All eyes are on Yankees’ Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton, and it’s quite a sight

TAMPA, Fla. — A rival talent evaluator sat in the stands at Joker Marchant Stadium in Lakeland a few weeks ago and discussed the Tigers as they finished batting practice.

Then came a distraction.

“Watching them stretch, Judge makes Stanton look semi-normal,” the scout said, nodding to the area of the field where the Yankees were stretching side by side before taking BP. “It’s insane. Judge is so freakin’ big, he makes Stanton look somewhat normal. And Stanton is one big dude.”

The scout, one of those baseball lifers who has seen most of it, if not it all of it, at least once in his career, could be forgiven for temporarily losing focus.

Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton can have that effect when seen together.

They were the top home run hitters in their respective leagues last season — Judge led the American League with a rookie-record 52 and Stanton hit 59 in earning National League MVP honors with the Marlins — before joining forces in the offseason, the result of a salary stripdown in Miami executed by Marlins part-owner and Yankees icon Derek Jeter.

But it’s not just the power potential and overall possibilities that they bring to a lineup that appeared to be stacked even before Stanton’s arrival. It’s the optics, the sheer size of the 6-6, 245-pound Stanton and the 6-7, 282-pound Judge together. Their size would make them stand out on an NFL field, let alone a major-league field.

It was that dynamic that often had opposing players stopping their pregame preparation for a moment and planting themselves on the top step of their dugout to watch the pair punish baseballs during BP. And it was not only an opposing-team phenomenon.

“Whenever you have Giancarlo and Judge hitting long shots, I’m watching myself. I’m a fan at that time when they’re hitting those shots,” said Gary Sanchez, who hit in the same group as Stanton and Judge throughout spring training (Greg Bird was the fourth member). “I know why [the fans] come out and want to watch everything.”

Sanchez smiled.

“What can you say?” Sanchez said through his translator. “Those guys, they hit some moonshots. Mine, they barely go over the fence.”

REELING IN BIG FISH

Sanchez, of course, has plenty of power. The catcher, who upset Stanton in the first round of last July’s Home Run Derby in Miami, hit 33 homers last season after missing the first month with a biceps injury, and few of those home runs were wall-scrapers.

But the comments by Sanchez — who is considered the Yankees’ most complete hitter by many scouts and plenty of people inside the organization — illustrate how Judge and Stanton have captured the imagination of players and fans alike since the moment the Stanton trade occurred a couple of days before the winter meetings in December.

It’s a trade that would not have happened had Shohei Ohtani said yes.

The two-way Japanese star, considered to be the crown jewel of the offseason, required every interested MLB team — which was pretty much all of them — to go through a process not unlike the recruitment of a top high school football or basketball player. But Ohtani quickly crossed teams off his list, and the Yankees — considered a heavy favorite to land the pitcher/outfielder when he officially became a free agent — were among the first to go.

Still wanting to add a bat for 2018, Yankees general manager Brian Cashman pivoted and found himself with an impossible-to-pass-up opportunity.

The Marlins’ new management group, which includes Jeter as club CEO, decided to shed payroll and put Stanton in its crosshairs.

Three years earlier, he signed a 13-year, $325-million contract, which now had 10 years and $295M left on it. Stanton had a full no-trade clause, but although he was not interested in being part of another Marlins rebuild, he became irritated with how the club hierarchy dealt with him in discussing trade options and rejected deals that would have sent him to the Cardinals or Giants.

That caused Michael Hill, Miami’s president of baseball operations, to pivot — this time in the direction of the Yankees.

Managing general partner Hal Steinbrenner, intent on bringing his payroll under the $197-million luxury-tax threshold this season, had one thought when Cashman broached the possibility of acquiring Stanton.

“That’s a pretty big contract, a lot of money,” Steinbrenner told Newsday’s David Lennon with a laugh in a spring training interview, referencing the 10 years and $295 million Stanton was owed.

But when it became apparent the Yankees could do the deal and still remain under the luxury-tax threshold — the Yankees will be responsible for about $265 million of the contract over the next 10 years — Steinbrenner felt a pull similar to what Cashman felt. Here was a unique opportunity that should be seriously considered.

“I was very interested in the idea because if you have a chance to get a player like him — the National League MVP and one of the best players in baseball, period — you have to look at it,” Steinbrenner said.

SUPER-SIZED EXPECTATIONS

Stanton, who grew up a Dodgers fan and had never been on a Marlins team that won more than 80 games in a season, eventually green-lighted a trade to the Bronx. It cost the Yankees second baseman Starlin Castro and two low-level prospects — hard-throwing Jorge Guzman, a 22-year-old righthander whom opposing team scouts are high on and who regularly has reached 100 mph on the back fields in Jupiter where the Marlins train, and 18-year-old shortstop Jose Devers.

There was, however, the matter of Judge. Both he and Stanton had been nothing but rightfielders in their big-league careers.

Although he didn’t feel the need to clear the deal with Judge before consummating it, Cashman reached out to the American League Rookie of the Year, who finished second in the MVP voting and who by midseason had emerged as a leader in the clubhouse.

Judge’s thoughts, to say the least, were exceedingly positive. “I was like, ‘We can get an MVP-caliber player on our team? Let’s do it,’ ” he recalled.

Yankees players couldn’t help but shake their heads when they heard the bombshell news.

“I kind of had to do a double take,” standout reliever Chad Green said. “I was like, ‘Really?’ The guy’s a monster. Having him and Judge in the same lineup is kind of crazy.”

It’s a lineup that looks as if it could make a run at the franchise’s single-season record of 245 homers by the 2012 Yankees (the MLB single-season record for homers is 264 by the 1997 Mariners).

Perhaps the 2018 Yankees can match the 2009 Yankees, who had an MLB record-tying seven players reach the 20-homer plateau and hit 244 homers en route to winning the World Series.

“You add the National League MVP to what we feel like is already a very strong lineup, the possibilities start to run through your head of what that could look like,” manager Aaron Boone said during the winter meetings after the Stanton trade became official.

Early in spring training, Boone said he hadn’t decided how he will deploy his big righthanded hitters, though as camp wound down, he seemed to settle on Judge hitting in the two-hole, followed by Stanton and Sanchez. There’s a chance that the switch-hitting Aaron Hicks or lefthanded hitters Bird or Didi Gregorius will split up Judge and Stanton, but there really don’t seem to be any bad options for Boone.

After facing a Yankees lineup that, for the first time in spring training, had Judge, Stanton and Sanchez in it, Tigers lefthander Daniel Norris chose the history route Feb. 28. He invoked the 1927 Yankees.

“Murderers’ Row,” said Norris, who gave up a titanic homer to Sanchez that cleared the big scoreboard in left-center at Steinbrenner Field.

60/60 SEASON FOR SLUGGERS?

Hype and hyperbole have been par for the course throughout spring training.

After watching Stanton effortlessly go the other way and hit balls off the rightfield wall during BP at Steinbrenner Field, another rival talent evaluator pondered what will happen now that he’ll be playing 81 games at the Stadium.

“Stanton might hit 90 home runs this season,” he said, laughing.

Both players have stayed out of the prediction business. Judge says that what has stood out from the start in his relationship with Stanton — the two met but spent only a little bit of time talking during last July’s Home Run Derby — was the latter’s constant expression of a desire to “win” and a willingness to do anything to accomplish it.

Stanton voiced no objection to occasionally playing leftfield in spring training, something the Yankees said they would do with Judge but did not.

Judge, who was standing on first base when Stanton hit his first homer March 10, looked forward to batting in front of Stanton during the regular season. “I like it because I’m probably going to score like 200 runs with him hitting behind me,” Judge said. “I just have to get on base for him.”

Although teammates have never accomplished the feat, a reporter suggested that hitting at least 60 homers apiece is achievable, which made Stanton visibly uncomfortable. “It’s definitely possible, but that’s not the goal,” he said. “Don’t ask me numbers. It’s not the goal.’’

His point: Wins are.

But Stanton did smile when asked in a general sense to evaluate what he and Judge might accomplish.

“All you can go off of is our stats from the previous year for what you think we can do,” Stanton said. “Then you put us together, and who knows after that?”