Stephen Brashear, Reggie Hildred-USA TODAY Sports
For those who enjoy the loudest, simplest, most dopamine-drenched form of baseball, today is a special day. It’s Derby day, and even better, the silly hats are not mandatory. The MLB Home Run Derby takes place at 8:00 p.m. ET at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas. What the Costco-coded ballpark lacks in aesthetics it makes up for in bulk. According to Statcast’s park factors, Globe Life yields more home runs than the average park both for righties (120) and for lefties (110), so we should be in for a show. You can watch on ESPN, but if you’re a nerd – and you’re reading FanGraphs right now, so I’m sure you can do the math on this one – you’ll probably prefer the Statcast broadcast over on ESPN 2.
As in any year, there’s a laundry list of Derby-worthy players who won’t be participating, with Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and Elly De La Cruz at the top. Still, this a solid sampling of swatters, and nearly every participant figures to have a legitimate shot at winning. Either we’ll have a first-time winner or Pete Alonso will take home his record-tying third title. The field features three of the top six home run hitters in baseball this season — Gunnar Henderson, Marcell Ozuna, and José Ramírez — and two of the game’s brightest young shortstops: AL MVP candidates Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr.. It also includes three sluggers who take the Derby much more seriously than your average participant — Alonso, Henderson, and Teoscar Hernández — and two others who’ve won derbies at lower levels: Witt and Alec Bohm. Finally, there’s Adolis García, an electrifying slugger whose historic power display during the Rangers’ World Series run last season is sure to keep the crowd at full throat.
In the sections below, I’ll break down all the new rules and I’ll try to make a case for why each candidate has a shot at the crown.
Rule Changes
In recent years, the entire Derby has taken the form of a single-elimination tournament, with the eight participants seeded based on their regular season home run totals. This year, the first round will be wide open. All eight players will hit as many home runs as they can, and the four players with the highest totals will advance into a four-person bracket. They’ll be seeded based on those totals, with the distance of their longest home run serving as a tiebreaker. On the one hand, this will likely make the competition a little bit more fair. Last year, Adley Rutschman hit 27 home runs in the first round. That was the third-highest total of the round, but he failed to move on because he had the bad luck to be facing off against Luis Robert Jr., who hit 28. On the other hand, this change makes the Derby much more of an endurance contest. Swinging for the fences repeatedly is tiring work. In previous years, if you were batting second, all you needed to do was homer once more than your opponent, and then you could save your strength for the later rounds. That option is now gone. Everyone needs to max out their first-round total, so we should probably expect some sweaty, sluggish sluggers by the time we get to the final. Conditioning will be key. If your favorite thing about the Home Run Derby is the byzantine rules, you’re in for a treat because we’re just getting started.
This year, the timing of each round remains the same: Batters get three minutes in the first two rounds and two minutes in the final round, with one 45-second timeout per round. However, you might recall that in previous years, the system required the pitcher to wait until the last ball had landed before pitching, at least in theory. In practice, some pitchers flouted that rule, and as a result, their hitters saw way more pitches than did their opponents. In order to curb that practice (which while undeniably unfair was also extremely fun), the rules now include a maximum number of pitches per round: 40 in the first two rounds and 27 in the final round, which works out to 4.5 seconds per pitch. If you run out of pitches, then the round is over, even if there’s still time on the clock. Keep in mind, that’s a maximum number of pitches, not swings. That could make the command of the pitcher, already a huge factor, even more important.
In recent years, if batters didn’t like a pitch, they could take it and their pitcher would fire another one right away. There wasn’t much of a time penalty, because they didn’t have to wait for the previous pitch to land. In this new format, if the pitcher misses their batter’s nitro zone, it makes a lot less sense for the batter to take the pitch and wait for the next one, because they only get so many precious balls. The bonus system has also changed completely. This year, each player concludes each round with an untimed bonus round in which they can hit until they record three outs. If they hit a ball at least 425 feet within the bonus, then they earn a fourth out. In other words, batters could get locked in and launch a bunch of homers in a row during the bonus and pile onto their totals for the round, and because of the extra out, those who hit one especially long blast during the bonus would have an even greater advantage. If there’s a tie in the head-to-head rounds after the bonus, then both players get a 60-second swing-off with no additional bonuses or timeouts. If they’re still tied after the swing-off, then they each get another swing-off that consists of just three swings. If it’s still tied after that, they do the whole three-swing business again until there’s a winner or until the sun swallows the earth, whichever happens first. OK, that’s it. Those are all of the rules, I swear. Let’s move on to the participants.
Although the players are no longer seeded, we’ll still discuss them in the order of their home run totals.
2024 Home Run Derby Power Profiles
| Player | HR | xHR | Bat Speed | EV | 90% EV | Max EV | Barrel% | HR/FB | Avg HR Distance |
|——————|—-|——|———–|——|——–|——–|———|——–|—————–|
| Gunnar Henderson | 28 | 25.2 | 75.8 | 93.8 | 108.9 | 113.1 | 14.1 | 31.1 | 402 |
| Marcell Ozuna | 26 | 28.9 | 74.2 | 93.4 | 107 | 114.6 | 17.9 | 25.2 | 409 |
| Jose Ramírez | 23 | 22.7 | 71.4 | 89.6 | 103.9 | 116.6 | 8.8 | 15 | 388 |
| Teoscar Hernández| 19 | 17.6 | 73.3 | 91.3 | 106.6 | 112.7 | 14.7 | 20.7 | 395 |
| Pete Alonso | 19 | 19.6 | 75.1 | 88.3 | 107.7 | 116.3 | 11.7 | 15.6 | 405 |
| Adolis García | 17 | 15.9 | 72.2 | 91.5 | 106.6 | 116.1 | 13.5 | 15.7 | 394 |
| Bobby Witt Jr. | 16 | 21.2 | 74.6 | 92.6 | 109.7 | 116.9 | 14.9 | 10.8 | 418 |
| Alec Bohm | 11 | 9.6 | 72.5 | 90.4 | 104.7 | 110.8 | 8.3 | 10.1 | 398 |
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Gunnar Henderson
Henderson turned 23 on June 29, so he has the chance to become the youngest champion in Derby history. As a second-year player who won’t be eligible for arbitration until 2026, the million-dollar prize for first place would more than double his salary, and the $750,000 runner-up prize would very nearly double it as well. Based on his performance this season, he also has a strong case as the favorite. His 28 homers rank third in baseball behind Judge and Ohtani, and his 56.7% hard-hit rate ranks fourth among qualified players behind those two and Juan Soto. Henderson also leads the Derby participants with an average bat speed of 75.8 mph (which is also good for ninth in all of baseball). Not that it’s particularly relevant to the Derby, but Henderson is second in the majors with 6.1 WAR, just a hair behind Judge (6.3). Henderson is also really invested in the Derby. On Thursday, he held a legit practice session at Oriole Park, timed by teammate Colton Cowser and pitched by his Derby pitcher, Norfolk Tides manager Buck Britton. “I’ve hit his BP well,” Henderson told reporters when asked why he chose Britton to pitch to him. “He throws good BP and it’s a pretty easy motion.” However, Britton…
