Juan Soto has yet to meet his match

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 what you do. It’s your job. It’s how you make your living.

Juan Soto does what you do, he just has a different job description: he hammers baseballs. He sends them far and deep over distant walls, even in the teeth of angry winds, and when he does this 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 more people looking on when he does his job as opposed to when you do yours. 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. After all: the stakes are high for you every day, too, right?

This is his office. This is what he does. It’s his job. It’s his living.

He just has more zeroes each first and 15th. And will have even more when he makes what is certain to be the biggest score in baseball history in a few weeks. Better still: it’s unlikely anyone will begrudge him a nickel. Not when he does as he did Monday night.

This time it was a home run leading off the third inning, 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 can go sometimes. We’ve seen plenty of playoff baseball games where you give the undermanned team a few innings to get their legs, to build their belief, to steel their confidence, and then anything can happen.

Unless someone steps forward, says: Won’t happen.

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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 brightest spotlights, he had just turned 21 years old. 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. It felt like you were watching a 12-year veteran.

And he’s only gotten better. He answers the bell. He punches a clock. He does his job, and it is something to see.

“He gives us all such a lift,” said Carlos Rodon, who did the same thing across six solid innings of three-hit, one-run, nine-strikeout ball. “He got us going.”

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. 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 minutes to see the ball negotiate its way through the jet stream. Cobb seemed to know even earlier. His shoulders slumped on impact.

And then Soto took his triumphant trot around the basepaths.

Judge has yet to get fully untracked 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 men on base. The Yankees will take the help. But they also have Soto doing as he does, which is to say hit a baseball as well as anyone else alive. Just another day at the office for him, and another night of deliverance for the Yankees.

They’ll take that every time.