The day of the All-Star Game, in the course of a normal conversation, Jayson Stark posed an existential question:

“Was it really worth it for me to stay up until 3 in the morning figuring out how many miles of home runs Vlad Jr. hit in the Home Run Derby?”

Anyone who has read Jayson knows exactly how he answered.

Of course it was!

The total distance of Vlad’s 91 homers, as Jayson revealed in his column on the Derby, was 7.3 miles.

Jayson’s readers probably would have survived with their lives intact if he had not dug up that detail. But Jayson might not have, which tells you all you need to know about why he will be the 2019 recipient of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award Saturday in Cooperstown.

From time to time, aspiring young sports journalists will tell me they want to be this writer or that broadcaster, usually locking in one of the biggest names in the industry. My response is always the same: There is only one.

And that’s how we all feel about Jayson. There is no other baseball writer like him. There will never be another baseball writer like him. And the coolest, most amazing thing about him is that after four decades of baseball writing — Danny Ozark was the manager when Jayson joined the Phillies beat in 1979 — his passion for the game, and ability to see things no one else can, remains unchanged.

Jayson was talking and writing about all of the crazy numbers in baseball long before anyone even heard of analytics, long before OPS and WAR and xWOBA. He does not always use statistics for predictions or even evaluations, though he certainly has a way of telling us why a player might be great — or, in the cases of his legendary Least Valuable Player and Cy Yuk awards, not so great. More than anything, he uses the numbers to tell a story, to illuminate us and, perhaps most of all, to show why baseball is so much fun.

Whenever something weird happens in the game — an occurrence that takes place, oh, about every three minutes nightly — legions of fans, writers and even players seek out Jayson’s perspective. Baseball dared proceed with the 2017 World Series after ESPN let Jayson go, and many of us were lost as Games 2 and 5, two of the craziest games in Series history, unfolded. Mercifully, Jayson burst back into action on Twitter and Facebook, our own Kirk Gibson popping out of the dugout when needed most, and journalistic order was restored.

Jayson is at his best when he is the last person in the press box after a postseason game, his papers and books spread everywhere, searching for one more historical nugget to help put what we just saw in the proper context. He is also at his best breaking down Hall of Fame candidacies, telling us why a neglected player such as Fred McGriff or Todd Helton is deserving. And he is at his best writing his Useless Info columns, a weekly potpourri of the baseball wackiness ensuing in stadiums across North America.

He also is pretty darned good on trends, monthly and midseason recaps, detailed analyses of troubled teams. Oh, and well before Justin Verlander called the baseball a “f—— joke,” Jayson put the ball on trial and determined that the ball is … well, you’ve got to read it.

Sometimes, I wish I could think like Jayson — and sometimes, with all the stuff ping-ponging around his brain, I’m grateful I cannot. But always, I wish I could write like him. Jayson’s writing is conversational, entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny. He doesn’t take himself seriously. But he takes his audience extremely seriously, and considers no detail too small in his service of the reader.

Among his many attributes, Jayson has a knack for engaging relatively obscure veterans who are keen observers of the game, and then elevating them to oracles in his columns. After a long night of October baseball, 99 percent of us will gather in the clubhouse around the star of the game. Jayson will be off in the corner, talking to whoever he has identified as this year’s Corky Miller or Casey Candaele or Skip Schumaker or Mark DeRosa — and naturally, getting the best stuff.

Early in my career, during the late 1980s, I recall Reggie Jackson sitting in the dugout in Oakland, complaining to then-Orioles radio announcer Jon Miller that not enough writers loved the game the way they did. The exchange stuck with me, and over the years I made sure to heed Reggie’s words, no matter what other issues arose with the job (and yes, though we are all incredibly lucky to cover baseball, it is a job, and at times quite a grind).

Jayson not only loves the game, he has an almost childlike fascination with it, an endless curiosity. His naturally sunny disposition, which shines through in his work — that’s him outside of print, too. I remember, years ago, discussing with him a publication that seemingly took glee in others’ misfortunes. And I’ll never forget what he said: “If you’re going to tell me what you don’t like, shouldn’t you also tell me what you do like, too?”

Not only does Jayson tells us what he likes, he makes us like things we did not even know we should like, educating and amusing us along the way. He is a true friend, a great teammate, a dedicated husband and father and, might as well say it one more time, a pretty amazing storyteller, too.

For all those lucky enough to know Jayson and all those lucky enough to read him, Saturday will be a true celebration, a fitting acknowledgment of one of baseball writing’s all-time greats.

As he might put it: Because Jayson.

(Top photo: Alex Trautwig / Getty Images)