This was a couple of years ago, before Reggie Jackson wandered to the baseball Death Star in Houston, when he would still spend some weeks of spring in Tampa, imparting knowledge to those younger players who sought it and generally entertaining the rest of us on the periphery.
This was the spring Gerrit Cole arrived as a Yankee as a bell cow free agent, and Reggie had talked to him plenty, and felt good about his chances of making the leap into the New York City glare.
“You know what it is?” Jackson said one morning, inside the home clubhouse at Steinbrenner Field. “He doesn’t just want to be here but he wants to deliver here. It’s not enough for him just to fit in. You want to be the big man in the big town.”
He smiled that forever 24-karat Reggie smile then.
“Not all of us can do that,” he said, with a wink.
Juan Soto, if you haven’t noticed, has done that. He hasn’t only accepted the responsibility of stardom here, he’s embraced it, and he’s thrived. It isn’t so much that he’s in competition with Aaron Judge to see whose star can shine brightest each night; they’re a matched set, lifting each other higher each game, each week, each month.
“They’re always rooting for each other,” Aaron Boone said.
One of the guests among the 41,263 at Yankee Stadium who watched the Yankees pulverize the Guardians 8-1 Wednesday night — five RBIs by Soto, three by Judge — was Paul Simon, who may know as well as anyone alive the power available when two talented folks merge their gifts and present them together. True in pop music. True in baseball.
“We’re both all about the team,” Soto said after his two-run homer and bases-clearing double — masterfully served like a slicing tennis shot just inside the third-base line — helped deliver an end to the Yankees’ three-game losing streak and nudged them back up by a half-game over the Orioles in the East.
“Even when we’re just working out, that’s what we’re thinking about: ‘How can we help the team win?’ ”
Mostly they do that simply by showing up, by taking their places at 2 and 3 in the batting order game after game, knowing that sooner or later a pitcher is going to have to get one of them out — often both — in a tight spot to win the game. You see how that works over teams most nights, gets into their heads.
For Judge, it is a more-of-the-same level of otherworldly excellence that has somehow turned the spectacular into the routine, but he’s been here from the start. For Soto it was a harder challenge. He was asked to come here from elsewhere, adapt to New York on the fly, and hang his star at the same time he was hanging a new shingle.
For some, that’s a task that consumes them in Year 1.
But not all. Reggie delivered his first year here, maybe as spectacularly as anyone ever has, after some early growing pains. Cole did that in 2020, a forgotten season in which he finished fourth in the Cy Young but looked unhittable most nights. Roger Maris did that in 1960, his warm-up lap for the great summer of ’61. Mike Piazza did that for the Mets in 1998, and Yoenis Cespedes did it in only two months for them in 2015.
Babe Ruth, of course, in 1920. He kind of invented it all.
There have been others in other sports: Y.A. Tittle for the Giants in 1961 and Curtis Martin for the Jets in 1998. Jason Kidd and Julius Erving, whose impact on the Nets was extraordinary, and if we’re being fair then Kevin Durant in 2020-21 qualifies, too.
All Mark Messier did his first year as a Ranger was dig a foundation for glories to come, and there may never have been a more immediate agent of change than the great Dave DeBusschere, who saw the Knicks win 15 of the first 16 games he played with them. And it took Jalen Brunson about 15 minutes into his first year before you knew the Knicks had something with him, too.
“It isn’t easy,” Reggie said back in 2020. “A lot of guys need a year to get the bright lights out of their eyes.”
Soto? He showed up one day in Tampa and started hitting line drives, and he hasn’t stopped. And he seems plenty happy to play Garfunkel to Judge’s Simon. And why not? Simon wrote one of the most beautiful songs of all time, “Bridge Over Troubled Waters.” But it was Artie who sang it. The best twosomes know how to carry their weight in style.
