The Yankees are always fascinating, mostly because they are the Yankees. They haven’t won a World Series since 2009, but they never have a losing season and there are still times -- at least when they’re not playing the Astros -- when they look like the baddest men on the planet. They did last season, all the way until the All-Star break, at which point they had a record of 64-28 and looked as if they were halfway to another parade in the Canyon of Heroes.

But after that, you got the idea that everybody except Aaron Judge stopped hitting, and they were a .500 team until they ran into the Astros again in the postseason and Houston beat them four straight.

Now the Yankees have played the first six games of the new season. Gerrit Cole has been great. They have run their first homegrown prospect -- Anthony Volpe -- out to shortstop since Derek Jeter. And then there was last Sunday against the Giants at Yankee Stadium, when Judge and Giancarlo Stanton hit back-to-back home runs -- the second of which, by Stanton, traveled 485 feet to left-center, making it the third-longest home run hit at the new Stadium tracked by Statcast since 2015 (the other two were by Judge, six years ago).

Those two shots extended the Yankees’ record to 29-2 when Judge and Stanton have homered in the same game. They also made the Yankees even more fascinating than ever, because the two power guys and power forwards made you wonder all over again just what they might be able to do if they both stay on the field for a full season, just how many home runs the two of them might hit.

Stanton was informed last Sunday of the Yankees’ record when he and All Rise Judge do homer in the same game.

“It means we gotta keep doing it,” he said.

But to do that, they both gotta remain healthy.

It’s been a problem.

Both Judge and Stanton are still young, and they look sturdier than the monuments in Monument Park. As long as it seems Stanton has been around, first with the Marlins and now with the Yankees, he is still just 33 years old, which means he's just three years older than Judge. If Stanton had hit one more homer for the Marlins in 2017, the year before he came to New York, it would mean the Yankees would have had two guys, same team, who both had 60-homer seasons in the books.

When it became official that Judge and Stanton were on the same team, Yankee fans immediately began to dream about Judge and Stanton perhaps combining for more home runs than the 115 that Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle hit between them in 1961, the season when Maris set the all-time Yankees and AL record for homers with 61 that Judge broke last year.

Maybe they still can. But only if they can both stay healthy in the same season, an if as big as the two of them.

Stanton has effectively played one full season out of the five he has played as a Yankee. That was his first season in New York, when he played 158 games, ending up with 38 homers and 100 RBIs. So he missed four games in all that year. Since then he has missed 256. Last season, he missed 52. Even in the short 60-game season of 2020, Stanton was only healthy enough to play 23 games, less than half.

And when he did play as many games for the Yankees as he did in 2018, Judge was the one missing 50 games because of injuries. When they’re together, they’re so often a wrecking crew, you bet. But they haven’t shown up together nearly enough. And when the Yankees did run into the Astros in October, as they almost always seem to, Judge and Stanton barely showed up at all. Judge was 1-for-16 in that four-game sweep, no homers and no RBIs. Stanton was 4-for-16, also without a homer and just one RBI. The Astros wrecked the wrecking crew and went on to win the World Series after that.

But then the two of them go deep and get you thinking about the possibilities with them all over again. Even last season, when Stanton only played 110 regular-season games, he still managed to hit 31 homers, which turned out to be exactly half of Judge’s 62. It’s really not so crazy to think that if Stanton had played the 157 games that Judge did in 2022, he might have at least made a run at 50 himself.

They are every bit as capable of producing baseball shock and awe in New York as Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout are hitting in the same batting order in Anaheim, capable of making big league ballparks, starting with Yankee Stadium, look as small as Little League fields. Stanton certainly did that again last Sunday, hitting that ball high over the batter’s eye in left-center.

“Every time [Stanton] comes in after one of those,” manager Aaron Boone said, “I just tell him, ‘You’re weird. You’re different.’”

Stanton is different. Both he and Judge are, because of their size and because of their strength. We know what they’ve done individually. Now we see if this is the year when they do it together, the way Maris and Mantle did once.