San Francisco ? Barry Bonds is within striking range of a former Atlanta Braves slugger on the home run list.

Hank Aaron? Yeah, him too.

But in this case, we’re talking about Darrell Evans, one of the few players to maintain his home run stroke as a baseball geezer. Evans hit 129 home runs after turning 38, the most for a player beyond that birthday, according to David Vincent of the Society for American Baseball Research.

Aaron is second with 116, and Bonds entered Tuesday night’s game against the Houston Astros with 113.

“I turned 30 and they thought I was old,” recalled Evans, a popular Giants infielder in 1976-83. “At some point, every time I appeared in the paper it was: Evans-comma-32, comma-33, comma-34 all the way through. I used it as incentive.”

The late-career power of Evans, Aaron and Bonds is unusual.

Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, tormented by injury, played their last seasons at 36.

Babe Ruth said goodbye at a flabby 40, with a .181 average, six home runs and 12 RBIs. The great Willie Mays was 41 for his final season: .211 with six home runs and 25 RBIs.

But instead of fading, Bonds, who turns 42 in July, stepped on the gas pedal in his twilight – to some, suspiciously so. Starting at 36, Bonds began to hit home runs about twice as often as he did as a young player. He averaged a home run every 15.7 at-bats in 1986-99. He averaged one every 8.2 at-bats in 2000-03.

Figuring out how Bonds did it is a question for former Sen. George Mitchell to consider during his investigation for Major League Baseball.

Figuring out how Evans did it requires only a call to the Long Beach Armada of the Western Baseball League, where Evans, 59, soon will begin his second season as manager.

“When you’re 30 years old, you’re old for a ballplayer, but are you old in anything else?” Evans said.

In 1985, when Evans turned 38, he led the league in home runs for the first time. In 1987, he became the first 40-year-old to hit 30 home runs.

The Detroit Tigers released him after the 1988 season, even though he led the team with 22 homers.

“They told me my bat was slowing down,” Evans said. “I told them, ‘If my bat is slowing down, what happened to the younger guys?'”

Evans stuck around for one more season, with the Braves, but finally called it a career at 42.

Pitchers have long been able to sustain success into their 40s. Roger Clemens and Nolan Ryan are recent examples, but the tradition goes back. Warren Spahn won the Cy Young Award at 42 by going 23-7 with a 2.60 earned-run average.

Starting pitchers, though, have the advantage of rest between starts. A hitter? That’s a rarity. Only the occasional player like Evans can defy the laws of baseball gravity.

To this day, Evans thinks he could have kept going.

“People say, ‘When did you retire?'” he said. “Well, I haven’t. They just wouldn’t give me another uniform.”