Winning the Home Run Derby Is about Power Swings — And, Oddly, Plate Discipline

Searching for signals among Derby winners in the Statcast era.

Pete Alonso of the New York Mets bats during the Home Run Derby at Dodger Stadium on July 18, 2022. (Daniel Shirey/MLB Photos via Getty Images)

The format may change every year (or at least it feels that way) and there’s a strange habit for the most memorable home run barrages to happen early, rather than in the final. But as part of my weird love for the MLB All-Star Game, I still get excited for the Home Run Derby — and that means clearing my schedule to watch this year’s version at Globe Life Field in Texas tonight.

The HR Derby is also a nice fit with MLB’s increasing integration of technology that can measure every swing’s speed, plane and power. As we saw when Mr. Exit Velo, Giancarlo Stanton, won the contest in 2016, some players are made to produce the big, fancy power numbers that go along with hitting as many dingers as possible in a few minutes’ time.

But among the Statcast measures, what does actually predict success in the Derby? Is it raw power (i.e., exit velo), the right combo of power and launch angle (what’s known as “barrels”), or something else?

With the caveat that we only have eight Home Run Derbies in the Statcast Era (since 2015), I thought it would be fun to run some regressions on Baseball Savant’s batting percentile rankings and see if we can find patterns about who does well at the Derby.

Using a stepwise method called backward elimination, I performed a logistic regression between winning the HR Derby and those Statcast percentiles for contest participants since 2015. (Excluding 2020, since there was no Derby that year. 😔) The three variables that ended up being significant predictors of HR Derby success were:

• Barrels - The total number of batted balls with an optimal combo of exit velocity and launch angle (relative to other qualified batters that season)

• Walk Percentage - Walks per plate appearance

• Chase Percentage - Percentage of pitches outside the zone swung at (this factor is positive for your chances of winning)

This result surprised me! Barrels, not so much; it makes sense that having a swing which consistently produces perfect combinations of exit velo and launch angle would also be conducive to winning the HR Derby. But the plate discipline metrics are fascinating, and seemingly at cross-purposes to each other (though they are not multicollinear).

Players who do well in the Derby tend to have a strong enough command of the strike zone to walk a good amount; winners have, on average, a percentile rank about 10 points higher than non-winners since 2015. But they also tend to be more likely to swing at pitches outside the zone than non-winners — or even the average MLB hitter, for that matter.

Even though they didn’t prove to be significant in the regression model, other categories carry relatively pronounced splits between winners and non-winners. Unsurprisingly, HR Derby winners have tended to rank far better in average exit velocity and hard-hit ball rate. They also tend to both walk and strike out more, with a particularly wide gap in whiff rate — HR Derby winners are more prone to swing and miss when they decide to swing.

(Given what we know about the inverse relationship between bat speed and squared-up rate, and the related positive correlation between harder swings and whiffs/bad contact, this is probably not surprising.)

Maybe all of these findings are a consequence of the unique setup Derby batters face. Having a great power swing is a prerequisite; the more raw power, the better. Knowing the strike zone is also good, in order to avoid wasting time and outs. But when you are on the clock — and this year, they’ll be limited to either three minutes or 40 pitches, plus an untimed bonus period, per round — you also need to know when to swing at something that isn’t perfect, but still might leave the yard.

And who epitomizes those characteristics among this season’s roster of participants? Two-time winner Pete Alonso of the Mets is the betting favorite to claim a third title, which would tie Ken Griffey Jr. for the most wins in contest history. But the second-ranked player in the odds, Atlanta’s Marcell Ozuna, might be an even better pick: He is in the 98th percentile in barrels, the 79th percentile in walk rate (second only to Baltimore’s Gunnar Henderson, who grades out in the 80th percentile, among contestants) and the 62nd percentile in avoiding chases — making him a lot more chase-prone than Henderson, which is apparently a good thing when you have his other combination of skills.

All of this is based on an eight-contest sample, of course, so take it with a grain of salt. But I thought it was really interesting to find skills that track with Home Run Derby success beyond just “hitting the ball really hard”. There’s an art to the Derby, which is one of the things that still makes it entertaining after all of these years.

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