Picking the ideal participants of the 2017 Home Run Derby

Two years ago, the format of the Home Run Derby changed, and I couldn’t roll my eyes enough. Clocks? Brackets? It was the same silly event, just with bells and whistles and keytars and explosions.

It turned out to be awesome. I described it as “HIT EIGHT HOME RUNS or THE BUS EXPLODES,” and I’ll stand by that. There’s an urgency that comes with the dingers now. Apparently, urgent dingers are the best dingers, and the Home Run Derby is far more watchable these days.

That means it’s time to pick the participants for the ideal 2017 Home Run Derby. Aaron Judge has already announced that he’ll participate, but does he make my list of ideal participants? Well, you’ll just have t

OK, yes, he makes the list. And Bonds willing, he’ll make the next 15 lists. He is a Minotaur who crawled out of the pages of a Frank Miller graphic novel about a sentient, vengeful home run, and he lives among us. There is no point to a Home Run Derby without Judge.

Judge has the beef and the brawn, but Bellinger has the swing that can’t be seen with normal cameras. It’s a violent, looping swing, as if he’s trying to hit home runs into the clouds and kill one of the baseball gods, and it moves so quickly that it has more in common with the flapping wings of a hummingbird than any baseball player who came before him.

Yes, I want to see him swing over and over again in a timed format. I want to see if those swings are finite or if he can just keep going until his dad catches on fire on the mound.

Baseball’s most underrated large son. The only thing standing in his way is the all-or-nothing swing that leads to a lot of strikeouts. But guess where that’s not a problem? The danged Home Run Derby, where he can unload on every pitch like it just called him names.

Apropos of nothing, here’s a video of every one of his 2015 home runs, set to that “written in the staaars” song:

That is the worst thing I’ve ever watched three times in a row.

Of course. He’s the hometown hero — the one who will get the biggest cheers — and he’s also Aaron Judge before there was Aaron Judge. This is the original Big Home Run Man, at least of his generation, the obvious heir to Frank Howard.

I wrote about Stanton and why he makes the Home Run Derby necessary, and if you haven’t read it before, I beg you to close the tab on this dumb story and read that one, because I worked hard on it. I began working on it in 2015, but he got hurt, and the wasted words tortured me for a year before he provided the inspiration with a transcendent Home Run Derby.

Or, if you don’t want to read it, I can give you the short version: I got to AT&T Park early enough to see batting practice for all four games of a Giants-Marlins series, and I spent two days in the bleachers and two days on the field, watching only Stanton. He made batting-practice regulars gasp by hitting baseballs that traveled where baseballs should not travel. Close up, everyone on the field gravitated toward him, milling around him, appreciating the show, even though they had every right to be jaded and used to it.

It’s possible that Dee Gordon is forced to orbit Stanton, actually, and that he can’t get away. Will investigate.

This is the most obvious pairing of player and derby since Barry Bonds and the 2007 Giants, except Stanton isn’t a surly weirdo, so he’ll actually do it.

Nope. Just those four. Anything else is a waste of our time. I’ll take questions from the audience about this. Yes, you in the back:

What about George Springer, Khris Davis, Joey Gallo, Jay Bruce, Eric Thames, Ryon Healy, Mark Reynolds, Bryce Harper, Adam Duvall, Corey Dickerson, Edwin Encarnacion, Anthony Rizzo, Yasiel Puig, Paul Goldschmidt, Jose Abreu, Lucas Duda, Todd Frazier, Chris Davis, Nelson Cruz, Gary Sanchez, Matt Kemp, Mike Trout with one hand, or Scooter Gennett?

Good question! Don’t care. Don’t care about any of them, not in the same way that I care about the above four. Davis and Gallo come close, and I’ll watch Harper watching someone doing his laundry, much less attempt to swat dinger after dinger. But I’m still far more interested in Judge, Bellinger, Sano, and Stanton, and I’m scared that anyone else in the pool will futz up the chances of a Judge-Stanton lightning round that we so richly deserve.

A Judge-Stanton final round. With the timer ticking down. I would be for changing the rules to crown the winner based on combined distance of the home runs, and I would also be for a 25-minute final round for each contestant. This is what baseball needs, and this is what we deserve. If you add in someone like Logan Morrison or Justin Smoak, you’re setting yourself up to watch more of either of them than you ever wanted, at the expense of more Judge and more Stanton.

But, ugh, fine. If you’re forcing me to pick five for each league, it would go something like this:

National League

American League

And while I wouldn’t exactly turn off an Ozuna-Springer final round, it would still make me lament for the Stanton-Judge showdown that could have been. This is their destiny — a fight over a river of molten lava that will leave one of them tethered to a mechanical suit for the rest of their lives.

Except you know we’re going to get, like, Jay Bruce. No offense, Jay. You know where we’re coming from.

So give me four players, two in each league, and make them hit dingers until they’re physically incapable of hitting them. This is my ideal Home Run Derby, and I’m pretty sure I’m right on this one.