Are James Wood and Oneil Cruz Statcast’s Next HR Derby Chosen Ones?

The STANTON metric flags them as tater-blasters in the mold of other Derby dominators — from Aaron Judge to Giancarlo himself.

Cruz and Wood both have monster Statcast power numbers. (Associated Press)

Tonight’s Home Run Derby represents baseball’s annual celebration of pure, unfiltered power, as eight of the league’s leading sluggers will attempt to sock as many baseballs out of Truist Park as possible with millions on the line.

But some of the contestants boast more power potential than others. For instance, towering 6-foot-7 Pittsburgh Pirates centerfielder Oneil Cruz ranks in the 100th percentile of all MLB hitters in average exit velocity, blasting the average ball off his bat at a speed of 96.5 mph. Fellow Derby competitor Jazz Chisholm Jr., by contrast, is in the 53rd percentile of average EV, at just 90.1 mph. Needless to say, Cruz’s odds of winning the contest (+310) are much better than Chisholm’s (+1100).¹

In the past, we wouldn’t necessarily be able to identify potential Home Run Derby monsters like Cruz, whose more traditional power stats like Isolated Power are good but nowhere near as eye-popping as his deeper metrics. But with the advent of Statcast — MLB’s camera-based tracking system — in 2015, we began to collect far more granular data on how the ball behaves off of each player’s bat, including exit velocity and launch angle. In turn, this led to the phenomenon of the Statcast Slugger™ — a player whose raw metrics practically beg for HR Derby superstardom.

As I wrote about at the time, then-Marlins star Giancarlo Stanton was basically the poster athlete for this, as his impressive showing at the 2016 Derby was presaged by his 100th-percentile average and max EV numbers as tracked by Statcast:

In other words, some hitters are just built for a power-hitting competition like the Home Run Derby. And to quantify what it means to be Derby-optimized in the Statcast era, I’m introducing what I call STANTON (or the Statcast-Tuned Algorithm for Nascent Tater Output, Normalized). STANTON is a weighted average of a hitter’s percentile ratings in five different Statcast power categories, with the weights corresponding to what tends to lead to HR Derby success: