One of my rules of baseball fandom is that it’s cool any time an Oriole has a chance to win something cool. It’s a lot of fun that they had five players end up making the All-Star roster and it’s a lot of fun that one of those players, Gunnar Henderson, is participating in the Home Run Derby tonight.
There are some real stakes to the derby, with a $2.5 million prize pool, of which the winner takes home $1 million. The money might mean the most to Henderson, who is the only participant who hasn’t yet at least hit his salary arbitration years.