Jordan Walker’s Breakout Continues With Home Run Derby Title
Jordan Walker was down to his last swing. Then he got another, and another, and another. When he finally stopped swinging, he was the Home Run Derby champ.
The Cardinals right fielder won the 2026 Home Run Derby in Philadelphia on Monday with five straight do-or-die swings. Hometown favorite Kyle Schwarber led off the final round and hit 11. That brought Walker to the plate under a chorus of boos from fans at Citizens Bank Park — boos that persisted and only grew stronger with every home run.
Walker tallied just eight homers in his 15 allotted swings for the final round, but new Derby rules this year did not allow rounds to end on a home run, so batters could keep swinging so long as they kept going yard. And so Walker kept swinging — and kept going yard. He launched his ninth and 10th long balls before crushing a 450-foot shot to left center to tie Schwarber. Walker took a brief pause to catch his breath, then took one last swing to end it.
The trophy arrived to even more boos from Phillies fans, who booed everyone and everything that wasn’t Schwarber or Bryce Harper.
“I was once told you don’t boo nobody,” Walker said with a smile after the event.
“My thought was ‘Philly is brutal,’ honestly,” he said. “But I think it’s pretty special because they love their players. That’s what you want from your home — where you play. I’ve never heard people cheer so loud for Schwarber and Harper.”
The prize for first place was $1 million, which is more than the $799,400 Walker will make in 2026 on the league’s minimum salary.
As Davy Andrews noted in our Derby preview, this feels like Walker’s year. He was a top prospect when he debuted in 2023, but he struggled over his first three seasons, with an 89 wRC+ in a bit more than 1,000 plate appearances through 2025. After showing some promise in his rookie season (.276/.342/.445, 16 home runs, 116 wRC+), he was optioned to Triple-A about a month into the 2024 season, when he had a .155/.239/.259 slash line, no home runs, and a 42 wRC+ in 67 plate appearances. He spent four months in the minors, and though his performance when he returned for good at the end of August (.242/.273/.463, five homers, 103 wRC+ in 99 plate appearances) still fell short of what the Cardinals expected from him, it felt like something he could build upon the following season. Instead, things got even worse, as Walker ran a 66 wRC+ with just six home run and -1.3 WAR over 111 games in 2025.
During the offseason, he went to Driveline to learn what had gone wrong and figure out how to fix it. He honed his mechanics to get his body in a better position before the swing and help his bat take a more direct path to the ball during it. He wanted his optimized mechanics to become second nature, so that he didn’t have to think about them while he was at the plate. Yet for all the work he put in, he still struggled during spring training, to the point that the Cardinals kept him out of the lineup for three days to get right in the batting cage. Working with assistant coach Casey Chenoweth, Walker went back to the basics and let it rip. According to Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“I’m just going to hit these balls as hard as I can,” Walker said he told Chenoweth. “I did that. I took a few more. I took a few more athletic swings. I caught some barrels. Then I’m like: I’m going to dial it back a bit for an in-game swing. It worked. I went forward from there. I didn’t think about mechanics, but later looking at the video and it was what I was trying to do.”
He hasn’t looked back since then. Across 93 games and 395 plate appearances this season, Walker is batting .294/.354/.532 with 22 home runs, a 143 wRC+, and 2.7 WAR. The biggest change seems to be his ability to lift the ball, helping get the most out of his uber-fast swing.
That new swing was on display for all 31 homers Walker needed to win on Monday. He advanced from the first round with 13 dingers, tying Willson Contreras for the most in a round. In the semi-finals, Walker faced Junior Caminero, the runner-up in last year’s Derby and the only player in the majors with a faster average bat speed than Walker. Caminero hit just five homers, and Walker quickly topped that mark to advance to the finals.
In total, competitors hit 131 home runs at an average distance of 430 feet, or about 10.7 total miles of homers, according to Baseball Savant.
| Name | 1st Round HR | 2nd Round HR | Final Round HR | Long |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jordan Walker | 13 | 6 | 12 | 470 |
| Kyle Schwarber | 10 | 9 | 11 | 461 |
| Willson Contreras | 13 | 8 | NA | 490 |
| Junior Caminero | 12 | 5 | NA | 491 |
| Munetaka Murakami | 9 | NA | NA | 466 |
| Bryce Harper | 8 | NA | NA | 482 |
| Jac Caglianone | 8 | NA | NA | 477 |
| Ben Rice | 7 | NA | NA | 443 |
The Home Run Derby remains one of the most bizarre events on the baseball calendar. It’s fun to see great sluggers hanging out with their friends and families, swatting flies in a business casual setting. But the presentation can make for a dizzying spectacle for the at-home viewer.
The event this year was broadcast exclusively on Netflix. I was not subscribed to Netflix, and then for a few hours I was, and now I’m not again. Coverage kicked off about an hour before the Derby, with roundtable banter and just enough swearing to let you know this wasn’t your grandparents’ Home Run Derby. Then Michael Buffer, flanked by umpires, announced the contestants into a boxing ring set-up at second base. The players trotted out in what appeared to be the Fourth of July jerseys they wore in games earlier in the month.
Once the Derby began, the broadcast was fine. It’s hard to describe 131 home runs, and the announcers generally didn’t try, treating the event closer to a live podcast than live news. Without timed rounds, it didn’t quite have the manic pace of years past, but there was still the identifying camera cuts, from throw to swing to fly to stands to baseball-adjacent celebrity reaction to T-Mobile commercial to throw again, repeat.
The whole thing felt very smooth. Perhaps too smooth at times, as some have described the event as boring, sleepy, juiceless, etc. There wasn’t anything necessarily controversial or historic or newsworthy that happened. It all felt very… fair. In fact, it wasn’t until Walker’s final do-or-die swings that there was anything specific to say about this Derby at all. Everyone just kind of stepped to the plate, hit homers, and had a good time.
Ryan Blake is a contributor for FanGraphs and Lookout Landing.
I would gently disagree with your evaluation of the Netflix production. I thought it was pretty brutal. A handful of tactical errors … but the worst thing was the overuse of different camera angles for many pitches – to the point to where you couldn’t tell if a ball was going out or in some cases even where it was.
This was my #1 takeaway. The cut from pitch/swing to tight zoom on a flying ball scrapes all visual context about the ball’s flight away. Impossible to tell how high or far they were going.
Best part of Netflix’s production was Barry Bonds who absolutely believes he would have won if he wanted to participate.
it’s Barry, he just might’ve
only if he was juicing again
I’m willing to take Barry at his word, lol.
Yeah the presentation was horrendous. Whatever they were doing with the camera angles has to be the worst camera work I have seen.
Walkers swing just looks effortless and then the ball explodes at 115, wild to watch.
As for Netflix’s production, I think it was pretty poor. The camera operators were swinging around everywhere in ways they manage to handle during regular baseball broadcasts. They were following popups to nowhere while the close-up crew seemed to be taking laps they were moving so much. Vasgersian seemed asleep half of the time while 475 foot tanks are happening all around him. I hope they improve this aspect of the derby the most next year because the new format itself I thought was a success
I’m curious how much was Netflix’s production? I would assume they use some sort of existing mlb production team, as opposed to spinning up a team from scratch for a single day.
As far as I know it was a coproduction of Netflix Live Events and MLB Productions with the bulk of the production decisions (when to cut to what cameras) coming from Netflix’s live directors. I obviously do not know all the details, but the production team failing the routine baseball shots (like tracking a popup) we never think twice about make me feel this is inexperience MLB Productions simply couldn’t have
Was Walker doing Griffey’s swing last night? He seemed taller in his posture and I thought I saw an occasional bat waggle.
He had the hat on backwards too
I hated the angle Netflix used where we faced the batter up close. Thank god Schwarber destroyed that camera
It should not shock you, but of the 10 lowest-launch angle HRs last night, Walker had 6, including the 5 lowest. I don’t think he changed his swing for the derby. (Caminero had 3 of the 10, Schwarber 1. Caminero is the other low-launch slugger in the league.)
Obviously some of this is a product of the Phillies rostering Schwarber and Harper, but given that Citizen’s Bank is #1 for homers by LHB and #18 for homers by RHB over the past three seasons, I was surprised that all the righties made it out of the first round while the lefties appeared to struggle a bit.
Walker’s swing changes helped, but more than any physical change, it is the mental change that has let him break out this year. If you watched him prior years, you could tell he was not confident, looked like a deer in headlights, and was in his head too much each pitch. But this year he looks much more relaxed and you can tell he isn’t overthinking.
Often in the analytics world look at what we can measure, but all sports and particularly baseball are as much mental as physical. Unfortunately there isn’t a way to measure a players mental side of the game though.
Maybe his “mental change” is a result of improvements due his swing changes? And if there is no way to measure a player’s mental side, how can you tell there are improvements?
Approach and mentality is a very real component to the game and many of the authors on this site itself have tried to determine that. Swing decisions, bath path, bat speed time between pitches, challenges, etc. all give us a glimpse into the player’s approach and mentality and offer measurable changes due to improvements in mentality. Improved mechanics and mental approach go hand in hand, and realistically we can only measure mechanics. Maybe one day body language analysis will have public facing metrics. Any coach will also look at the mental side by talking to the player and observing their body language and behavior to determine a path forward.
If anyone want some anecdotal evidence of mental improvements, look up the players who turned around their careers after reading “the mental ABCs of pitching”
I read an interview with PCA yesterday where he said his turnaround started after a conversation in May with Bregman. Basically said “he said the same thing everyone else was telling me, but it hit home in a different way”. And it was about the mental approach to the at bat, not the physical – pick a pitch type in a quadrant and don’t swing unless it is what you expected. And turn it into a game to compete against yourself to see if you can be as disciplined about it on every at bat as possible.
We’re all kind of guessing as to what changes when someone makes a great leap or falls of the table. How much e-ink was spilled this April about how Nico Hoerner changed his swing to a pull-friendly uppercut and that fundamentally made him a hitter with more power in his game. And that it was a meaningful physical change that we could all believe in. Fast forward two months and he’s having the worst hitting season of his career by far. We’re all just telling stories. Some of them are true, but we don’t usually know which.
I agree. It’s trying to force a narrative. It’s just like “team chemistry”. When teams are going bad, it just seems like they have bad chemistry, but maybe they have bad chemistry because things aren’t going well and everyone is in a bad mood? Dog wagging the tail, or tail wagging the dog?
Causation/correlation
I didn’t watch last night’s derby, and kind of bailed on it over the last few years (got really tired of Berman’s back, back, back schtick for every HR).
MLB network replayed the ’96 HR derby – it was Berman and I think Joe Morgan. That broadcast was awesome! Just two guys talking baseball, bringing up historical tidbits, informative towards the players participating. No catchphrases, no gimmicks.
I know I’m being “old man yelling at cloud” guy, and it was 30 years ago, but I think sometimes simple is better.
1996 being 30 years ago was a real punch in the gut this morning.
Not gonna lie, it gave me extra satisfaction to see Walker win, just to see those Philly fans shut up and suck it.
And it got even better the next day. All Philly hitters were retired, all but one plate appearance, ending with a strikeout. And Philly pitching gave up almost every single run scored in the entire game. Karma’s is a b…
I wish they would have shown more stats, like launch angle, exit velocity, etc. Also, I seem to recall that only ONE time did they show a map of the strike zone that showed all the locations of pitches hit for home runs, I think it was Schwarber in the finals. They should have done that for everyone, but also show the location of the HRs and the NON HRs so we can see a difference. The graphic was pretty useless without that context.
Was Walker’s feat all that significant? I mean, it’s batting practice.