Julio Franco doesn’t understand all the fuss.

He hits one home run, and suddenly everybody he knows is calling. The Hall of Fame is asking for souvenirs. And his feat remains the talk of baseball more than a week later, with everyone marveling at how the “old man” keeps doing it.

“You get tired of the whole subject,” Franco said, “looking at age.”

While he may not like people going on and on about how old he is – no, he didn’t wear a flannel uniform – he’d better get used to it. At 47, he’s defying the aging process, doing things guys half his age can’t manage.

He’s not the only one, either. Look around the majors this first month of the season, and you’ll see plenty of geezers showing up the kids. The boys of this summer have gray in their hair and miles under their belts.

Greg Maddux, who turned the big 4-0 on April 14, has won his first five starts for the first time in his career, and leads the majors with a 1.35 earned-run average. Tom Glavine, also 40, is among the NL leaders in strikeouts. At 43, Jamie Moyer is still good enough to be the Seattle Mariners’ opening-day starter.

Curt Schilling, who doesn’t join the 40 club until Nov. 14, leads the AL in strikeouts, and ranks near the top in innings pitched and ERA.

The New York Mets' Julio Franco follows the flight of a home run. Franco homered April 20 in San Diego.

Three months shy of his 42nd birthday and battling a tender, surgically repaired knee, a swollen left elbow and continuing questions about steroids, Barry Bonds homered twice in as many days this week. That brings him within three of catching Babe Ruth for second place on the all-time home run list.

Steve Finley has three triples with his 41-year-old legs. So does Kenny Lofton, though he’s a relative baby. He’ll only be 39 on his next birthday, May 31.

“Just because I’m 40-plus, there’s no one in this game telling me I’ve got to quit,” said Moyer, who has won 205 games in 21 seasons. “As long as I feel like I am able to contribute to building a winning team and I have my health, why not?”

The average major leaguer this year is 29.82 years old, and the Elias Sports Bureau said there only were 17 players who are 40 or over. With 855 players on active rosters or the disabled list, that works out to about 2 percent of the entire league.

But the old guys are making their numbers felt.

“If you’re physically fit and take care of yourself, you should be better later in your career. I had my best year before I retired,” said Mets manager Willie Randolph, who hit .327 with 54 RBIs in 1991, his second-to-last season in the majors.

“You should get better if you keep yourself in shape and still have passion for the game,” Randolph said. “That’s why you see guys playing longer.”

Still, it’s one thing to be playing in a beer league after you hit 40, and quite another to be competing against the best players in the world, most of whom aren’t even 30.

“It used to really be an anomaly to see a huge population of (older) athletes in any sport,” said William J. Evans, the chief of the Nutrition, Metabolism and Exercise Laboratory at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

“Training and nutrition have really helped the older athlete,” added Evans, who also is a research scientist.