Aaron Judge was a nine-year-old Giants fan in 2001 when Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs.
“I was just in amazement as a kid,” Judge recalled recently. “I was like, ‘This game’s really that easy?’”
Regardless of PED controversies, the record book still recognizes 73 as MLB’s single-season home run record.
After hitting home runs in both games of the Subway Series, Judge is now on pace for 62 home runs, which would break Roger Maris’s Yankees record and set a new American League record. Judge’s pace has slowed a tad thanks to a recent nine-game home run drought, and a little of the Bonds treatment when it comes to seeing strikes.
Judge’s walk rate in August is 19 percent, well above his 14 percent career mark and the 8.5 percent league average. Yet it is far from Bondsian – Barry’s career walk rate was 20 percent, with an unfathomably high rate of 38 percent in 2004.
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It’s that challenge of seeing *maybe* one good pitch to hit each night and blasting it that amazed little Aaron Judge (if you can believe there ever was such a thing).
“It might be easy at times I feel like in Little League, but (Bonds was) doing it at the major league level against the best pitchers in the highest leverage situations, and he’d go up there and get walked three times and all of a sudden in the bottom of the 8th he’d hit one into the water (San Francisco’s McCovey Cove). And you’re like ‘How can that be possible?’
“I’ve been in the same spot where if you get walked a couple times and you’re not seeing pitches and they’re constantly avoiding you. All of a sudden comes a spot where they do pitch to you and they might give you one pitch, and you take your A-swing and hit it? That’s near impossible to do, so it was a treat getting to watch (Bonds) do his thing.”
And that challenge is what motivates Judge on a nightly basis, and not specifically for the record-chasing element, as he politely side-stepped questions about Maris and Bonds, etc. For Judge, it’s about what he can do with that one opportunity each night to help his team win a game.
“That’s the fun part,” Judge told me. "Can I mentally stay locked in for every single pitch and every single at-bat that I have? No matter if it’s the first pitch of my first at-bat, or the eighth pitch I see in a grind at-bat against one of their better back-end of the bullpen guys. It’s kind of a test for me, kind of me against myself. Can I really lock it in here for this whole game, for these at-bats and just wait for that one pitch I can drive? I look forward to those. This is what it’s all about.”
Judge, who grew up in Linden, California, returns to the Bay Area tonight when the Yankees begin a four-game series against the Oakland A’s.
It’s only a couple of Judgian blasts away from the park where he grew up watching Bonds do his thing two decades ago.
Follow Sweeny Murti on Twitter: @YankeesWFAN
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