Two years ago, Aaron Judge was chasing Roger Maris for the American League home run record of 61, what many consider the real MLB home run record set in 1961.
This season, Judge is on a similar pace, but instead of Maris’ milestone, he’s going after his own mark of 62 home runs.
He entered Thursday with 32 homers through 88 games — two ahead of his pace from 2022.
Judge is on track to hit 59 on the season, but that’s including the first month of the year, when Judge slumped and hit just four homers in the Yankees’ first 27 games.
“It’s a big deal chasing that [number] because of the history of all the guys before me that had it,’’ Judge said prior to Thursday’s game against the Reds in The Bronx. “But I’m not too concerned about it. I’ve got a lot of other things I want to check off my list before I think about breaking another record. If it happens, it happens, great.”
And as Judge made clear when he was on his historic pace in ‘22, he is among those that considers Barry Bonds’ MLB record of 73 home runs in 2001 to be legitimate, despite the PED controversy surrounding it, saying at the time, “That’s what I go by. I watched [Bonds] as a kid flip the ball into the bay with ease. That hasn’t changed.”
With 26 homers in his previous 51 games entering Thursday, Judge — who told The Post in June he won’t be participating in the Home Run Derby in Texas later this month — continues to draw comparisons to Bonds, with Aaron Boone saying Wednesday he wouldn’t be surprised to see Judge get a version of the “Bonds treatment,” with opposing teams frequently pitching around him.
Asked Thursday about the possibility of trying to catch Bonds, Judge said: “I don’t think anybody’s gonna break that. That’s a tough one. Any time you get up into the 50s and 60s [in homers], people start pitching you differently. They don’t give you as many opportunities to hit. Like with Bonds that year, he would get like one pitch to hit in a series and he’d hit it out. I don’t think we’ll ever see that again.”
Judge got a small dose of that treatment in the latter part of ‘22, when he was walked intentionally eight times in his first 121 games, a number that increased to 11 times in his final 36 games.
That’s still well below the 35 free passes Bonds got in ‘03 — and just a fraction of the record-setting 120 intentional walks Bonds got in 2007.
“I haven’t seen teams pitch me like they did to him,’’ Judge said of Bonds. “I hope it doesn’t happen.”
