Happy Monday and welcome to our first 2026 MLB Dinger Derby update email. I’ll try to send one out towards the end of each month, time permitting. As always, the standings and some other information can be found online at dingerderby.ca.
It’s been a pretty wild start to the season, with several surprise players launching decent numbers of bombs all over the league. There are, however, some familiar names at the top of the HR leaderboard, including a Mike Trout renaissance to start the season. Fourth group sluggers Yordan Alvarez and Muni Murakami are our leaders after the first month or so of games.
After a week where a few players finally got on the board (including Spencer Torkelson who didn’t homer until Wednesday, and has homered in every game since), there are only a couple players without: Jackson Chourio (who hasn’t played a game yet) and Fernando Tatis (who has played 27 games, oooof).
Last season’s HR champ, Cal Raleigh is finally getting going, dumping all over 4 in the past week. The aforementioned Torkelson isn’t the only one with all of his dingers coming over the last 7 days, as Seiya Suzuki knocked out 4 to get himself on the board. Expect things to heat up with the weather.
It’s not much of a surprise that the only players that weren’t selected were in groups 1 and 4. Group 1 tends to be top heavy with the selections so Kurtz, Alonso, Greene and Suarez didn’t make their way on any rosters. Neto, Caglione, Story and Langford weren’t picked in the final group. I’ll touch on the most popular picks in the next update.
Newcomer William Keough is out to the early lead with an impressive 78 dingers, and he had built up almost a 10 point lead on second place, but 2023 Champ, Jason Hunwicks has since closed the gap to 4. In what can only be described as a small miracle, both my teams round out the top 4, closely behind Jason. I don’t think I’ve sniffed the top 5 since I won almost a decade ago. Harry Shpelfogel (I guarantee I spell this about 4 different ways the longer he sticks around the top of the leaderboard) and Smoothie, find themselves in a tie for 5th, rounding out the current teams in payout positions. You can find the payout on the sidebar of the Standings page.
I won’t mention the bottom of the standings for now, as it’s a long season and far too early to start crapping on them. They’re all really only one good week away from being close to mid-pack.