MLB

Youkilis with Yankees will take some getting used to

TAMPA — Honestly? Yeah, it looked a little strange.

Forget the tinkering Kevin Youkilis has done with that batting stance of his, which always looked like he was trying to sneak in a few quick moments of yoga or pilates while the pitcher was determining whether to come at him with a fastball or a slider. It still looks like Youkilis up there.

“I’m still me,” he says with a smile.

So, yes, that, as much as anything, will be what takes the most getting used to. Yankees who join the Red Sox and Red Sox who join the Yankees? Honestly, that part of it shouldn’t be news anymore. David Cone and David Wells went to the Red Sox, after all, after making their bones as Yankees, and the world didn’t spin off its axis. Johnny Damon became a Yankee after embodying the very essence of everything fans detested about the Idiot Red Sox.

And Damon plowed though another would-be barrier for Youkilis, too. Damon reported for work on his first day as a Yankee back in 2006 fully shaved and shorn, no longer looking like John Lennon off the “Abbey Road” album cover. So it shouldn’t be nearly as jarring to shake the classic Youkilis image of him and his goatee when he answers the bell in The Bronx on April 1, either.

But that stance …

Put it this way: The first test for Youkilis came Sunday, first home game of the exhibition schedule at Steinbrenner Field. Before the game, as fans wandered in, most of them shouted encouragement at him. He is, after all, a Yankee now, and the Yankees will be a lot better off if he has a terrific year. He was introduced, and you were reminded of something Lou Piniella once said of his first days as a Yankee.

“Nobody likes to get booed,” Piniella said of that 1974 season, after he moved over from Kansas City. “But I had a good way to transition to the big city thanks to my name. Once they started with the ‘Loooooooou’ thing, even if they did boo me, I could talk myself into believing it was the other thing.”

There was a long cry of “Yooooooouk” when he was introduced before the game, and then again when he was introduced in the bottom of the first inning, bases loaded and two outs. And then when he made a bid for a grand slam on his very first swing wearing a pinstriped No. 36 — “Wind got it,” he said, “but I think that’s gone at the Stadium” — there was a pleasant round of applause by the 10,000 or so faithful.

Even if by then it felt odd. My cousin Jane was at the game. She is as big a Yankees fan as anyone I’ve ever known, had dutifully worn her No. 42 Rivera jersey to the park, will watch every pitch and every inning of the season to come, no matter what it brings.

“Your new third baseman gave it a ride,” I said, a few seconds after that ride ended its flight in the right fielder’s mitt.

She smiled a guilt-ridden smile.

“Yeah,” she said. “But that stance. It’s going to take me a while to get used to that stance…”

Really, in an age when we know everything, when we see everything, when over the last 17 years there have been probably 3 million New York Little Leaguers who mimic to a T everything about Derek Jeter’s batting stance, that really may be the last frontier. Maybe it would have been the same in 1973 or so, if Yaz had donned pinstripes and started in with that crazy old corkscrew stance of his, or if Mickey Rivers had tried the baton twirl with his bat in a Sox uniform.

Or maybe things just weren’t as bloody back then. After all, Luis Tiant switched allegiances after the 1978 season. He won 21 games for the Yankees across the next two years, and in every one of those 55 starts he brought the most distinctive windup of the ’70s, that check-the-sky-and-the-center-fielder delivery that every kid born between 1955 and 1970 tried out at least once, no matter what city you lived in.

But that was a time when Yankees-Red Sox was still a feud more than a rivalry, a one-way road. Maybe we know too much about each other now to ever be truly, totally comfortable seeing someone switch sides ever again. We’ll know soon enough.

michael.vaccaro@nypost.com