MORGANTOWN — They still tell the story down in Charleston about the day Dave Parker stepped up to the plate and hit a home run that wound up in Cincinnati.

The thing is, when you tell it to people, they look at you quizzically, like “Man, I know the man could perform miracles, but a home run that went all the way from Charleston to Cincinnati? C’mon. Maybe to Louisville, but not Cincinnati.”

Of course, it didn’t really happen. At least not all the way in the air.

See, Parker played half a season in Charleston, 1973, and deep behind the right-fence in Watt Powell Park there was a train track and the story goes that Parker hit one on this day that flew clear into the coal car on the train and it wound in Cincinnati.

Certainly, I hope it was true because Dave Parker was supposed to do things other people couldn’t do.

Don’t take my word for it. He would tell you.

Take that afternoon in 1978 when Parker, who died tragically at 74 on Saturday after a long fight with Parkinson’s Disease and a month before he would have been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.J., was talking with someone about the chase for his second consecutive batting title.

It was then that he uttered his most famous quote.

“When the leaves turn brown, I’ll be wearing the batting crown.”

And when they did turn brown, he was wearing that batting crown with a .334 batting average along with 30 home runs, 117 RBI and the National League’s MVP title.

It was nice, though, that this famous minor league home run would connect him with Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. He was from Cincinnati, a high school phenom from Courter Technical High School. The Pirates had drafted him in the 14th round of the draft and so it was that his professional career began there and blossomed there while also seemingly turning to ashes there.

He was a big part of the Pirates roster as it morphed from the early 1970s “Lumber Company” with Willie Stargell, Roberto Clemente, Al Oliver, Richie Hebner, Manny Sanguillen, Bob Robertson and Dave Cash into the 1979 World Champion “We Are Family” Pirates.

If the Lumber Company was Stargell and Clemente’s team, “We Are Family” was Stargell’s and Parker’s.

Stargell, of course, was the beloved “Pops” and Parker “The Cobra”, a nickname bestowed upon by the great play-by-play broadcaster Bob Prince.

He wasn’t the kind of guy to shy away from a nickname like that.

“When Bob Prince called me ‘The Cobra’, I felt like that name fit. I was quick, and when I struck, I made sure people felt it,” he said.

You have to think about the role Parker played in the Pirates’ history to understand his real place in the hierarchy of a franchise that Stargell and Ralph Kiner and Clemente and the great Honus Wagner, who a century after he played still is considered in baseball as the greatest, shortstop ever.

See, that time in Charleston was the final prep before they made him a Pirate, the man who would replace Clemente in right field.

You needed big feet to fill those shoes but that wasn’t all Parker had that was big.

At 6-5 and 230 he was a giant of the pre-steroid era and he had that ego to match, to say nothing of a throwing arm that was everything Clemente’s was.

His flair, too, could match Clemente’s. Some franchises have a player of Clemente’s talents and take decades to replace them. It took the Pirates a year after Clemente’s tragic death in an air crash while on a New Year’s mercy mission in the Caribbean to begin filling the void.

Parker, with Stargell, set the tone in one of the wildest clubhouses the sport ever saw, forever getting into it back and forth with the infielder Phil Garner in mock verbal battles that became centerpieces of what the “We Are Family” Pirates were.

“Dave was 6-7 and a gift to the Planet Athlete and we had a wonderful five years together,” Garner. Once explained “But most of it, you would have thought we were dead enemies because of the barbs that would go back and forth among us every day. Guys would come to the clubhouse early just to listen and see what Dave and I were going to do. It was unbelievable.

“Oh, yeah, I got my shots in. And thank God Dave was a gentle giant because he would have killed me with one swipe of his big ole paws.”

Parker did not exit Pittsburgh as the hero Clemente did, though, leaving after 11 years as he became embroiled in the Pittsburgh drug scandal, heading elsewhere.

Where? He went looking for that home run ball in his hometown of Cincinnati.

In four years there, after a decade with the decaying Pirates in Pittsburgh, he re-emerged as hero.

By 1985 he had built himself back into an All-Star, finishing second in the MVP vote while hitting .312 with 34 home runs while leading the National League in doubles with 42 and RBI with 117.

His Pittsburgh problems worked against him over the years as he passed over by the Hall of Fame, but he had re-invented himself and then fought gallantly and bravely against the savages of Parkinson’s.

Oddly, Ali was diagnosed with the disease in 1984, the year Parker left Pittsburgh.

Both would win back the popularity they deserved as human beings in the years they had left, but it wasn’t sympathy but instead their character rose above any controversy.

That made this a bittersweet weekend, for as in Cincinnati they celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Big Red Machine of 1975, another of their local heroes there in Dave Parker died.

It had to take a little bit of the edge off the celebration, doing it in Cincinnati without Pete Rose, Joe Morgan and Sparky Anderson and in the shadow of the death of Dave Parker.