PHOENIX - The Home Run Derby, like seemingly everything in baseball these days, fell to the Red Sox [team stats] vs Yankees. Sox slugger Adrian Gonzalez and Robinson Cano Yankees counterpart tried to inject some life into an otherwise bloated affair with a match head to head in the final last night.
The two each jet 20 homers in the first two rounds to advance to the final, Gonzalez dropped a record of the event with 11 bombs.
“That was a lot of fun,” Gonzalez said. “I had a blast with it. You’re tired by the third round. Cano did an unbelievable job to get to 12 home runs, and he still had four outs left. He just swung the bat great.”
Sox slugger David Ortiz [Statistics] showed that knows how to pick a team. His team attacked with 76 home runs, compared to only 19 for the National League team chosen by Prince Fielder of Milwaukee. If Sox manager Terry Francona be worried? “You saw that?” Ortiz joked. “Tito, look out, man. I’m coming to get your job. I made the right choice. That was an unbelievable show out there by Cano and my teammate, Gonzo. There were a lot of bombs out there. What Cano did was unbelievable. It was enjoyable.”
Added Gonzalez: “We had more than 70, and Cano was still on a roll.”
Cano hit his homer of his father, Joseph, a first big player who threw 23 innings in his career. Gonzalez hit out Indians manager Manny Acta, who came to take the job about 20 minutes before the event after Gonzalez was unable to get either his brother or baseball coach the school to go out and shoot.
Gonzalez led off with nine homers, the highest total of the first round.
Ortiz had a harder time advancing. In the first round, he was struggling with four homers when the event’s emcee, broadcaster Daron Sutton, announced, “Pretend it’s Kevin Gregg on the mound,” in reference to the Orioles closer Ortiz brawled with Friday. Ortiz immediately blasted his fifth homer.
Those five homers left him in a three-way tie with Matt Holliday and Fielder. Ortiz advanced with Fielder in the tiebreaker.
Ortiz was eliminated in the semis with nine total homers, but he did become the event’s all-time leader with 77, three more than Ken Griffey Jr.
And at the end, it came down to New York and Boston.
“I never thought of it as Red Sox vs. Yankees, even though I was going against Gonzalez,” Cano said. “I was focused on winning.”
