Yankees-Twins ALDS will be a colossal slugfest

Anybody with a Yankee Stadium seat in fair territory is advised to don a hard hat and dip your body in Kevlar for Game 1 of the ALDS on Friday night between the Yankees and Twins.

What else could be expected when two teams who shattered the all-time home run record and combined for 613 homers in the regular season face each other in a ballpark batters fantasize about hitting in.

“It’s interesting. It is cool what both our teams were able to do with the home run, along with the rest of the league,” Giancarlo Stanton said Thursday when rain kept the Yankees indoors. “It will be a cool dynamic and big punches thrown.”

The Twins slugged 307 homers to the Yankees’ 306, and because there isn’t a Cy Young candidate in either rotation, expect a lot of posing at the plate and jogging around the bases.

James Paxton, who won 10 straight starts before leaving his final regular-season start last Friday night in Texas with a glute problem, goes for the Yankees. Jose Berrios starts for the Twins.

Game time is 7:07 p.m., with Game 2 set for 5:07 p.m. Saturday.

While the Stadium will be buzzing, the intensity on the field reaches a level not seen during the season’s first 162 games spread across six months.

“This is the regular season. They can say that 162 is the regular season, but that’s spring training,” Aaron Judge said of October baseball. “This is when it all counts. This is when it matters. The first one to 11 [wins]. So it’s going to be fun.”

That depends which side of the ledger a team is on when the best-of-five affair ends. For the AL Central champion Twins, who went 101-69, it would hurt deeply to lose in the ALDS. For the Yankees, who went 103-59 and copped the AL East for the first time since 2012, it would be a catastrophic ending to what so far has been a dream season in which injuries ripped through the roster.

“This is what we play for,” Brett Gardner said. “This is when it counts.”

There are other stories surrounding this series. The Twins have lost 13 of 15 postseason games to the Yankees, and their president and CEO Dave St. Peter recently said, “I just say it is time to slay the dragon, right?”

In order for that to happen, the Twins need to do what they do best: slug.

“The ability to change the game with one swing. I think this is going to be a fun series in that way because the two teams have that quality,” first-year Twins manager Rocco Baldelli said. “Unlike any two teams maybe that have ever played the game. There have been some wonderful teams that have played throughout the course of baseball history, but we’ve never seen more home runs than we’ve seen this year between these two teams.”

The Yankees will have Stanton and Judge in the same lineup for only the 13th time this year, and while Stanton has played in just seven games since being activated off the injured list on Sept. 18, manager Aaron Boone is looking forward to having the powerful right-handed bats in a lineup that also has Edwin Encarnacion and Gary Sanchez returning.

“With Giancarlo and the guys we are getting back here for Game 1 I feel like our lineup has the ability to be long and to be able to wear you down just with at-bat quality,” Boone said. “So, that is something I am looking forward to seeing.”

Not to mention his lineup causing baseballs to vanish over walls.

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