Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 21
So Jose Siri made the coolest play I’ve seen in a while. He’s on the Angels now, a fact I had missed entirely, even though I now realize I saw him pinch-running against the A’s just two nights ago. When you think about Jose Siri, you think of great center field defense (and one million strikeouts), but that great center field defense usually comes in the form of great jumps and fantastic athletic catches. Tonight, however, he racked up an out with a combination of savvy and a perfect, powerful throw. A’s right fielder Carlos Cortes hit a routine single back up the middle. There was nothing notable about that whatsoever, but the Angels must have a scouting report that says Cortes likes to take aggressive turns when he singles. Whoever wrote it deserves a raise.
Siri played the ball normally right up until the moment when he didn’t. He intercepted it at a slow jog. It looked like he wasn’t taking the threat of Cortes going for a double seriously, but what he was actually doing was baiting Cortes, while also allowing the slow route to let him field the ball with his momentum still pushing him to his left, toward first base. That way, when he came up firing behind Cortes, he was able to got everything he had behind the throw. First baseman Nolan Schanuel was clearly in on it too. He lurked in foul territory, out of view of both Cortes and the first base coach so as to avoid arousing any suspicion, then popped back onto the field in time to catch the throw and apply the tag.
Last month, Ben Clemens declared 2026 to be The Year of the Bunt. “Bunts are making a comeback,” he wrote, and then he backed that contention up with numbers and graphs and such, because while the FanGraphs style guide doesn’t have a hard target for words per article, we’re generally expected to use more than five. Ben was right, of course. That’s what the graphs and the words were for. Bunts have gone from 0.7% of plate appearances in 2025 to 0.9% in 2026. We’re talking about very small numbers here, but that’s still a year-over-year increase of nearly 23%.
Not only are teams bunting more often, but they’re also bunting in optimal situations and laying them down more successfully. This year’s bunts have a .533 batting average, compared to .468 last year. Unsuccessful bunts, which result in neither a hit nor a sacrifice, are down from 22% to 19%. According to Baseball Savant’s Run Values, last year’s bunts were worth 13 runs. This season’s bunts are already at 50 runs, and we’ve still got a couple months left! Over the winter, the whole league seems to have finally figured how and when to bunt. But not the Detroit Tigers.
The Tigers have laid down eight bunts this year. Eight. That works out to just under one bunt every 12.5 games. In this article, I will show you all eight of them. It will not take long. The Tigers have more triples than bunts. The Rays have bunted 10 times more than the Tigers. Every team except the Phillies has bunted at least twice as often as the Tigers. Twenty different individual players have bunted more than the Tigers. The Tigers recognize The Year of the Bunt as a fad, and they want no part of such ephemeral frivolities. They didn’t attempt to bunt for the first time until May 4, their 36th game of the season. It, uh, did not go well.
You know the joke. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” asks the interviewer. Mitch Hedberg has the perfect answer. “Celebrating the five-year anniversary of you asking me this question.” Mike Elias and the Orioles sure seem to have their own five-year plan, and they fleshed it out on Sunday, signing right-hander Kyle Bradish to a five-year, $90 million extension. The deal buys out the starter’s final two years of arbitration, along with three free agent years, keeping him in orange and black until his age-35 season in 2031. Bradish is making $3.55 million in arbitration this season, and he’ll make $10 million when the new deal kicks in next year. He’ll get a $3 million raise in 2028, then get $1 million added to his annual raise in each subsequent season. So he’ll make $10 million in 2027, then 13, then 17, then 22, then 28 in 2031. It’s a classic example of linear growth rather than exponential, and it should help Bradish stay a step ahead of inflation. According to The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, it’s also the largest deal for a pitcher in franchise history.
Bradish has a 3.50 ERA and a 3.62 FIP for his career, but there’s still room for some uncertainty in his profile. He debuted in 2022 and put up ugly numbers across 23 starts, running a 4.90 ERA and a 4.46 FIP. He broke out in 2023, going 12-7 with a 2.83 ERA and a 3.27 FIP. The underlying numbers weren’t quite so spectacular, as a big component of his improvement was a drop in home run rate that looked unsustainably large. Although Bradish had made more sustainable improvements to his walk, strikeout, and groundball rates, it still would have been fair to expect some regression. Instead, he came out of the gate even better in 2024. His walk rate did indeed regress, but he suppressed homers even further and ratcheted his strikeout rate all the way up to 33%. It was a huge jump, but it lasted just eight starts before the god of ulnar collateral ligaments demanded its tribute.
Bradish returned from Tommy John surgery at the end of August 2025, and he picked up right where he’d left off before the injury. In fact, over his six starts, he struck out more than 37% of the batters he faced. If you combine the two seasons, Bradish threw 71 1/3 innings across 14 starts, posting a 2.65 ERA and a 2.48 FIP. He put up 2.5 WAR in what was essentially half a season. It was legitimate dominance. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 20
Derek Jr. and I will be on our own for much of the day. My wife is planning on meeting up with a friend for a walk in the park, taking an hour-long call, and then spending a couple hours editing her novel. Things go beautifully at first. Derek Jr. naps for nearly three hours in the morning, during which time I do a little writing myself. I feed and change her when she wakes up, but the effort of having someone else feed and clothe her seems like it’s already tuckered her out. Such is the life of a baby.
I put her right back down to sleep and try to nap in the room with her, but I can’t sleep. My brain is still whirring from the writing I did earlier. So I grab the monitor and take a crack at mixing a children’s song I’ve been working on. It’s the last thing I recorded before Derek Jr. was born. Fittingly, it’s called “I’m Sleepy.” Read the rest of this entry »
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 18
The summer after my wife and I moved in together, we had a mouse in our apartment. We set traps everywhere we could think to put them, but no matter what kind of traps or bait I used, the mouse wanted nothing to do with them. After a couple days, I got desperate. I wanted to figure out exactly where the mouse was getting in so that I could close up the gap to keep it out. Failing that, I wanted to figure out where it was going so that I could set traps in the right places. So I propped up an iPad against the arm of the couch with its camera pointed at the kitchen, called it on FaceTime from my laptop, and brought the laptop into the bedroom and closed the door. Then I sat quietly, stared at my kitchen from the other room, and waited for the mouse to show up. Even as I was setting everything up, I recognized it as an act of madness. But it worked.
I didn’t glean much that first day. If I recall correctly, the mouse did eventually show up, but it turned out that the iPad didn’t have a good angle on its movements. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from or where it was going, only that it crossed the kitchen a time or two. Convinced that the concept was sound and the execution could be improved upon, I tried it again the next day. My wife was off work, so I explained that I needed her to hole up in the bedroom with me. She recognized it as an act of madness too, but she found it hilarious. She dubbed it Mouse TV, and she understandably shrieked when the mouse finally showed up. We watched and stifled our laughter as it nosed around the kitchen. It took a couple more days of Mouse TV to figure out where the mouse was coming from, plug the hole, and make sure that the mouse wasn’t coming back. My wife was tickled the whole time. Whereas I felt embarrassed and vaguely unclean about having a rodent in my home, she’d tell the story of Mouse TV to anyone who could listen. It has, somehow, become a fond memory. Read the rest of this entry »
On Tuesday night, as I watched Luis Arraez, sparkler in hand, chatting with Otto Lopez outside the National League dugout, I couldn’t help but reflect on how he ended up in Philadelphia. This is Arraez’s fourth All-Star selection, but it’s also his first in four years. Although we’re only 90 games into the season, his 3.7 WAR is already a career high. As you surely know, the biggest improvement in his game came with the glove. Michael Rosen put it simply enough back in May, with an article titled “Luis Arraez Is Good at Defense Now.” At the time, Arraez had put up 5 FRV over 30 games. In the ensuing 61 games, he’s accrued another 3 FRV. The pace has slowed down, but he’s still grading out as an excellent defender (though the other defensive metrics admittedly disagree).
Today, however, we’re interested in Arraez’s offensive improvement. Arraez won his first batting title in 2022, and he did more than just put up a high batting average. He also walked more than he struck out, earning a 130 wRC+. He followed it up with a 131 mark in 2023, though he did so in a slightly different fashion. Both his walks and his strikeouts dropped below 6%, but he ran a .362 BABIP, which led to a .354 batting average. Essentially, he leaned way, way into his status as a contact god, and the sky-high BABIP made it all work out beautifully.
But Arraez took things too far. In 2024 and 2025 combined, his walk and strikeout rates fell below 5%, and his .307 BABIP, while above the league average, wasn’t good enough to carry an offensive profile that features no walks and no power. He ran a 107 combined wRC+, and because he was putting up negative value in the other parts of the game, he ended up with just 2.0 WAR. That put his value squarely between an average player and a replacement-level one. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, Bryce Harper looked briefly like a villain. I’m sure you know the story by now, so I’ll keep this recap brief. On Thursday, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story about a gambler who is suing FanDuel and DraftKings for allegedly using “their products and VIP services to intentionally maximize addiction.” The specific VIP service that turned this into such a big story was a video, branded with the FanDuel logo, in which Harper thanked the fan for his support. The idea that the biggest stars in baseball are secretly recording videos as perquisites to keep deeply indebted gambling addicts hooked on FanDuel understandably outraged many people, but it was an odd story, because Harper was not known to have any affiliation with FanDuel.
The truth was, well, stupid. Harper really doesn’t have any affiliation with FanDuel. A FanDuel employee ordered the video on Cameo, and told Harper what to say. Harper read the script he was given, which included the phrase, “Your host Bryttanni from FanDuel wanted to make sure your Thanksgiving was extra special,” and then the employee slapped a logo on the video. Harper has since released a statement which read, in part, “I did not know FanDuel would do this, I did not consent to it, and FanDuel had no right to do it. Had I known FanDuel’s true intent, I would not have made the video.” That’s about as unequivocal as it gets. Harper said the request was for a personal video, and that “Cameo had a separate category for business video requests, and at the time I did not know this video would be used for commercial purposes.” The statement also included screenshots of the instructions he received through Cameo, script and all. Harper isn’t really the villain here.
It’s not at all surprising that someone who spends their workdays figuring out how to squeeze more money out of people with gambling problems would try to get a video like this made. What’s surprising is that they were actually able to do it. In this article, I’m going to ask and answer several smaller questions about the relationship between Cameo and baseball. I’m doing so to compensate for the fact that I have no way of answering the really big question that’s staring us right in the face: Why the heck is Bryce Harper on Cameo?Read the rest of this entry »
Break out your biggest, dumbest hats, friends. It’s time for the Derby. The 2026 Home Run Derby is at 8:00 PM Eastern tonight at Citizens Bank Park in Philadelphia. It will be streaming on Netflix, which means that in just a few hours, my parents (and probably your parents too) will discover that they have no way of watching it. If the streaming service’s official trailer for the event is any indicator, the action will be pixelated electric. There’s no Statcast broadcast this year, but the Derby will apparently be a crossover event with Hot Ones, the show where celebrities answer questions while eating chicken wings. If you tune in too late for the dingers, you can console yourself by watching Will Ferrell get very sweaty.
Every year’s preview contains a section in which we bemoan the absence of some of the game’s biggest stars, and though it would be great to see Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, or Yordan Alvarez, we honestly can’t complain about this field at all. It’s fantastic. It’s got three of the top four home run hitters this season, and six of the top 20. It’s got hometown favorites. It’s got one surefire Hall of Famer. It’s got a mix of first-timers and previous winners and runners-up. It’s got a mix of young players and established stars. It’s got participants from four countries. Most of all, it’s filled from top to bottom with jaw-dropping, light-tower, into-the-next-county power.
Every single participant has plus bat speed and a huge hard-hit rate. We don’t have any filler. Nobody feels like a last-minute replacement, and nobody made it just because of a fluky first half or because they can combine average power with a high pulled-fly ball rate. Every single participant can mash, and none of them would be a surprise winner. Moreover, although practitioners of this brutalist version of baseball can sometimes struggle toward the end of the competition, when they’re tuckered out from all those daddy hacks, that may be less of an issue thanks to this year’s new format, which we’ll get to in a moment.
The ballpark should also help. Citizens Bank Park is a notoriously cozy venue that enables home run hitting. Statcast’s park factors rate it the fifth-friendliest home run park in baseball. However, that number isn’t exactly balanced. It plays roughly average for righties, while for lefties, it’s second only to Coors Field. The five lefties in the field should have the advantage.
The Rules
This year’s format change is drastic. After using a timer-based system since 2015, the league is going to a swing-based format. That’s actually different from the pre-timer format. In the past, players got a certain number of outs, which is to say non-homers, in each round. This year, it’s about swings. Each player gets 20 swings in the first round, and 15 in the second round and the final. However, the last swing of each round works like the old out system. You can’t end a round on a home run, so as long as you keep hitting homers, the round can go all night long.
This is a clever wrinkle, because it means that no matter how far behind he is, each player technically has a chance until he makes that final out. No longer will we watch players fall behind and know that, even with two minutes still on the clock, all their efforts will be futile. It’s also an annoying wrinkle, though, because that final ball has officially been branded the “T-Mobile Magenta Ball.” I’m not sure the enjoyment derived from giggling about the fact that this sounds like an embarrassing medical affliction will be worth the stultifying quantity of cellphone advertising that’s about to slam into our skulls.
As in the two previous Derbies, the first round will function as pool play. The four hitters with the most homers in the first round will enter a bracket, seeded by their first-round totals. Any ties in the first round will be decided by the length of each player’s longest home run. In the semifinals and final, the tiebreaker will be a three-swing swing-off.
The format contains one more odd wrinkle. In previous years, the order of the first-round pool play was determined by how many home runs each player hit in the first half. This year, the rules say the hitters “will hit in an order determined by the Commissioner’s Office.” I have no idea what would constitute an optimized order to the commissioner. However, I’m sure that somebody out there will disapprove of that order, so I hope they appreciate the gift of having a reason to complain about Rob Manfred before the Derby even starts.
The format change involves some tradeoffs. We lose the immediacy and adrenaline rush of a ticking clock. However, we gain the ability to enjoy each home run. No longer will we need a split screen or a camera that careens wildly from the infield to the outfield in order to see where the previous ball landed without missing the current swing. The big situations will get a moment to breathe, as will the big sluggers.
The new format is also a bit more fair. In previous Derbies, the pitcher wasn’t allowed throw the next ball until the previous one landed, but some teams – I’m looking at you, 2018 Bryce Harper and 2018 Bryce Harper’s dad – simply flouted that rule and gained a huge advantage. That will be off the table. We’ll also be free of gimmicky distance-based bonus rounds. Another effect of the new format is that a bad pitcher might be less of a handicap. Without a time limit, there’s no downside to taking a couple extra pitches and offering only at the tenderest of meatballs.
As for why the league changed the format again, why it’s constantly changing the format, I can’t really tell you. I’m excited about this new version. I think it’ll be more watchable than the timed version. But honestly, whatever problem the league has with the Home Run Derby, I think the format is rarely the culprit. The Derby always starts to drag halfway through because it runs for three hours, and that’s simply too long. Even the best, most exciting Derby is not a Christopher Nolan movie. It’s a one-note symphony, a fireworks display, and fireworks displays rarely last more than half an hour because eventually all those bangs and zooms start to blend together and get monotonous.
In order to stretch a Home Run Derby out for three hours, you need a bracket, multiple rounds, rest periods, convoluted bonus systems, indecipherable graphics, interviews with celebrities you wish you’d never heard of, and a full hour of commercials. You spend the whole time waiting for the good part, and because the contestants get physically tired, the good part can sometimes be a letdown. If the goal is to make the Home Run Derby as exciting as it can be, then the solution is to bring it down to a brisk 90 minutes. That probably won’t happen, because it means less advertising money, but changing the format is never going to solve that particular problem.
Alright, you’ve waited long enough. Let’s get to the large home-run-hitting men!
No matter what criteria you’re using to assess the Derby participants, Schwarber has to be a favorite. He’ll be in front of a raucous home crowd, and he has a history of showing up in big moments. At 33, he’s on the best two-year stretch of his entire career. He leads baseball with 32 home runs. As a matter of fact, since his debut in 2015, his 372 homers are second only to Aaron Judge’s 385 (and as Judge will be on the IL for at least another month, probably longer, Schwarber may just pass him). Schwarber has Derby experience, finishing second behind Harper in 2018 and going out in the first round in 2022. Maybe even more relevant considering this year’s format, he absolutely blew the roof off last year’s All-Star Game by laying waste to the swing-off.
Schwarber’s average launch angle of 21.8 degrees is the highest of the field by a mile and the sixth-highest among all qualified players. His 19.3% barrel rate ranks second in the field and fifth in baseball. Not only does it help that he is a lefty at Citizens Bank, but he is a pull machine. His average attack direction – the horizontal angle of his bat at the moment of impact – is 10 degrees toward the pull side, one of the most extreme marks in the game, and 16.9% of his batted balls are pulled fly balls, the highest mark in the group by a lot. At 25%, Schwarber also has the third-lowest chase rate in the field, and as players can take pitches to their hearts’ content waiting for the right one, that could end up being a difference-maker. But these are just numbers, and the argument for Schwarber is more visceral than that.
Ben Rice
Ben Rice debuted in 2024, and he’s done nothing but crush dingers ever since. He hit 26 last year, and he already has 29 this year. That’s the third most in baseball and the second most among Derby contestants. Still, if there is an underdog in this group, it’s probably Rice. The Big Grain (as everyone will soon by calling him) has the slowest bat speed of the field by quite a bit. He just doesn’t have the top-end power of the rest of the field. His average home run is the shortest of the bunch, and he’s benefited from Yankee Stadium’s shorter right-field dimensions. However, you know who had the shortest average homer in last year’s Derby? Winner Cal Raleigh. Additionally, as a lefty in Citizens Bank Park, Rice will have a similar advantage to the one he has at Yankee Stadium, and despite his relative shortcomings, he’s certainly not a weakling.
Rice ranks third among the group in barrel rate and home runs per fly ball. He leads all of baseball with a .320 isolated slugging percentage. He’s also coming into the Derby on a tear. Over his final 12 games of the first half, Rice batted .349 with a 259 wRC+ and seven home runs.
My biggest concern is that Rice is having his dad pitch to him. Now, Rice’s dad did pitch in college and has been throwing him BP for his entire life, and Rice also has the second-lowest chase rate of the field, but still, I think I’d rather have Dino Ebel.
Junior Caminero
If you’re simply looking for the most powerful player in the Derby, Caminero is your guy. His 28 home runs rank fourth in the majors. He has the fastest bat speed and the longest swing of any qualified player. He leads the Derby Field in 90th-percentile exit velocity, max exit velocity, fast-swing rate, and blast rate. The one thing he struggles at is getting the ball in the air. With a swing path tilt of just 24 degrees and an attack angle of just eight degrees, Caminero possesses one of the flattest swings in all of baseball. He’s got the second-lowest fly ball rate of the group, and his average fly ball travels the shortest. Hard-hit line drives are fantastic in baseball, but they can be killers in the Derby.
Still, Caminero has to be a favorite. He finished second in last year’s Derby, and the fact that he’s back certainly indicates that he’s in it to win it. He’s running it back with Rays major league field coordinator Tomas Francisco pitching to him again. Moreover, Caminero can hit absolutely anything out of the park. Here’s a side-by-side pitch chart of the home runs Caminero and Caglianone have hit. Caglianone has a sweet spot. He needs the ball middle up. But Caminero doesn’t care at all where you throw the ball.
Of course, this effect might matter just a little bit less in an untimed Derby, because batters can take as many pitches as they’d like, waiting for one that’s right in their sweet spot. But nobody’s perfect at this. Every pitch looks juicy in the Derby. And for Caminero, every pitch really will be.
Caminero is also coming into the Derby red-hot. Over his last 19 games, he’s batting .292 with a 227 wRC+, an .861 slugging percentage, and 13 home runs. Yeah, 13 homers in 19 games is pretty good.
Jordan Walker
The argument for Walker is the same as the argument for last year’s winner, Cal Raleigh: This is just his year. After big prospect hype and even bigger struggles in his first few seasons in the majors, Walker is finally putting it all together. He’s coming into the break with a 143 wRC+ and 22 home runs. He’s finally figured out how to lift the ball enough to take advantage all the power his 6-foot-6 frame can generate. Walker ranks second in the field in a bunch of big categories: bat speed, average exit velocity, 90th-percentile exit velocity, max exit velocity, and fast-swing rate. He’s also yet another participant coming into the Derby on a tear. Over his last 12 games, he’s running a 208 wRC+ with four homers and a .707 slugging percentage. He’s got his normal BP pitcher, St. Louis bullpen catcher Kleininger Teran, throwing to him. However, Walker’s launch angle is still the question.
Just 5% of Walker’s batted balls have been pulled fly balls, and even if you also add line drives in there to look for pulled-air percentage, he’s still at the bottom of the field at 15%. He just struggles to get the ball in the air, and it’s hard to win a Derby that way. But it’s not impossible. Just ask Juan Soto and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. If Walker does win it all, it will be an unforgettable laser show. Also, he has been practicing:
Munetaka Murakami
The final addition to the field was an exciting one. Murakami hit at least 28 home runs in all six of his first full NPB seasons. Injuries shortened his 2025 campaign to just 56 games, but he managed to launch an astonishing 22 dingers during that stretch. Over a 162-game season, that would be a 63-homer pace. Even though injury has shortened his 2026 campaign too, he’s still on pace for 34.
Murakami is also jumping straight off the IL and into the Derby, so don’t let his relatively low total of 20 home runs fool you. He reached that figure despite missing 35 games with a hamstring strain, and only returned to the White Sox lineup on Friday. And don’t overlook him based on the fact that his top-end power is in the middle of this particular pack. He always hits the ball hard. He leads the field in hard-hit rate, average exit velocity, barrel rate, home runs per plate appearance, and home runs per fly ball. All he does is find a way to put the ball over the wall.
Here’s an example. Home run derbies are all about pulling the ball in the air, because the wall is shortest down the line. But Murakami doesn’t care about that. He’s great at hitting home runs even to the deepest part of the ballpark. Center field is where home runs go to die, but he’s tied with Nick Kurtz for the major league lead with nine home runs to straightaway center. That’s 41% of his homers going to the deepest part of the park, the highest mark in baseball (minimum 15 straightaway fly balls). Caminero is the only other member of the field above 30%.
The two concerns about Murakami before this season were that he might not be able to handle velocity, and that he definitely couldn’t hit breaking stuff. Neither of those will matter at all here. And the swing-based format might help him most of all. Murakami has the lowest chase rate in the field, and not by a small margin. He’s great at waiting for his pitch. He is made for home run derbies, and maybe for this format in particular.
Willson Contreras
I don’t really have a way to look this up, but I suspect Contreras is the first player ever to participate in the Derby in the middle of a suspension. He’s currently four games into a five-game suspension for his role in a June 30 benches-clearing brawl. For a few reasons – he was responding to racially inflammatory language, he was not in the best place emotionally due to the devastation in his home of Venezuela – Contreras came off as at least something of a sympathetic figure, even though he removed his helmet and threw it in the melee with the same motion as a Tim Tebow jump-pass. I’m about as pacifist as they come, but even I must admit there’s something poetic about watching a man use a piece of protective equipment as a weapon. Sure, you can beat your swords into plowshares, but that doesn’t have to stop you from launching those plowshares right at somebody’s noggin, now does it?
At 419 feet, Contreras has the longest average home run of anybody in the Derby. Wait, sorry, that’s his brother William Contreras. It’s a talented family is all I’m saying. In fact, Willson actually asked his brother to pitch to him in the Derby, which would have been so much fun. Unfortunately, William declined. Instead, Boston’s interim bench coach José David Flores will be stepping in. It won’t be as fun a story, but it’s definitely a wiser choice, as Flores throws BP to Contreras all the time.
Contreras possesses the game’s third-highest pull rate at 54.7%. The lack of red cells in the table above may make him look like something of an underdog, but I actually think he’s an interesting dark horse candidate. Being right-handed doesn’t help, and he’s definitely not the most powerful swinger of the bunch, but he doesn’t have any blue cells either. He’s toward the top in pull rate and pulled-fly ball rate. He also sounds genuinely excited to participate, and he has a sound strategy, telling reporters, “I think Philadelphia is a good stadium to hit. The ball carries a lot, and the key for me in the Home Run Derby is not trying to do too much or trying to hit it a long way. I already have a plan on what to do.”
Earlier, I mentioned that Caminero can hit any pitch out of the ballpark regardless of where it’s located. Contreras is similarly indiscriminate, but with regard to pitch type. Left-handed hitters Harper, Caglianone, Murakami, and Rice are fastball mashers. Each of them has hit at least 45% of his homers on four-seam fastballs. Fellow righties Caminero and Walker, along with the lefty Schwarber, are around 30%. Contreras is all the way down at 15%. This might not help him all that much when all he’s getting is batting-practice fastballs, but it does speak to an ability to send any pitch he sees over the fence.
Bryce Harper
Harper enters the fray coming off a very weird week. The announcement that he was entering the Derby came mere hours after the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that he had recorded a video message for FanDuel to a debt-ridden gambling addict who had lost $1.5 million to the company. However, the next day, Front Office Sports reported that the video had simply been ordered through Cameo, where anyone can buy a personalized video from Bryce Harper for $899. Harper definitely should have gotten suspicious when, according to FOS, the video was purchased by a FanDuel employee who also provided Harper with the script, but the story is not nearly as unsavory as it originally seemed. Why is Bryce Harper, who will make roughly $900 dollars for each 1.5 pitches thrown in a Phillies game this year, on Cameo at all? That’s a good question, but one for another day. The question for today is whether this bizarre situation will give Harper extra motivation to win back some love by mashing baseballs. God knows high-level athletes have used lesser slights to fuel themselves.
Harper is a hometown favorite and the only previous winner in the field. He also has perhaps the best pitcher in the field. Although he won the 2018 event with his father pitching to him, this time he selected Dodgers third base coach Dino Ebel. Ebel is as renowned as a BP pitcher can be, which is why he’s pitched in the Derby four times, including 2024, when he and Teoscar Hernández won the whole thing. Ebel also pitched to Schwarber during last year’s All-Star Game swing-off.
The 33 year-old Harper is running his lowest exit velocity and hard-hit rate of the decade, and at this point, his ferocious uppercut is far from the most powerful in the field. He’s got the lowest hard-hit rate, average exit velocity, barrel rate, home run per fly ball rate, and he’s second worst in bat speed, home run distance, and pulled-air rate. I don’t think anyone would be shocked to see Harper rise to the occasion and channel his precocious past, but at this point, the numbers say he probably shouldn’t be the favorite.
Jac Caglianone
At first blush, Caglianone might look like the odd man out here. He’s the low man by quite a bit in terms of home runs. His 15 homers put him a 12-way tie for 49th in baseball. His 4.3% home run rate per plate appearance is the lowest of the field. His dad is pitching to him. But Caglianone is a gargantuan slugger who was built for the Derby. He has the third-highest hard-hit rate among qualified players and the second highest in the field. He’s just one year removed from a rookie campaign in which he bashed 19 home runs over just 62 games, a 47-homer pace. And luckily, he doesn’t have to do any throwing. Perhaps you’ll recall that Statcast created a metric called blasts when they introduced bat-tracking data. The loose definition is a ball that is squared up with a bat speed above 82 mph. This season, 23.5% of his batted balls have been blasts, third highest in the field and ninth highest in baseball.
I showed you the pitch chart of Caglianone’s home runs earlier, with all of them coming belt high and up. It’s the opposite of what you’d expect from lefty sluggers, who typically drop their bat head on the ball and finish with their hands high. There’s nothing wrong with tomahawking high pitches like Caglianone does, but it tends to lead to a lot more line drives and topspin. Just 5.6% of Caglianone’s batted balls have been pulled fly balls, the second-lowest mark in the field. It also means that Caglianone needs to pick his pitches carefully, and that might be tough, as he has the highest chase rate among the eight contestants. He also has the fewest home runs per plate appearance in the group. However, on the flip side, he has the longest average homer at 414 feet. Now, some of this may come from playing at Kauffman Stadium, but it also speaks to the fact that when Caglianone gets ahold of the ball, it can go an awfully long way.
Who’s going to win?
Look, we never really know who’s going to win. We do the best we can with the information we have, but there’s so much randomness involved. That said, it’s Kyle Schwarber. After last year, I just can’t pick against Schwarber.
Hello. While on paternity leave, I kept a journal about baseball and my daughter, who is not named Derek Jr., but who will henceforth be referred to as Derek Jr. You can read all of the entries here.
May 17
Yesterday, when Derek Jr. was fussy, my wife played a Black Eyes Peas song on her phone and bounced our daughter on a yoga ball. Today it became clear that she considered this to be a successful experiment and that it will be a thing in our household going forward. The baby is fussy. Let’s bounce her to that Black Eyed Peas song. On repeat. Day after day. The Black Eyed Peas playing in our home. This was not a path I could have foreseen. This is not a path I would have chosen. This already seems like it will not be a path I can escape.
While I’m feeding Derek Jr. in the evening, I catch the ninth and 10th innings of the Cubs and White Sox. The 10th inning is one of the most exciting I’ve seen in a while. The Cubs start with Pete Crow-Armstrong as the zombie runner, which already makes it must-see TV. The White Sox broadcast is apparently having some sort of kids’ day celebration, and all of the graphics have a distinctly Backyard Baseball feel to them. If you’ve never played the Backyard Sports games, then this will go right over your head, but as I watch, a realization washes over me: The speedy, lanky, left-handed, red-haired Pete-Crow Armstrong is Major League Baseball’s version of the speedy, lanky, left-handed, red-haired Pete Wheeler. I mean, come on:
Last night, my wife’s friend Paula texted me to make sure I’d seen the below play. Paula moved back home to Minneapolis from Brooklyn a few years ago, and we head out to visit her each summer. We do jigsaw puzzles and go to Minnesota State Fair together. It is a lovely tradition. Paula is more of a basketball fan than a baseball fan, but sometimes she’ll reach out to me when the Twins do something surprising. It’s a sweet way of trying to connect with someone who’s important to her dear friend. Last night, however, she just needed to share what she’d seen, because, frankly, it was bit hard to believe. Here are the Royals turning a swinging bunt into a Little League home run via three errors and at least that many terrible decisions:
If you’ve seen this play, you have thoughts. You can’t help but have thoughts. That’s why Paula sent me the video in the first place. When you watch something like this, the thoughts start bubbling up inside you so rapidly that if you don’t find a safe place to vent them, your brain will explode. This play is the baseball equivalent of microwaving a potato. So let’s get to some thoughts.
1. Poor Seth Lugo.
Let us spare a thought today for Seth Lugo, who got dinged with an error and three unearned runs. This would not be Lugo’s finest outing. He would go on to give up six more runs, all of them earned, which means that both his ERA and his RA9 WAR took a beating. After starting his night like this, it’s hard to blame him. But I hold that Seth Lugo was nigh blameless on this play. I avow it with vigor. As such, please find below a list of things that Seth Lugo did right on this pitch:
He got Carson Benge to chase a two-strike fastball that was a good six inches above the zone.
He induced contact so weak that Statcast measured the ball as traveling 0 feet in the air with an indeterminate exit velocity.
He sprang off the mound like a cat who knows how to field groundballs.
He fielded the ball cleanly. Seriously, form this pure would make your Little League coach break down and cry:
He made a quick, off-balance throw to first base. That throw was perfectly fine.
Yeah, you heard me. It was a good throw. It bounced about 12 feet from the bag, giving Jac Caglianone plenty of time to adjust and catch the ball. It would have been easier to field had it been a foot or two farther to Caglianone’s right, but it was by no means offline. I understand that when the ball bounces, the first baseman is absolved from all blame, so the error has to go to Lugo, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be honest with ourselves.
Yup, we’re still on the throw. I realize this bullet point and the last bullet point should be sub-bullet points, but I don’t want to format them that way, and more importantly, I don’t know how to format them that way. Point is, the throw was good! I watched it zoomed in on super slow-motion, so I can tell you that the throw actually brushed the tip of Caglianone’s glove. You could reasonably argue that Lugo should’ve eaten this ball, but his throw was more or less on target and it got there in plenty of time to beat the runner. Good throw. Do your worst, haters.
When everything went pear-shaped, Lugo hustled back behind home plate to back up the play. That’s just good fundamental baseball in the midst of one of the least fundamentally-sound plays you’ll ever see.
He tried to prevent the third error of the play. If you watch the video, you’ll see Lugo shouting and pointing, trying to get Nick Loftin to throw the ball to third base rather than home. I don’t know if that was necessarily the right call, but it certainly couldn’t have gone any worse than the throw to home.
He kept his composure and ended the inning on the very next pitch. Sure, everything kept falling apart for him the rest of the night, but for at least one more moment, Lugo put his head down and retired the batter in front of him.
2. Poor Jac Caglianone.
I feel bad for Lugo because he did pretty much everything right here. I feel bad for Jac Caglianone for the opposite reason. While I stand by my assessment of Lugo’s throw, I don’t mean to say that it was an easy play for Caglianone. It was a tough throw to field cleanly. But he still made a couple tactical errors. He would have been better served waiting back for the hop rather than trying to stretch and pick this ball. He absolutely should have prioritized knocking the ball down over going for a clean catch. But regardless of who was to blame, everybody who’s ever played baseball knows what it’s like to have to turn around and chase down a ball that you failed to catch. It’s a lonely feeling, even when you’re being observed by 32,734 screeching New Yorkers. It can make you do some things you’ll regret. Speaking of which…
3. Where was Caglianone trying to throw the ball?
I’m not just asking for me. I’m asking for everyone on the internet too:
This ball traveled right between third base and home plate. In fact, it went right toward Lugo, backing up like a champ, except 10 feet over his head. Maybe Caglianone was trying to decide between third base and home plate, and he split the difference? Maybe this is just the major league translation of Caglianone’s 6.4 BB/9 as a collegiate pitcher. The most likely answer, though, is that Cags had no idea where he was throwing this ball either.
4. Or maybe Seth Lugo is a sleeper agent.
Hear me out. Lugo spent seven years with the Mets, and five more years in their minor league system. Maybe he engineered this play on purpose. Maybe Lugo has spent the past four years pitching well for the Padres and the Royals as part of a long-term mole operation, waiting all that time for this moment when he could hand the Mets a game on a silver platter. All it takes is one properly-timed, improperly-placed throw, plus six more earned runs. Will the Mets still lose the game? Of course they will.
5. Advertisements on the pitcher’s mound are a blight on the game.
The beauty of the playing field is one of the best things about baseball. That feeling of walking through the tunnel and emerging into a green cathedral is what makes even non-baseball fans keep coming back to the ballpark (well, that and the soft serve in the little souvenir helmets). Every square inch of the stadium is covered in advertisements. They put advertisements on the players’ jerseys. They put advertisements on the players’ heads. They will soon find a way to put advertisements on the players’ faces. That garish black gash on the back of the mound, the focal point of the entire field, is a slap in the face to anyone who cares about baseball.
6. Create your own luck?
While we’re complaining about the advertisements, let’s also note that the company advertising on the back of the mound has an ad behind home plate as well. I’d never heard of this company before, but everything I can find about them on the internet makes them sound like they treat their customers abysmally. But also, they seem to have repurposed the mantra of the villain in Titanic and made it their slogan. So that’s a choice.
7. Poor Keith Hernandez.
Hernandez was in the booth for SNY last night. It must be a unique form of torture for arguably the greatest defensive first baseman of all time, a guy who is constantly harping on the need for good fundamentals, to watch a play like this. Here are the two things Hernandez said during this debacle. He said, “Ohhhhh.” Then he said, “Oh my God.” He wasn’t wrong.
8. Poor Some Other Guy.
The broadcast booth always houses a couple people whom we never see. Producers, researchers, stat people, I don’t know who they are. But they’re there to help out the people who narrate the game for us, and they normally keep quiet. Keeping quiet is part of the job. On this play, though, right when Loftin’s throw went awry, just before that “Ohhhhh” was forcibly torn from Hernandez’s thorax and/or soul, somebody else in the broadcast booth couldn’t help himself. He shouted, “Oh my—” and then remembered himself and cut the exclamation short. Who could blame him? (I suppose it’s possible that this was Hernandez himself, that he had his mic muted but could still be heard through play-by-play guy Gary Cohen’s microphone. But either way, this exclamation was not meant for public consumption.)
9. Poor Tyler Tolbert.
Statcast makes these cool diagrams where they track the movement of the ball and every player on the field. The moment I saw this play, I thought about the movement tracker. I tried to picture what it would look like in my mind’s eye. How far would the center fielder move on a play like this? Who ended up moving the most? I borrowed this one from Anthony DiComo’s MLB.com article about the play:
It’s a lot to take in. Caglianone ran every which way. Right fielder Tyler Tolbert hilariously ended up with the ball about 40 feet from home plate. Do you know how wrong things have to go for a tapper back to the pitcher to end up with your right fielder in foul territory, right near home plate, and in possession of the ball? Tolbert picked up the ball barehanded on the run like a third baseman charging a bunt. And then he realized it was too late. It was all over. There was nothing left to do but turn the ball over to the proper authorities and make the 200-foot jog back out to his natural habitat.
10. Poor Carter Jensen.
You know who moved the least? Catcher Carter Jensen. The rookie just had to stand there like a Walmart greeter as the Mets whipped by him. He stepped out in front of the plate when Benge tapped the ball back to Lugo. He moved to the left side of the plate when Caglianone’s throw went rogue. He stepped even farther out to give Loftin a clear throwing lane outside the base path. When Loftin decided that clear throwing lanes are for suckers and threw the ball directly at the runner, Jensen trotted 15 feet over toward the right side, then retreated back to home plate. But he never made it more than a step or two onto the grass in any direction. This whole play was an elaborate form of bear-baiting, and Jensen was the bear, staked to home plate, beset on all sides by jubilant Mets, with nothing to do but watch helplessly as wild throws zipped by him in every direction.
