I gots to tell ya I cringed big time while watching one of those morning ESPN network talk shows last week while on the elliptical machine. Both talking heads — I can’t remember their forgettable names — offered as how they liked tonight’s All-Star game home run derby more than the game itself.

Well, you got my proxy. I shan’t be watching a second of it. Those taters get seriously devalued as the night progresses.

Besides, given the nature of the game, the mid-summer meeting of baseball’s finest — at least, baseball’s fan favorites — is the only major sports all-star game that actually resembles real competition. My mind still reels at some of Willie Mays’ performances back when. It’s the only one of these affairs that is worth tuning in.

Anyway there is only one true Home Run Derby, that gloriously black and white now kinescoped TV show from around 1960. An announcer who didn’t hyperbolize like Chris Berman. Hall of Famers going 9 innings of long ball. Aaron. Mays. Colavito. Snider. (Need I recite their first names? I don’t think so.) Mantle. Mathews. Jensen. Kaline. Hodges. Banks. Killebrew.

And, the mention of the last two allows me to retell one more time my favorite, and really only, story of being in their presence at the opening of the Louisville Slugger plant and museum on Main Street. Ernie Banks and Harmon Killebrew and a pack of acolytes were walking through the bat making facility.

Killebrew picked up a bat and swung it a few times, asked his fellow Hall of Famer, “Ernie, you like a close grained bat or an opened grained bat?”

“I always liked an open grain,” was Banks’ reply.

“Oh, Ernie, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You always want a closer grain. It generates more power.”

Banks responded, “Well, Harmon, I must know something. I hit 512 home runs.”

– Seedy K