Residual Yoenis Cespedes Home Run Derby Giddiness Day

This is maybe just because I'm a Bryce Harper fan, but I have a hard time remembering a Home Run Derby field that was more fun than the 2013 model. Not better, necessarily, just more fun. This year's inexplicable veteran addition, Michael Cuddyer, was better than Brandon Inge; the sudden home run champion, Chris Davis, had a better showing than Jose Bautista.

And the finalists were a 20-year-old who was supposed to be baseball's most cartoonish pro wrestling heel but, alas, turned out to be likable, and a guy whose first appearance in front of stateside baseball fans came in the scouting-video equivalent of a particularly melodramatic Home Run Derby.

Granted: You might have to like the Home Run Derby in the first place to get anything out of this one's batch of contestants. In that sense I think it's different from the Slam Dunk Contests it's usual compared to, where the difference between Dwight Howard, frontrunner, and Fred Jones, frontrunner is enough to get people talking about calling the whole thing off again. No matter how interesting the personalities and violent the swings, eventually you're just going to have to enjoy watching baseball players swing at batting-practice fastballs as hard as they can.

Which seems pretty easy, to me, but there's no accounting for taste.