. “Talk about it when the season’s over. You gotta control stuff. Not everybody’s entitled to know everything about…
