Mike Stanton Hit The Ball About 900 Feet Last Night

The Marlins don't do distance estimates, so we'll never know precisely how dead Stanton killed the ball. But rest assured, he killed it very dead.

In the first inning, Stanton went to the upper deck in left, sending one poor usher upstairs, since Florida has closed off the whole tier. In his next at-bat in the third, Stanton found the blue seats just left of center—no doubt the longer of the two. That's numbers 33 and 34 for Stanton in his first full season in the majors; by this time next year he'll be hitting his 80th, also into the Joe Robbie upper deck, but doing it from the new Marlins ballpark.

Don't look now, but the Braves are trying to choke away the playoffs too. It was Omar Infante's walkoff homer following a Chipper Jones error that cut Atlanta's wild-card lead over St. Louis to just 2.5. Normally you'd say there's not enough time to blow it, but Stanton hit the ball so hard, he sent the entire National League back in time a week.