Some years ago, Babe Ruth’s daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, was on the phone describing what it was like when The Big Man got ready to play ball in the Bronx. The Babe would sometimes stare across the Hudson at the Palisades – man, did he love that view – before leaving his Riverside Drive apartment, heading to the barber shop for a shave, and arriving at the old Stadium in time for batting practice.

Sometimes Julia would sit in the upper mezzanine to get a view of her father’s office that wasn’t available in those pricy box seats. “When Daddy stepped to the plate,” she told me, “everyone was kind of breathless. You knew something big was going to happen.

“It was thrilling, absolutely thrilling. I remember how Daddy would hit it high and the crowd would stand up and try to follow the ball, and when it landed deep in the bleachers they’d let out a tremendous roar.”

A century later, Aaron Judge is having the same impact on Yankees fans. In the ninth inning Tuesday night, Judge turned the Stadium upside down with his 60th home run of the season, setting up a stunning five-run rally – punctuated by Giancarlo Stanton’s grand slam – that beat Pittsburgh, 9-8. Judge matched Ruth’s homer total in 1927. He now stands one swing away from matching Roger Maris’s franchise and American League-record 61-homer season in 1961.

But as a colossal figure at the plate, the Yankees’ No. 99 is best compared to their iconic No. 3.

“I would say Judge’s towering shots are reminiscent of the Babe’s,” said Ruth’s 70-year-old grandson, Tom Stevens, son of Julia Ruth Stevens, who died in 2019 at age 102. “That’s a nice way of putting it.”

Tom Stevens, a retired civil engineer who grew up in New Hampshire and who, like his mother, became a fan of the Babe’s two employers – the Yankees and the Red Sox – has followed Judge’s pursuit of history, not to mention his pursuit of a new contract. “He’s a free agent, so he picked a good year,” Stevens told The Post. His grandfather never made more than $80,000 a season, and now Judge is in line for a long-term deal that will likely pay him north of $300 million.

Everything is bigger these days, including the size of home-run heroes. Judge stands 6-foot-7, 282 pounds, a good five inches taller and 67 pounds heavier than Ruth. But in his day, Ruth became so much larger than life as the founding father of the superstar American athlete.   

Everything to know about Aaron Judge and his chase for the home run record:

Wielding that heavy hickory lumber, the Babe effectively invented the home run, and the notion that a ballplayer could stand among the three or four most recognizable people on the planet.

“He was always swinging for the fences,” his daughter Julia had said. “Daddy would always say, ‘The crowd didn’t come out to see me hit singles. I’ve got to hit some home runs.’ …The big city was absolutely made for him because he had the biggest personality. New York was Daddy’s playground.”

Julia’s mother Claire was Ruth’s second wife; the Babe adopted the girl after he married Claire in 1929. Ruth took her bowling, took her to the golf course, took her to Japan, took her everywhere. Julia was very much the Babe’s own even before he literally gave his blood to her in a transfusion when she was hospitalized in her youth. “I had Daddy’s blood in me,” she told her son Tom and others. “I was his daughter.”

Tom was born four years after Ruth’s 1948 death. Julia was forever telling her son stories about the Babe that weren’t common knowledge, like the one about the throw rug she kept in their New Hampshire home.

“She said that rug was the first thing Babe’s feet hit when he got out of the bed in the morning,” Stevens recalled. “She said he was on top of that rug while she held his ankles and he did sit-ups at night before he went to bed. She would talk about family stuff, how he carved the Thanksgiving turkey and decorated the Christmas tree.”

The Bambino made it a habit of not bringing the game home with him, win or lose. “I remember a couple of weeks before my mother passed away, she said, ‘Daddy was such a great guy,’” Tom Stevens said. “She could never say it enough. She was just gaga over him. Everybody was. Everyone within that sphere was caught up in the whirlwind of Babe Ruth.”

In 2008, the Yankees invited Julia to throw out the last ceremonial first pitch in The House That Ruth Built. The following spring, when fly balls were flying through the right-field jet stream and out of the new Stadium at an absurd pace, I asked Julia how many homers her father would’ve hit in The House That Ruthless Businessmen Built.

“Oh my heavens,” she responded. “Daddy might’ve hit 100 in one season.”

Ruth’s descendants are proud and protective of his legacy. They believe anything that draws attention to Ruth and their web site (baberuthcentral.com) — even discussion of steroid-using sluggers — only serves to educate young fans on the magnitude of the Babe.

By repeatedly crushing baseballs without the help of chemical enhancements, Aaron Judge has focused some fresh attention on Ruth. “Everything I hear about him is that he’s a nice young man, and you want somebody like that to do well,” Tom Stevens said.

“He’s got a nice swing. …You look for him to be a bit clumsy in the field because he is so large, but he’s acrobatic and very athletic. They always talked about the sound of when Babe hit the ball, that it was different than when anybody else hit, and they say the same of Judge. But Babe’s lifetime slugging percentage (.690), nobody will ever touch.”

Judge won’t catch Ruth in plenty of categories, but he will indeed pass him in single-season homers. On the day after the Babe’s death, The New York Times wrote that the one and only “had an amazing flair for doing the spectacular at the most dramatic moment.”

The same can be written of a modern-day Yankee titan, Aaron Judge. He is the Babe Ruth of his time.