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 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. 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 ...