MIAMI — If you want to understand someone’s baseball soul, look at the game when that person was 8 years old. Those are the days of miracle and wonder, the sweet spot when baseball grabs ahold of you and fixes your view of it forever.

Giancarlo Stanton was 8 years old in 1998. That was the summer of the great home run chase, the first time anyone ever hit more homers in a season than Roger Maris’s 61 in 1961. The man who got there first, Mark McGwire, was Stanton’s favorite player.

“I was on the Cardinals for Little League,” said Stanton, who played in Tujunga, Calif. “They set it up so you’re on the same team for three years straight. So I was on the Cardinals, I played first base, wore 25, had a big league hat. I always wanted to be like that.”

Stanton hit his first over-the-fence home run at age 10. He knows that he pulled it to left-center field, and believes he hit four that season, a lot for a 10-year-old. He has forgotten the other details, he said, except this:

“I just remember I wasn’t the first one to hit one that year in the league,” Stanton said. “I wanted to be the first, and I just remember I wasn’t.”