The Ding Dong Challenge: Mike Trout is still really good at hitting dingers

Welcome to the Ding Dong Challenge, a game were we try and correctly predict who will hit the most home runs in a given week, keep score throughout the entire season and win a free, awesome t-shirt. Here’s last week’s report card and this week’s list of “elites”. If you want to play, just pick one player from the “elites” and two players from the “everyone else” category (which is just everyone who’s not elite), then list your team in the comments. The sooner you create your team, the better as you only get the homers from when your team is posted till the end of the week.

As someone who is still learning his way through the world of baseball, I like this game because a) picking an everyone else forces me to learn names that I otherwise wouldn’t know and b) I learn things each week about the players people pick. Want to know what I learned this week? Mike Trout can still hit dingers. Is this a fact I already knew? Yes, but it’s always a nice reminder that Trout is still the best baseball player in both the fake and the real game.

A big week for Nolan Arenado, not so much in terms of production (although two homers is nothing to scoff at) but in terms of being by far and away the most popular player last week. He was on four different teams last week and luckily for all those teams, he produced. Would have been a real bummer for everyone if he’d had a bagel week.

A very depressing week for Giancarlo Stanton and Charlie Blackmon who did bagel this week. In fact, both got knocked out of the Elites for this week so if there’s ever a time to capitalize on their poor performance, it’s now! I’ve said this before, Stanton is someone who I know hits a lot of homers but I just don’t feel like we’re really seen that so far this season.

Anyways, here’s your perfect lineup from last week:

Elite: Mike Trout (4)
Everyone Else 1: Tim Anderson (4)
Everyone Else 2: Scooter Gennett (3)

That Scooter guy still hanging around the dingers it seems...

Anyone not on this list is an Everyone Else. Reminder: you pick one Elite and two Everyone Else each week so choose wisely! Leave your team in the comments if you want to play this week (and feel free to leave your twitter handle as we’ll give a shoutout each week to the previous week’s winner).