This is who Giancarlo Stanton reminds you of when he can stay on the field and in Aaron Boone’s batting order with the Yankees:

He reminds you of Giancarlo Stanton.

He reminds you of a lot of the guy who hit 59 home runs once for the Marlins. In the history of the Yankees, only two players have ever hit more than that in a season. Babe Ruth was one. Roger Maris was the other.

So far this season, Stanton has done as much to carry the Yankees and get them to a game over .500 after a 6-11 start as the team’s other $300 million man, Gerrit Cole. Neither Stanton nor Cole could get the Yankees a sweep of the Astros on Thursday afternoon, even though Cole left with the lead after seven more strong innings. By then, Stanton -- after an even bigger game the night before -- had hit his ninth home run.

It means that Stanton is hitting right now the way he did in the postseason of 2020, when he hit six home runs in seven games against the Indians and the Rays and had 13 RBIs in 26 at-bats. Everybody knows that Stanton has been a lightning rod for Yankees fans -- the way A-Rod always was after the Yankees traded for him and his big contract in 2004 -- but they loved him last October and they love him now, because they know the early season at Yankee Stadium would look a lot different without him.

Yankees fans have also been reminded so far of what the offense can look like when both Stanton and Aaron Judge are healthy. Judge has quietly hit seven home runs so far, and even with occasional days off for what was described as “lower body soreness," he's actually been on the field for one more game than Stanton has. Whatever the Yankees can be this season, even with DJ LeMahieu still at the top of the order, starts with Stanton and Judge, who both have 50-homer seasons on the backs of their baseball cards, the only time that has happened with this franchise since Maris was coming off hitting 61 in 1961 and Mickey Mantle had hit 54.

Yankees fans keep their fingers crossed and hope that both of the big guys don’t have another star-crossed season because of injuries. Coming into the weekend’s games, Stanton has already played more games and had more at-bats and hit more home runs than he did in the short season of 2020. Stanton, before he exploded in the postseason, played just 23 games in ’20, hit just four homers, knocked in 11. It wasn’t much different with Judge, who would likely have missed 100 games or more if the ’20 season had started on time. He has now played exactly the same amount of regular-season games that he did last season.

But it is Stanton who has been the hotter of the two sluggers lately. It is Stanton whom Astros manager Dusty Baker described as a “dangerous man” on Wednesday night after Stanton had a two-run homer, an RBI double and an RBI single. It is worth remembering, in light of the way Stanton has hit so far for the Yankees, what his manager with the Marlins, an old Yankee named Don Mattingly, said about him in Spring Training:

“Stanton changed the way the other team approached the hitters around him in the order, changed me as a manager trying to get him pitched to.”

Derek Jeter traded Stanton to the Yankees once he took over the team, mostly because he felt the Marlins couldn’t build a playoff team working around his $325 million, 13-year contract. The Yankees took that contract on, trading for a 50-homer guy the way they had traded for a 50-homer guy in Alex Rodriguez in February of ’04. Brian Cashman had watched his team score just one run against the Astros in Games 6 and 7 of the 2017 American League Championship Series and had been rebuffed trying to sign Shohei Ohtani, so he went for Stanton instead.

Stanton hit 38 homers and knocked in 100 runs in his first season with the Yankees. He proceeded to play a combined total of 41 games in 2019-20 and hit a grand total of seven homers. Now he’s got nine in the first week of May. On the field after Wednesday’s game, at which point his hitting streak had reached 10 games, he said this about his hot streak:

“When I give myself a chance and put the ball on the barrel, good things will happen.”

The hitting streak went to 11 on Thursday afternoon. He hit another home run. In just April and May he’s already had more of a season than he had last year. It is the same with him as it is with Aaron Judge: Good things don’t just happen with both of them when they put the ball on the barrel. Good things generally happen when they’re on the field.