Ryan Howard wins Home Run Derby 2006; I get older with very little to show for it

July 11th, 2006 | Posted by PostmanE

Did you feel the excitement? Did you absorb the rush? Were you able to gather yourself after the storm blew you from your bearings and replaced your previous baseball-watching consciousness with something altogether more enlightened?

Did you - um - hear that Ryan Howard won?

Yes, the Home Run did not fail to dissapoint, and in that, I mean the Home Run dissapointed once again. Perhaps dissapointment is the wrong word. I mean, you know what you’re going to get going in - a bunch of slightly interesting, but mostly boring, bat-to-ball connections with no real tangible impact on anything at all. That expectation doesn’t really make up for the lack of excitement, though; you almost wish someone would put on some sort of crazy ‘obviously this guy’s roiding performance’, just for old times sake. Instead, um, Ryan Howard wins.

The best part of the night, for me, was not the actual flight of the many home runs leaving the park. Instead, it was the pre-Derby speculation that David Ortiz and Ryan Howard were in jeopardy of losing their ability to hit baseballs because particpating in the Derby drastically altered Bobby Abreu’s approach to the game. Seriously, Karl Ravech and the two dwarfs had a serious discussion about this, and the dwarfs were in agreement - Ortiz and Howard are doomed. Abreu is, after all, hitting like 20 points less than what he was before last year’s Derby, which means almost nothing. Or it means that he’s in a pretty long slump that he will one day come out of, or it means that he had a really really good first half last year and has since mailed it in/struggled to regain form.

Whatever the reason, it can not be the Home Run Derby. But we’ll see, I guess, when Ortiz and Howard start whiffing incessantly. Call it the Derby curse. Oh wait, Jayson Stark actually did that. Yikes.

One more quick highlight: There was an anti-steroid commercial at the end of the show last night. No, really. Suprisingly, Jose Canseco was not the pitch man. Dissapointing. Another Home Run Derby, indeed.