The Home Run Derby has kinda grown on me. I wasn’t wild about it at first, but that was mainly because they kept trying to do it like the old black-and-white TV version made decades ago. Baseball kept trying to fix it and it never seemed to work.

Look, we’ve left behind the old days of Monday (day off), Tuesday (All-Star Game) and Wednesday (day off) and then resume the second half of the year. Every other sport is trying to find a way to jazz up its highlight weekend and just because baseball is so tradition-riddled, it doesn’t mean the National Pastime can’t do the same.

Baseball has come to find out the the worst thing that can happen is to have nobody talking about you. Two days off sandwiched around an exhibition game wasn’t exactly dripping in momentum. The Home Run Derby is a nice event that gets people interested in the mid-summer showcase. It carries no great significance, but it’s not supposed to.

Basketball seems to try to have as many events as possible — do I really need to see Justin Bieber try to cross over Kevin Hart every year? — and the actual NBA All-Star game is worthless. But Bryce Harper winning in front of the home crowd Monday night seemed to be a nice (and fairly predictable) storyline. But it’s what people will be talking about Tuesday, and maybe beyond.

Unlike football, baseball has to take the best shot from other sports. The Open Championship is this week. Wimbledon just finished. World Cup has been trying to grab its share of the headlines for the last month. Somebody said the Tour de France is going on, but I really have no idea if that’s true. Before you know it, NFL training camps will open and there will be endless updates from Jaguars camp about the injury status of the backup deep snapper.

So that Harper had a moment Monday night had a nice feel to it. It was good for him. And it was good for baseball.