ARLINGTON — The 2024 Home Run Derby is complete and the winner is Teoscar Hernandez of the Dodgers. That’s fun. He wasn’t really on anyone’s radar for the event several weeks ago and is a legit slugger, having hit 19 homers so far this season and sitting with a career high of 32.
It was also cool that the finals featured a Dodgers player and Royals player when neither team had ever previously had a Derby winner.
The finish was furious, too, as Bobby Witt Jr. had one pitch to tie Teoscar Hernández and crushed that one pitch, only to have the ball hit the center-field wall on the fly. It was one of the closest finishes we’ve ever seen.
For much of the night, however, I found myself thinking about 2014 and 2015. Let’s go back in time.
The Home Run Derby had become a complete slog. Players were watching upwards of what felt like 10 pitches go by before swinging. It took way too long, which was only a problem because of how many pitches they were watching. If there’s constant action, being there for three hours can be fun, but there wasn’t much.
That was 2014. Major League Baseball did something to change the Derby and they, um, hit an home run. A monster shot. The 2015 Derby remains my favorite iteration of the event — 2019 was probably higher quality — because it was so new and amazingly exciting now with a clock to follow. It helped that then-Reds slugger Todd Frazier won in front of the Cincinnati faithful. The electric crowds rallying around the home players are always top-notch fun.
Heading into this year, for whatever reason, the MLB folks decided to tweak the Derby and it’s clear now that was a mistake. One of the things that made the clock era so successful was the close head-to-head matchups. We lost a lot of that juice by having the eight participants just hit and then taking the top four. There’s nothing to compare for the early players. Was Alec Bohm’s 21 good or not? We had no idea, since he went first.
As it turned out, he tied for the top score in the first round, but without a head-to-head matchup, Bobby Witt Jr. following with a 20 really lacked the steam it would’ve had if the duo were directly facing off. What about if Adolis García, being the hometown Rangers player, was matched up against Teoscar Hernández and went second, only to fall short by one home run as the clock ticked down to zero. Stuff like that is what made the past several Derbies so amazing and we just didn’t get that sort of drama in this first round at all. Marcell Ozuna and Gunnar Henderson were the last two entrants and they didn’t get close enough to the cut to create any excitement.
Henderson’s turn in particular turned into a total bore, as he only finished with 11. Had he been matched with Pete Alonso, who finished with 12, at least it would’ve been interesting.
The first-round homers this year were down by 29% from last year, so maybe that’s part of the reason that it felt duller than the past, but I think it’s just the lack of drama.
Five of the eight players were within three homers in the first round. That’s an awful lot of possibly-close calls at the buzzer in the old format.
I still fondly remember the 2021 Home Run Derby at Coors Field when Matt Olsen sent a scorcher down the right field line, only to see it end up foul as his time expired. He lost by one to Trey Mancini. That was incredible. We lost moments like that.
I started to regain some buzz in the second round when the head-to-head matchups were back on. José Ramírez was chasing down Bobby Witt Jr. and I found myself glancing at the clock and the count and back at the ball again and again. That’s what I want. It’s what we need in this thing every single matchup.
Of course, Ramírez was also running out of pitches before he was running out of time. Another new wrinkle this season that didn’t work.
I don’t think there’s any need to put a pitch limit on it nor do we need bonus stuff. Just give them three minutes and let’s rock.
The second semifinals bout was very exciting. Alec Bohm ran down Teoscar Hernández in the final seconds to tie it. The crowd started to get up and into it for the first time in a while. It was great and a nice reminder of how fun this event can be. The two ended up going to a swing off and that was outstanding theater — coming down to Bohm’s final swing and all. We just needed more of it from an event that lasted nearly three hours.
One of the most fun parts of the clock format of the Derby is getting walkoff winners — that is, when a player surpasses the score of his opponent, that matchup is over. We got zero of those in the 2024 Home Run Derby.
It isn’t the biggest deal in the world. I’m probably nitpicking. This is an exhibition event and it was still very fun. The atmosphere in person is top notch. It just wasn’t as fun as it was, in my humble opinion, from 2015-23 and I really feel like losing the head-to-head matchups in the first round was the No. 1 culprit.
