By JOHN JAMES MARSHALL/Designated Writers

There’s a really good chance you’ve never heard of Cliff Mapes, which is fine, but you are about to.

Before you do, this is why baseball is so great. Sure, there are the magical statistics that no other sport has, but baseball also has Cliff Mapes.

Cliff hasn’t been been alive since 1996 and his noteworthiness in baseball is accidental and certainly anecdotal. And it’s not like I’m some great Cliff Mapes historian — I didn’t even hear about him until two weeks ago.

But the next time you want to amaze a baseball trivia nut, ask them who is the only person to wear both Babe Ruth’s number (3) AND Mickey Mantle’s number (7) for the New York Yankees.

That’s right … the Cliffmeister.

He was called up to the Yankees in the 1948 season as a backup outfielder — there was a guy named DiMaggio on that team — and Mapes wore the number 3. As hard as it may be to believe, the Yankees hasn’t gotten around to retiring numbers at that time. (They’s only retired about 137 since.)

With the Babe about to die of throat cancer later that year, the team decided to retire Ruth’s number, so Cliff said that’s fine and took No. 13 for the rest of the year.

Maybe he was superstitious, but when he got to spring training for the ’49 season, he traded the unlucky number in for another. This time, it was #7.

Cliffie had a pretty good year in 1950 — 12 dingers, 61 RBI — but then Mantle showed up in 1951 and that was it for Mapes. Mantle had originally been No. 6 but when he returned from the minors, Bobby Brown was wearing No. 6, so Mantle took #7.

Meanwhile, Mapes was traded to the St. Louis Browns, the worst team in baseball (they’d finish 46 games behind the Yankees in the standings.) Cliff had a cup of coffee with the Detroit Tigers in 1952 and then he was out of baseball.

He was a two-time World Series champion and got to play with DiMaggio and Mantle, so that should have been plenty to tell the grandkids about during his golden years.