Words figure to be exchanged the first time Vance Worley faces Shane Victorino on Friday night at Target Field.

The woofing, however, won’t be about the home run Victorino, now playing right field for the Red Sox, hit off his former teammate last week in Boston.

Instead, it will probably be about shoes.

High-end Nike basketball shoes.

“He’s a big shoe guy,” Victorino said of Worley, the Twins right-hander who was his teammate for two seasons in Philadelphia. “He loves sneakers.”

So does Victorino, who likes to taunt Worley on Instagram by posting photos of his latest acquisitions, and critiquing those Worley is constantly adding to his collection.

“I’ll write, ‘Nice shoes. Must be nice,’ ” Victorino said. “We always have fun with it.”

Sometimes, the exchanges are more direct. Text messages in the wee hours.

“He’s having a hard time getting a hold of this one pair that just came out the other day,” Worley said. “He’s like, ‘I know you got a guy.’ I’m like, ‘I’m not saying I don’t have a guy. What’s the importance of this shoe versus another one?’ He’s like, ‘I got to have these, man. My addiction’s getting so bad.’ ”

The friends are shoe junkies. Victorino has so many size-9-1/2 shoes he won’t even venture a guess as to the extent of his collection.

Worley, who got serious about the hobby at 14, around the time his size-12-1/2 feet stopped growing, was up to 400 pairs at his suburban Philadelphia home before cutting that number in half this winter.

“It was a four-bedroom place, and I had 2-1/2 of them full of shoes,” Worley says. “I had them stacked in a certain order, but it kind of looked cluttered.”

Getting engaged and setting a mid-November 2013 wedding date was part of the impetus, as was the December trade that sent Worley to Minnesota.

Some pairs he gave away to friends with a similar shoe size. The rest he sold off.

Worley figures he made close to $8,000 from his eBay transactions, with a single pair of Jordans fetching nearly $500 on the open market.

“I had stuff from the early ’90s, stuff you don’t see every day,” he says. “With my shoe size, when I get stuff it’s always rare.”

Worley developed his business acumen at a young age as his parents made him figure out ways to turn his savings into fancy sneakers. His first pair was the Jordan XIVs, white with oxidized green, which came out in the late 1990s.

“I wore them out,” he says.

Wanting more, he came up with a plan.

“I was like, ‘OK, every time I see them in my size, I’m just going to buy it,’ ” Worley said. “I have five pairs of them now.”

Smart move.

“For some reason they weren’t that hot when they came out, so nobody bought ’em up,” Worley says. “The few people that did are now making a bunch of money off them.”

His remaining collection, Worley estimates, is worth well north of $20,000. He keeps the entire batch catalogued and stores half of it back home in Sacramento, Calif., and the other half at his future in-laws’ home.

Fortunately, his fiancee, Maricel Vivas, is cool with this.

“She understands that’s my fix,” Worley said. “She likes shoes, too. We have a lot in common.”

And when she goes on a shopping spree of her own?

“I can’t say anything,” Worley says.

One of the best things about reaching the major leagues, Worley said, was the realization he could put his shoe addiction into overdrive, which he quickly did, adhering always to the shoe collector’s credo of “Rock one. Stock one.”

“That way,” Worley explained, “you can sell one and it pays off the other pair you’re wearing.”

The most Worley ever paid for a single pair?

That would be the $4,000 he spent last year for Nike Air Foamposite Ones made especially for Lady Gaga’s charity in connection with the film “ParaNorman.” Worley won a raffle for those.

“Those things are crazy-looking, but I just had to have them,” he says.

What are they worth today?

“They’re not worth four grand, I’ll tell you that much,” he says, laughing.

Lately, he has branched out into a different sort of shoe collecting. He requests limited-edition baseball cleats from his friends around the game. A.J. Pierzynski gave him an autographed, game-worn pair, as did Manny Ramirez, Roy Halladay, Jimmy Rollins and, of course, Victorino.

“He’s got such a good deal with Nike; I’m sure he gets all the good stuff,” Worley says. “But he knows I’ve got a lot of good stuff, too. I have some stuff I know he doesn’t have. He gets all the stuff that gets released (to the public.) I get the stuff that’s ‘1 of 1.’ ”

Which drives Victorino crazy, leading to more agitated text messages.

“I don’t know how you do it or who you know,” Victorino will text.

Worley just grins.

“Don’t ask me how I get my stuff,” the pitcher said. “It’s all about who you can trust.”

Follow Mike Berardino at twitter.com/MikeBerardino.