By Morris Phillips
MINNEAPOLIS–It wasn’t immediately apparent that Yoenis Cespedes was at his swinging best on Monday. But when faced with a “swing off” to break a tie with teammate Josh Donaldson after the first round, Cespedes sent a pair of drives into the upper deck that clear announced the defending home run champs’ presence.
From that point in the competition to its conclusion, the champ was the champ.
Cespedes went on to club nine homers to get past Baltimore’s Adam Jones, then seven more in the semis to best Toronto’s Jose Bautista, and nine in the finals in his matchup with the National League’s Todd “Toddfather” Frazier of the Reds.
“I was able to get past the first round, then re-gather myself and that allowed me to then go on and win the title,” Cespedes said through ESPN’s Pedro Gomez, who translated Yoenis’ answers into English.
Cespedes became the first back-to-back champion in the Derby since Ken Griffey Jr. in 1998 and 1999.
The defending champ got little resistance from his competition in the final three rounds; Jones hit just three, Bautista after a bye from his outstanding first round sat for over an hour and hit only four shots in his matchup with Cespedes. And Frazier could only muster one in the finals, the equivalent of a sweep in the World Series, so to speak.
While others struggled with the cool Minneapolis night air, occasional rain which delayed the competition’s start by over a half an hour, Cespedes benefitted from being the last competitor to bat in the first round, and then the first in the final three rounds.
Cespedes’ truncated schedule seemed to allow him to stay warm while first round leaders Bautista and Miami’s Giancarlo Stanton fell off dramatically after waiting more than an hour in between the first round and the semis, where they advanced after receiving a bye in the quarterfinal round.
“It had to let him establish some type of a rhythm,” Oakland teammate Sean Doolittle said of Cespedes’ order in the competition.
Cespedes’ teammate Josh Donaldson like Cespedes managed just three homers in the opening round and that pitted the pair against each other in a swing off. Donaldson appeared to be getting heated up in the matchup with Cespedes but it appeared his swing leveled a bit too late to advance.
“It’s tough in the derby because you need to pull the ball to have success. And as a major league hitter that’s not something that you try to do,” Donaldson said.
Doolittle took the whole competition in from the American League dugout and marveled at both of his teammates in battle. He was equally impressed with Donaldson, who hit 20 home runs to Cespedes’ 14 in the first half of the regular season.
“They put on a pretty good show,” Doolittle said. “It was fun to watch. We thought that they were the two favorites, but with them in the swing off, we knew that one of them would advance.”
The format of the Derby was tweaked with 10 competitors, five from each league, up from the previous eight. The other big change was that hitters were allowed just seven outs, down from ten, to keep the competition moving at brisker pace.
The competition raised $465,000 for Boys & Girls Clubs of America and other charities.
Cespedes was cheered on by Cuban countrymen Yasiel Puig, Aroldis Chapman and Jose Abreu who helped comprise a record haul for the Caribbean country on the big stage of the All-Star game. Amazingly, Puig bowed out of the competition meekly without hitting a home run in the first round.
Afterwards in the press conference for the winner, Cespedes seemed relaxed and assured surrounded by his family, many of whom had endured a harrowing entry to the U.S., a story that was recounted by the Chronicle’s Susan Slusser a year ago. True to her background as a nationally renowned softball player in Cuba, Cespedes’ mother grabbed his bat after the press conference and showed off a pretty nuanced swing.
In this case, like mother like son.
