It is always sad to hear about the death of a ballplayer who, as a youth, you admired.

Sports reports on May 15 indicated Harmon Killebrew had decided to end his fight against esophageal cancer and was entering hospice care. The end was near, but it came really quick when the former Minnesota Twins slugger and Hall of Famer died two days later at age 74.

I can recall when the Idaho native broke in as a teenaged third baseman with the old Washington Senators in 1955 and some of the tape-measure home runs he hit at ancient Griffith Stadium in the late 1950s. Those were the days long before steroids when fencebusters such as Killebrew, as one radio announcer put it, made their bodies bigger with cheeseburgers and milk shakes.