Maybe it shouldn’t be all that surprising. You have important days in your job, too: deadlines to beat, quotas to meet, commissions to earn. After a while, it doesn’t surprise you when you make those deadlines, hit those quotas, cash those commission checks.
It’s how you pay your mortgage.
It’s how you make your car payment.
It’s how you do what you do. It’s your job. It’s how you make your living.
This is what Juan Soto does: he hammers baseballs. He sends them far and deep over distant walls, and when he does that it looks like the most natural thing in the world. It looks as ordinary as breathing.
It doesn’t matter that there are 48,000 people looking on. It doesn’t matter that the stakes are enormous: four wins to make the World Series — first for the Yankees in 15 years, first for him in five. This is how he does what he does. It’s his job. It’s how he makes his living.
And how he’s soon to make probably the biggest score in baseball history.
This time it was a home run leading off the third inning Tuesday night, a 401-foot blast off Cleveland’s Alex Cobb. It gave the Yankees a 1-0 lead. It greeted the Guardians to this best-of-seven American League Championship Series and seemed to unglue them: a spate of walks and wild pitches that built the lead and a Giancarlo Stanton blast later on that tied a ribbon around this 5-2 win.
The Yankees outclassed the Guardians start to finish, but we’ve all seen how these things go sometimes. We’ve seen plenty of playoff baseball teams where you give the undermanned team a few innings to get their legs, to build their belief, anything can happen.
Until someone steps up and says: Won’t happen.
Follow The Post’s coverage of the Yankees in the postseason:
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- Anthony Volpe embracing Yankees’ World Series expectations: ‘The standard’
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- The big four that make the Guardians a dangerous challenge for Yankees
Not tonight.
“It doesn’t surprise you,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone would say. “It’s what he’s done all year. It’s the kind of player he is. This is who he is.”
When we first became aware of Soto under the bright spotlight, he had just turned 21. He hit .333 in the 2019 World Series and clubbed three home runs, and if Stephen Strasburg won the MVP of that Series, Soto was certainly in the conversation. He played with a poise that was almost shocking. Every day he did something to help the Nats win.
And he’s only gotten better from there.
Now, after turning in one of the great walk years you’ll ever see — 41 homers, 109 RBIs, an OPS of .989, a likely MVP in any season that doesn’t include Aaron Judge — he’s doing what he does in the postseason now. He was fine against the Royals in the ALDS — .286/.389/.387 — but Monday night announced his presence immediately.
In the first, he laced a single off Cobb, helping build a rally that failed to yield fruit. That made him 8-for-12 lifetime against Cobb.
Then came the third. Cobb got ahead with a splitter. Then he threw two sinkers that Soto spit on. The count was in his favor. And Soto knew what was coming.
“I was just locked in on that pitch,” he’d say later. “He showed me that pitch three times. I was ready for it. I just tried to make hard contact and thankfully it went the right way.”
There was also a swirling wind at Yankee Stadium that threatened to knock it down. Soto hit it too hard. He hit it through the wind. He thought he’d gotten it, waited a few seconds to see the ball negotiate its way through the jet stream. And then took his triumphant trot around the basepaths.
Judge has yet to get fully untracked in this postseason. The Yankees offense has been helped along an awful lot thanks to the largesse of Royals pitchers and Guardians pitchers who’ve seemed downright scared to pitch with the bases loaded. The Yankees will take the help. But they’ll also be delighted when Soto does what he does, which is to say hit a baseball as well as anyone else alive.
They’ll take that every night.