dingers Page 2 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Here's Vlad Guerrero Jr. Practicing For The Home Run Derby, Because What Else Could You Possibly Need?
Baseball got it absolutely right when it made sure Toronto’s rookie slugger Vladimir Guerrero Jr. would be swinging his bat in next week’s Home Run Derby, even if his debut season hasn’t quite produced the eye-popping numbers everyone expected. Baby Vlad’s eight homers in 231 plate appearances may n...

Mighty Pirates Masher Josh Bell Is Going To Be Fun As Hell In The Home Run Derby
Six of eight names have been announced for the 2019 Home Run Derby, to be held next Monday night. The field does not yet include Shohei Ohtani, which is frankly an outrage. The good news is, the field does include Pirates masher Josh Bell, who is rounding into peak form exactly in time....

Lourdes Gurriel Jr.'s Second Home Run Interrupted A Replay Of His First Home Run
Lourdes Gurriel Jr.—one of Toronto’s many sons of former players—has been a rare bright spot on an otherwise mediocre Blue Jays squad. An example of just how great the 25-year-old can be came on Friday in a 6-2 win against the Royals, when Toronto’s feed could not keep up with the highlights he was ...

Enrique Hernandez Gets Heckled, Smacks Home Run, Blows Kisses At Hecklers
The Rockies were already down one run late in Thursday’s game, and then some doofuses behind home plate had to go ahead and motivate Enrique Hernandez to put them in a deeper hole. Bad idea!...

It Is Time Now To Demand That MLB Invite Shohei Ohtani To The Home Run Derby
Shohei Ohtani smoked another big home run Thursday, a sizzling shot to straightaway center against the puny Oakland Athletics. It was his 10th dinger of the season, and his seventh in the month of June, a period during which he’s also hit for the cycle and driven his slugging percentage up from .345...

Tommy La Stella's Blessed Season Continues With Leadoff Inside-The-Park Dinger
It is now late June, which means if you can’t at least feign excitement about a leadoff inside-the-park home run in an interleague baseball game, you are staring down a summer of relatively slim pickings, VAR-marred World Cup soccer notwithstanding. Please, before you reduce yourself to hunting for ...

Todd Frazier Upset He Hit Home Run Instead Of Deep Fly-Out
The Mets have been having an off day in the sense that they’re actually on the winning side of an embarrassing rout for once. Of course, such breaks in normalcy are bound to happen when the weather is on your side. Such was the case in the top of the third when Todd Frazier from Toms River, N.J. was...

Nomar Mazara Broke His Own Home Run Record With A 505-Foot Bomb
Less than 24 hours after MLB commissioner Rob Manfred finally acknowledged that this year’s batch of baseballs might in some way, shape or form be contributing to the league’s historic home run pace—it’s not that the balls are juiced, the “pill” inside the ball is providing less drag—a home run dist...

This Is Not The Best Way To Try And Catch A Home-Run Ball
Every baseball fan who buys tickets in the outfield dreams of exactly one thing: catching a home run ball hit by Seattle Mariners catcher Tom Murphy. With that goal so close to his grasp in the fifth inning of Monday night’s Royals-Mariners game, it’s understandable that an overexcited Ichiro suppor...
![Shohei Ohtani's Superpowers Are Slowly But Surely Returning [Update]](https://images.deadspin.com/tr:w-900/glimirjxlxsei4gpdlsg.jpg)
Shohei Ohtani's Superpowers Are Slowly But Surely Returning [Update]
Shohei Ohtani has been having a ho-hum season as a hitter, entering Thursday batting .256 with a mediocre .775 OPS in 133 plate appearances, with seven home runs and just eight total extra base hits. The good news is, his power seems to be picking up. Ohtani has now socked five homers in his last ni...

Which Of These Two Battered Pitchers Suffered The More Humiliating Sequence?
Phillies pitcher Jerad Eickhoff got the rudest of welcomes in his start Monday night in Philadelphia, against the Arizona Diamondbacks. A first-pitch leadoff home run is deflating; allowing back-to-back leadoff dingers is downright demoralizing; serving up back-to-back-to-back taters to open up a st...

Madison Bumgarner Gets Roasted To Hell By Max Muncy For Playing Dinger Cop
Madison Bumgarner is a good pitcher and a marvelous baseball player, but what he also is is a great big diaper baby. Few pitchers in all of baseball are as likely as Bumgarner to express their sensitivity to the humiliation of allowing a home run by shouting unwritten code commands at triumphant bat...

Max Kepler Kept Calling Trevor Bauer's Bluff
Twins outfielder Max Kepler was fantastic in Thursday’s 5-4 win over Cleveland as he went 4-for-4 with three home runs and a walk. There are two ways to look at this performance, and they’re not mutually exclusive. You could say that Kepler had a hell of a night, and you could say that opposing pitc...

Dodgers' Will Smith Launches One To Bel Air For Walk-Off Win Against Philadelphia
Dodgers catcher Will Smith is not from West Philadelphia, neither born nor raised, and it’s not clear whether the playground was where he spent most of his days, but on Saturday he was certainly chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool while playing some baseball outside of the....101 Freeway? Whelp,...

Marlins Cast-Off Derek Dietrich Is Now A Mashing God For The Reds
Derek Dietrich came to the Cincinnati Reds over the winter via a minor league contract, after playing the first six years of his career with the Miami Marlins. This all transpired with very little fanfare, in part because Dietrich has never been an especially consequential player. Before now, that i...

Daniel Vogelbach Hit A Homer So Meaty It Could Feed A Family Of Four
Look at the faces. No, not at the mugs of the guy at the plate or the guy on the mound, although you’ll find expressions of optimism and helplessness, respectively. Look into the stands, and gaze at all the “O”s on those fans’ faces, their expressions turning them into some kind of poorly organized ...

Cavan Biggio Proves There's Enough Room In Toronto For Two Dinger-Mashing Sons Of Cooperstown Greats
The Toronto Blue Jays made history on Friday when they called up Cavan Biggio to the Majors. If Cavan’s last name sounds familiar to you, it’s because Cavan is the son of Astros legend Craig Biggio. As a result of that connection, the Blue Jays became the first team in Major League history to have t...

The Orioles Should Consider Getting A Restraining Order Against Gleyber Torres
Gleyber Torres socked a solo dinger in the fifth inning of Wednesday’s Yankees-Orioles game, a muscular, opposite-field job that just cleared the Camden Yards scoreboard. The blast put the Yankees up 7–2; they’d go on to win 7–5. There was nothing particularly special or noteworthy about this home r...

Mashing Titan Josh Bell Sends Another Worthless Baseball Screaming Into Hell
Friends and dinger lovers, rejoice! The mighty works of Josh Bell continue unabated into the summer. In the second inning of Wednesday night’s Rockies-Pirates game, foolish mortal Jon Gray left a puny 87-mile-per-hour changeup up in the zone, and Bell promptly sent it to the Cenobites for an eternit...

Not Surprisingly, It's Bad News When The Words "Orioles" And "Dingers" And "Record" Appear In The Same Sentence
Home runs are up across baseball. The woeful Baltimore Orioles will not be the only team whose pitchers give up what in previous eras would’ve been considered nauseating dinger totals. Still, statistics like this, courtesy of Eddie Matz of ESPN, continue to be appalling, at least in part for how suc...