The Ding Dong Challenge: Mike Trout let everyone down

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.

So as many of you probably noticed there was no ding dong challenge last week. I was busy and didn’t have the time to throw it all together. I promise I have a good excuse:

But I’m back now. The wedding and honeymoon are over and now it’s time to get back to a lot of big, long dongs. The best way to celebrate a marriage.

So housekeeping, since there were no lineups last week, I’ve decided to take the lineups submitted for Week 11 and drag them through Week 12 of the challenge. This means double dingers! Let’s see what those numbers look like...

Everyone picked Mike Trout this extended week and everyone got more or less let down. Trout knocked home only two dingers in a two week span. That’s like a dinger a week! Meanwhile, my boy Just Dingers Martinez went yard four times over the last two weeks and helped me get back on track, which is exactly what I wanted him to do.

Big week for Eric Thames and Matt Carpenter who matched Martinez’s output with four ding dongs.

Heath and Brian, get back on the wagon.

And of course for those curious, here’s the perfect lineup from the last two weeks:

Elite: Aaron Judge (6)
Everyone Else 1: Avisail Garcia (8)
Everyone Else 2: Alex Bregman (6)

That’s 20 frickin points right there. *Wide eyed emoji*

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).