Look, if I’m being honest, my original conceit here was to rank every All-Star by how cool they are. Like, Shohei Ohtani and Tim Anderson: incredibly cool! Mark Melancon and Lance Lynn: not as cool! But then I looked at the All-Star rosters and realized I have no idea how cool Teoscar Hernandez is, or Jesse Winker, or Gregory Soto. I did not want to do the world an injustice by creating Official Cool Rankings without doing adequate research. That would be a disaster.
Fortunately, Pete Alonso showed up last night and hit a whole lot of dingers, and that really bailed me out. Thanks, Pete!
Alonso had by far the most impressive first round of the night, but that wasn’t what convinced me he was going to win. I’ve watched plenty of Home Runs Derby over the years (and also not watched when I didn’t need to hear Chris Berman say “back” around 2,000 times in a single evening), and I’ve seen impressive single rounds before. Josh Hamilton, for example, hit 28 in the first round in 2008, but then only 3 in the finals, to lose to Justin Morneau. David Wright hit 16 in the first round in 2006 to lead the pack, and lost to Ryan Howard. Just in 2019, Vlad Jr. hit 29 in the first round — second place was 25 and Alonso hit just 14, though he stopped after beating Carlos Santana’s 13 — and Alonso beat him in the finals. It can happen.
It was when Ohtani went into his swing-off with Juan Soto that it seemed certain that Alonso would win. Ohtani was visibly tired as he swatted his many impressive dingers, while Soto was putting everything he had into hitting balls as far as he could. Meanwhile, Alonso had been hitting balls way, way out with almost no visible effort. It was a staggering contrast. Salvador Perez, who was Alonso’s opponent in the first round, hit a wildly impressive 28 homers, but on the broadcast they were busy talking to Alonso, and besides, 28 wasn’t really that close to Alonso’s 35. He was always going to win.
When you watch a football game, a great quarterback or running back can take over the game, becoming a dominant force who will be unstoppable as he takes his team down the field. In basketball, you’ll see the same thing from Damian Lillard, for example, when he just wills his way to scoring on every possession. Baseball has that too, but really only for pitchers. A hitter doesn’t come up that often, and when he does, the pitcher can pitch around him. Jacob deGrom, meanwhile, gets the ball, strikes you out, gets the ball back, and strikes the next guy out. Baseball just doesn’t have that kind of dominant narrative-driving performance on the offensive side, and when it does it kinda feels like something the opposing pitcher is doing wrong.
Except in the Home Run Derby.
The Home Run Derby is the only baseball-adjacent event in which a hitter can dominate through sheer willpower like that quarterback, or like Dame does. Last night, Pete Alonso saw Trey Mancini hit 22 homers in 3 minutes in the final round, slightly outdid him over the first two minutes, and then hit 6 straight dingers during his bonus time to win with 30 seconds remaining. Once he hit the first, you knew it was over, as he hit the next, and the next, and the next, and the next, and the next just as effortlessly as he had his first shots of the night. Alonso wasn’t just made to win this event. He was made to dominate it.
It’s worth noting that even with his 74 homers on the night and 17 regular season homers on the year, Pete Alonso isn’t having that great of a season. His 121 wRC+ is about the same as Mike Yastrzemski’s, and, just sticking with the Giants, it’s worse than that of Darin Ruf, Steven Duggar, and Lamonte Wade Jr, not to mention the Poseys, Belts, Crawfords, and Longorias of the world. His 0.7 fWAR is just a tenth of a win better than Austin Slater’s 0.6, and Slater has had 109 fewer plate appearances. So if a hitter could take over a regular baseball game, it’s entirely likely that that guy wouldn’t be Pete Alonso.
But the beauty of the Home Run Derby is that it doesn’t matter what he’s not doing this year. What matters is what he did last night. Pete Alonso hit an abslute ton of dingers, and he made it look easy, and nobody had a real chance to beat him. It was the kind of thing that you’ll remember for a while, because it was fun. Fun is the point of sports, after all, so even though it didn’t affect anything in the playoff picture or record books, watching Alonso mash dingers was still absolutely worthwhile.