Mike Celizic

It’s the only day on baseball’s calendar when no matter how many home runs fly ridiculously long distances, you’ll never hear anyone talking about steroids. For that reason alone, Home Run Derby deserves its reputation as the best part of the All-Star break.

I might have missed a snide column after some bygone derby, but I can’t recall ever seeing anyone complain the next day that the winner might have been cheating. Not when Mark McGwire participated or when Barry Bonds and Jason Giambi won it. The subject wasn't even whispered last year when Josh Hamilton lit up Yankee Stadium with 28 homers in the first round and Justin Mourneau beat him in the finals.

There’s a good reason. Home runs hit during the season count in the game’s sacred record books. But dingers hit in HRD don’t count for anything other than bragging rights.

The object is to hit as many out as possible. I suspect if Major League Baseball decided to juice up the event by letting the participants swing aluminum or carbon-fiber bats, the fans would be delighted. We’d see balls go distances they’d never gone before. We’d see them leave buildings that no baseball had ever departed. We’d be whooping and cheering and asking each other how incredible that last shot was.

So why would anyone even think about steroids? The totals don’t go into the record books. They don’t occupy a special niche in Cooperstown. They don’t even result in huge new contracts for undeserving cheaters. It’s a night to suspend disbelief, an that’s what we d.

This year, it’s not an issue anyway. Despite all the agonizing about Manny’s suspension and the pre-season angst about Alex Rodriguez’ dalliance with performance-enhancers, the season has been clear of rumors and suspicion. Having a testing policy will do that for you, and Manny’s suspension actually helped the game’s credibility. Once he was forced to take a 50-game unpaid sabbatical, we could no longer issue blind accusations about how baseball must be protecting its superstars and the testing program must be inadequate.

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The program probably is inadequate, if only because all such programs are. The cheaters are always one step ahead of the drug cops. All we can hope for is that it works at some reasonably high level.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter at Home Run Derby. This year, all that really matters is that Albert Pujols, who is on a pace to break Roger Maris’ 61-home run non-juiced record, will be going for the fences in front of his hometown fans in America’s best baseball city, St. Louis.

The NL’s other entrants are Adrian Gonzalez of the Padres, Brewer Prince Fielder and Ryan Howard of the Phillies. For the American league, it will be Carlos Pena of the Rays, Brandon Inge of Detroit, Nelson Cruz of the Rangers Joe Mauer of the Twins.

Those may not all be the game's biggest names, and I used to whine about big sluggers who politely begged out of the derby, arguing that the fans wanted to see the biggest stars flex their muscles. But after Hamilton left the fans at Yankee Stadium staring slack-jawed at his prodigious display of power last year, I realized it didn’t really matter who was swinging the bats.

As long as you had a couple big names in the lineup, it was actually more fun watching a guy like Hamilton come out of nowhere and steal the show.

The players usually say that HRD is exhausting and trying to hit home runs for the contest can screw up their swings for months. They’re right. Hamilton suffered a major power outage the second half of the season, and the competition is more grueling than it looks.

A format tweak or two might help. I’d make the first round nine outs instead of 10 — nine is a baseball number and 10 is a Bo Derek number.

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I’d also have the hitters rotate in three-out turns. That may ruin continuity, but it would fight fatigue. And when the last hitter passes everyone else, let the guy sit down and move on to the second round. Sure, it might deprive the fans of seeing a few more leave the park, but it doesn’t make sense to keep playing after one guy has won. It’s like making the home team bat in the bottom of the ninth even if they’ve already won the game.

But these are quibbles. No matter how they run it, the show is pure fun for everyone, from the kids who get to run down the outs on the field to the hand-picked BP pitchers many of the players bring to serve them up for them, to the hitters and most important, to the fans.

In these hard times, they need nights like this more than ever.

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