It’s Sunday, The Perfect Day To Enjoy Some Cool Dingers

More than any other type of highlight, a cool home run resonates with me deeply, without the need of any context of how a particular game is going. It's why I follow the wildly satisfying MLB HR Videos account on Twitter, after all. It makes sense, on a base level: A deep home run is all about the noise and the sights and not really about what it means for, say, the Mets when Javy Báez yolks one a bajillion—444, to be exact—feet.

I was looking around for things to blog about this Sunday, but then the power hitters of Major League Baseball decided for me: I was going to write about dingers. Specifically, I was going to write about three massive whacks that all occurred within 10 minutes of each other. It wasn't just Báez's homer, which did, in fact, put the Mets up 3-2 in the bottom of the fourth. It was also Luis Robert, stepping up in the bottom of the first during a Sunday afternoon intra-Chicago Cubs-White Sox game and crushing a 2-0 sinker on the inside of the plate to the moon.

And it was Atlanta's Jorge Soler, who caught an 87-mph hanger and walloped it into the second deck against the Giants:

That all of these home runs have that satisfying wood-on-ball sound that only comes from 400 foot-plus dingers is a happy coincidence. That they all occurred in short succession from each other on what is a sleepy Sunday afternoon is nothing short of a gift. Even though I have fallen off my pre-season dedication to the last-place Marlins, this season has been defined, in my own personal realm, by ginormous home runs. Chief among those is, of course, the ones from Shohei Ohtani, but following the aforementioned Twitter home runs account has led to me keeping up with baseball solely by the sound of a bat making flush contact.

All home runs are cool; that's just a reality. In the time since I started writing this, there have been six more home runs across the majors, and I'm sure there will be more by the time this gets published. I watch all of those videos, waiting for one that makes me wish I was at a ballpark, ready to hear the crack and the cheers that come with a particularly notable bomb. The three above will likely be joined by other long drives throughout the day, and there's no better way to relax on this particular Sunday than to keep searching for the next thump of a homer. For about ten minutes, three games in three different cities across the country delivered what I wanted, and that is a delight unmatched by most other sports.