Last year Yankee Rookie Aaron Judge won the ‘Home Run Derby’ at the All Star game in Miami.

In 1959 the Home Run Derby was born and might be considered the very first reality tv show.  It featured head-to-head competition with future Hall of Famers seeing who could hit the most home runs and advance to the next round.

St. Henry’s (Wendelin) Wally Post appeared on several of those shows.  Thanks to Post and others who appeared, the HRD is one of the highlights of the All Star weekend almost sixty years later.

Mercer County was well represented by Post, one of the all-time great athletes to represent it in MLB.

In a biography posting about Wally Post, St. Henry Coach  Charles Karcher talked about his freshman’s first high school home run:

“We were playing in Houston, Ohio, about 25 miles from St. Henry. There was an embankment in left field that led to the highway. Nobody ever hit a ball out there. Wally did….He got all of it. It went about 400 feet.”

If your baseball fan you will enjoy the two posts below.

Filmed in California for 3 weeks in December of 1959, the series aired in syndication from January 9 to July 2, 1960 and helped inspire the Home Run Derby event that is now held the day before the annual Major League Baseball All-Star Game. ESPN staged a revival of the show in 1989.

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