Jasson Dominguez's Yankee Stadium debut should be special

Martian, meet the Bronx.

Those who will be filling Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night couldn’t be happier to meet you.

A season Yankees fans were ready to forget — though not to the point of forgetting their collective desire to chase general manager Brian Cashman and manager Aaron Boone out of town with pitchforks and torches — suddenly has presented them a possible September to remember.

Not because the Yankees are primed for a final-month push into the postseason. They are eight games out of the American League’s final wild-card spot and have a 0.4% chance of making the playoffs, according to FanGraphs, despite sweeping the Astros and winning six of their last seven games.

It’s because of the arrival in the last couple of weeks of a quartet of rookies who no less than Aaron Judge has said have provided a surge of “energy” throughout the club — from the team bus to the clubhouse to the dugout to, most importantly, the field.

One of them more than the others, no disrespect intended to Everson Pereira, Oswald Peraza or Austin Wells, all of whom had their moments in Houston.

That would be Jasson Dominguez, aka “The Martian,” tagged with that forever nickname shortly after being awarded a franchise-record $5.1 million signing bonus at the age of 16 out of the Dominican Republic in July 2019.

The play of Dominguez, 20, has stoked the hype accompanying him since he signed. His performance in his first big-league spring training this year brought it to a fever pitch. And then came Friday night.

Dominguez, who was called up earlier that day along with catching prospect Wells, homered in his first at-bat. In what seemed to be an almost effortless swing, an 0-and-1 fastball from Justin Verlander turned into an opposite-field rocket into the Crawford Boxes that overhang leftfield at Minute Maid Park, a stadium where so many Yankees postseason dreams have gone to die since 2017.

On Sunday night, Dominguez became the first Yankees rookie since Judge (naturally) to hit two homers in his first three games. His go-ahead two-run blast to right in the sixth inning off Cristian Javier, a pitcher who flummoxed the Yankees twice in the 2022 regular season and in Game 3 of the ALCS, gave the Yankees a 3-1 lead in their 6-1 win.

“He’s comfortable,” Boone said. “When he goes up to the plate, there’s not a lot of anxiety. He plays the game with ease.”

Behind the scenes, Dominguez, who spent valuable time with the club in spring training and impressed his veteran teammates in that short stint before being sent to minor-league camp, seems to have immediately passed the not-always-easy-to-walk line for just-promoted prospects. It’s a line that includes projecting confidence, yet not too much confidence, and deferring to veterans, but not deferring too much.

“He gets it,” one Yankee said.

Said another member of the traveling party of what first jumped out about Dominguez: “The maturity. He asks the right questions.”

Such as?

“What does this pitcher or that pitcher like to throw in this count or that count? Tendencies. Doesn’t act like he knows [everything].”

Clint Frazier, who doubled and homered in his big-league debut on July 1, 2017 — also in Houston, coincidentally — is a recent example of a ballyhooed prospect failing to walk that clubhouse line.

Leave it to Michael King, the son of a TV newsman, to provide the perfect sound bite, playing off Dominguez’s nickname.

“He’s lived up to every ounce of hype that I’ve heard. I’ve heard he was otherworldly, and he comes out here and just dominates,” King said before addressing some of the intangibles referenced above.

“I was more impressed with just his poise,” he said. “You come up as a top prospect, you think a guy could easily have a big ego, and he comes up and he’s very humble and he’s very quiet, honestly, being like a very good rookie. And then when he goes out there and produces, it makes you love him even more.”

Late Sunday night in the visitor’s clubhouse, Dominguez smiled while pondering what his Yankee Stadium debut might feel like in front of a fan base borderline ravenous to have something to be excited about this season and in the future.

“I think it’s going to be big-time,” he said.

He has no idea.