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The 2017 campaign has been an unprecedented one for the home run. Both by overall totals and by rate, no other season rivals the present one by that measure.

The causes are manifold: a juiced ball, smaller stadia, a greater effort among hitters to hit the ball in the air, etc. A number of questions have been and will be asked about the implications of this season. The present dispatch concerns only one of them, though — namely, who (if anyone) will serve as the lasting face of this year’s record home-run campaign?

Allow me to begin by saying: I don’t care. Or, more precisely: I don’t care about the answer, per se. If it’s important to someone that Giancarlo Stanton forever remain the lasting image of 2017, then that’s fine. The prospect of formulating and presenting an argument to the contrary is nauseating.

Of some interest, however — as a means to exercising the critical faculties, if nothing else — is the variety of criteria one might establish to arrive at a reasonable answer. For those who are concerned with certainty, perhaps this smacks of relativism and sounds awful. For those among us who are resigned to the fact that reality is a myth and truth a moving target, then it’s probably acceptable.

Below, I’ve attempted to summarize the various criteria one might employ to determine the face of this record home-run season. First, however, I’d like to present a list of four players who merit the distinction for one reason or another. Depending on one’s preferences, any of these four is the correct answer.

They are (in alphabetical order):

• Yonder Alonso
• Matt Olson
• Jose Ramirez
• Giancarlo Stanton

Those are the results, basically. The process by which on might arrive at those results is detailed below.

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James Shields is the oldest part of a young and rebuilding White Sox ballclub. For that reason, he’s easy to overlook. Even fans of the team itself would presumably rather focus on, say, Yoan Moncada or Lucas Giolito or Reynaldo Lopez. Those guys, and others — they could be around the next time the White Sox make the playoffs. Shields, almost certainly not. He might not even still be in the game.

So this isn’t a tale with widespread implications. This isn’t a story that’s going to change how you think about the broader baseball landscape. All this is is a story of a pitcher who’s come back from the brink of professional extinction. James Shields will turn 36 a few days before Christmas, yet over the last couple months, he’s changed the way that he pitches. Shields still has something left to give after all; all he had to do was alter everything, at a time when it would’ve been easy to wave the white flag.

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Chris Sale has obviously been the pitching story in Boston this year, as the team’s first-year ace surpassed expectations and stabilized a group that saw David Price miss most of the year and Rick Porcello go backwards once again. But in Sale’s shadows, Drew Pomeranz has also been quietly excellent, and is one of the main reasons the Red Sox are almost certainly going to win the AL East this week.

Among AL starters, Pomeranz ranks 5th in ERA-, 11th in FIP-, and 10th in xFIP-. His season line is a near identical match for that of Justin Verlander, for example. For all the heat Dave Dombrowski took for giving up Anderson Espinoza to acquire Pomeranz last summer, he’s been more than worth the price thus far.

But, of course, one of the reasons people weren’t thrilled about the trade is that Pomeranz hasn’t proven to be a durable starter, and there are always concerns about his health in the postseason, when the Red Sox need him most. And once again, as the calendar turns to fall, the Red Sox can’t be sure whether they can trust Pomeranz with the ball next week.

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Last night, in a game that meant little, the Astros clobbered the Rangers. It made sense, because the Astros are a very good baseball team, and the Rangers are not. Maybe the most interesting thing happened early on, before the clobbering part was underway. One at-bat before Carlos Gomez took inexplicable offense to nothing, Joey Gallo stepped in, and he looked at the following defense.

We’ve seen our share of aggressive shifting. We’ve seen infields stack the left side, and the right side. We saw what the Diamondbacks did to DJ LeMahieu. Still, that Astros shift for Gallo is something else. Depending on how you word your definitions, either the Astros had four infielders on the right side, or they had two infielders on the right side, with a five-man outfield. The positioning sort of blurs the traditional lines. But, these days, tradition doesn’t matter for much. Defenses are just trying to get as many outs as possible. For Gallo, this defense just might have been perfect.

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If you’re a regular reader of the site, you probably heard this phrase, uttered the day after All-Star rosters were announced. In case you’re not, or you simply forgot about it, Daniel Murphy was upset that his teammate, Anthony Rendon, didn’t land a spot on the National League All-Star team. Someone asked him why. This was his response.
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With less than a week remaining in the regular season, a number of end-of-year player awards appear to lack a decisive winner. With so few games left, a decisive winner is unlikely to emerge.

In the American League MVP race, for example, you couldn’t have a greater contrast between the top two candidates. Jose Altuve is the smallest position player in the majors, Aaron Judge the largest. They possess different offensive skills and different defensive homes. Yet these two very different players had produced exactly 7.3 WAR entering play Monday. Lurking behind Altuve and Judge is the game’s best position player, Mike Trout. After losing time to injury, Trout isn’t the favorite. He’s been excellent when healthy, however.

The American League Cy Young race might be even more fascinating. After Chris Sale seemed to have run away with the award by the end of July, Corey Kluber has made it very much a contested race thanks to a remarkable series of performances since he returned from the disabled list in June. How one chooses between the two might depend on which version of pitcher WAR one consults: either the FIP-based version (denoted at the site just as WAR) or the one calculated by runs allowed (RA9-WAR).

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As I write this, six teams have already reached 90 wins. Another three teams still could. Four teams have won at least 60% of their games, which is the highest total for the league in more than a decade, and that doesn’t include the Yankees, who have baseball’s second-highest run differential. It also doesn’t include the Cubs, who last year were one of the better teams in recent memory, and who this year picked up Jose Quintana, among a few others. The Dodgers, who are great, added Yu Darvish. The Astros, who are great, added Justin Verlander. The Nationals, who are great, added Sean Doolittle, Ryan Madson, and Brandon Kintzler. And so on. The top of the league is always good, by definition, but this year the best teams seem particularly strong. Particularly talented, and particularly deep. This year has marked a step away from what had been a trend toward greater parity. Now the parity is simply among the elite.

The great teams are going to the playoffs. That’s what’s supposed to happen. The Twins, also, look like they’re going to the playoffs. It’s not yet locked up, but it’s just about there, with the Twins looking ahead to a date in New York. Playoff entry, of course, is everything, because each of the final 10 teams gets a chance to win it all. It’s inarguably true that the 2017 Twins could win the World Series in a month. The question is, would that be a good thing or a bad thing? It’s a question I’m actually posing to you, but not before I go over each side.

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Episode 770
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the serious guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

A reminder: FanGraphs’ Ad Free Membership exists. Click here to learn more about it and share some of your disposable income with FanGraphs.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 77 min play time.)

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