Aaron Boone said if Aaron Judge continues to hit at his current pace, he may get a bit of the “Barry Bonds treatment,” with opposing teams choosing to walk him intentionally rather than watch him do more damage.
“There will be stretches where that probably happens,’’ Boone said before Wednesday’s 3-2 loss to the Reds in The Bronx.
Perhaps the better question is why it hasn’t started already, especially with the Yankees lineup in disarray beyond Judge and Juan Soto.
On Wednesday, though, Judge was set up to tie the game — or more — with runners on the corners and one out in the seventh inning and hit into an inning-ending double play against right-hander Fernando Cruz.
The grounder to third traveled at 106 mph, but still ended the Yankees’ best chance to erase the deficit.
It was a rare off night at the plate for Judge, who may see teams pitch him more carefully, something Boone noted they did frequently during the latter part of his historic 2022 season, when parts of the offense was slumping.
In his first 121 games that season, Judge was walked intentionally eight times. In his final 36 games, he drew 11 intentional walks.
One such occasion seemingly came up Tuesday, when Judge was at the plate with the Yankees down by two runs with two outs in the bottom of the seventh.
Left-hander Sam Moll was tasked with facing Judge with the slumping lefty-swinging Alex Verdugo on deck.
Moll threw one pitch to Judge and it ended up in the left-field seats for his 32nd homer of the season.
Moll recalled his approach to the at-bat on Wednesday and even though Moll had never pitched to Judge, the two were teammates in the Cape Cod League in 2013 with the Brewster Whitecaps, both heading into their junior seasons at college.
“I’ll usually let the bench decide if we want to intentionally walk someone,’’ Moll said. “And then there’s some level of pitching around him. I felt [Tuesday] the best thing to do was to get to 0-1 as fast as possible — which we did and it ended up going over the fence.”
The hope, Moll said, was to “steal the first one and then expand [the zone] a lot from there.”
Instead, Judge made it a one-run game.
But the Yankees didn’t get another base runner the rest of the game and lost.
The end result of the game made it easier for Moll to live with the homer and he said he understood the mentality that would lead a team to walk Judge in that kind of situation.
“I don’t really give up homers — although I did there — so my mentality is always to attack,’’ Moll said. “In the moment, I could have taken a step back and pitched around him, but for me, that’s such a foreign thing to do. But Aaron is the best hitter in the world right now, so it’s not a bad thought process.”
Moll has been watching Judge hit homers for over a decade and still remembered Judge showing up at Brewster and making an immediate impression.
“He struck out his first time up and his second at-bat he just hit a moonshot,’’ Moll said. “You could see what kind of hitter he could become.”