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 .