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Harper won the event in 2018 in Washington and also finished as the runner-up in 2013, but no other player in Nats history has ever participated until now. Alonso, who won the 2019 Derby, comes in as the defending champ. At age 22, Soto is the youngest Derby participant this year. And if you saw Gallo drop jaws with his batting practice session prior to the 2014 Futures Game, then you can imagine what he's capable of in this kind of format.
Sporting News tracked live updates of the 2021 Home Run Derby throughout the night. Here’s to a hopefully exciting couple of hours of fun Monday night in Denver with a ball that will almost certainly be extra juiced in a park that is already begging for home runs. The 27-year-old first baseman has been a leading force for the A’s in the first half. He has just one season of 30 or more home runs in his career, but he’ll likely add a second in 2021. • Alonso now has a chance to join Ken Griffey Jr. (1994, ‘98-99), Yoenis Céspedes ( ) and Prince Fielder as the only multiple-time Derby champions.
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But since Statcast began tracking in 2015, no Colorado player has hit a longer one than Story’s 487-foot blast on Sept. 5, 2018, onto the left-field concourse at Coors Field. With the benefit of playing half his games at altitude, Story has averaged 416 feet on homers in his career, tied with Stanton for the longest of any player with 100-plus roundtrippers in that span. This was the second derby since the format change in 2015 to feature tie-breaking rounds, as Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani went to a swing-off in the first round. Winner Pete Alonso of the New York Mets tied his own record for most home runs hit in the final round with 23.
The eight players were seeded based on their home run totals through July 7. Each player is pitted in a head-to-head match, with three minutes on the clock in the first two rounds to hit as many home runs as possible. The running clock will only be two minutes in the final round.
Takeaways from the 2021 Home Run Derby
The CBS Sports stable of MLB writers recently conducted a roundtable on this very topic, and five writers made four different predictions -- Story, Ohtani, Mancini, and OIson. Since Ohtani was the only participant to earn two votes from us, we'll go with him. After all, he's the MLB home run leader, and he also hits the ball harder than almost anyone.
He just edged out Matt Olson's 23 in the first round, and got props from Russell Wilson to boot. Pete Alonso, leave some home runs for someone else, why don't you? The 2019 Derby winner, who seemed to be practically dancing with joy through his at-bat, broke Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s first-round Derby record of 29 home runs by launching 35. Seems like his secret weapons are working out pretty well. Juan Soto's out here hitting home runs 520 feet, which is two feet farther. But Ohtani's 33 home runs at the break combined with his pitching prowess might have led many to forget about Soto -- at least a little.
MLB Home Run Derby: Live stream, time, how to watch online, participants, bracket, odds
He also broke the record for most home runs hit in the first round with 35, surpassing Vladimir Guerrero Jr.'s total of 29 from 2019. With the win, Alonso become the fourth player in history to win multiple derbies and the third to win back-to-back derbies (the 2020 Home Run Derby was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic). The Home Run Derby format has remained unchanged since 2015.
Not only is the Japanese lefty leading the league in home runs, he’s also a starting pitcher with a sub-four ERA. The left-handed batter has pulled about two-thirds of his career homers. • Even with the pandemic-shortened 2020 and a couple of injuries, Soto is the 18th player in AL or NL history to hit at least 80 home runs by the end of his age-22 season. If Soto can hit 10 more after the break, he will be just the 11th to reach 90 by that point. • Whatever you say about Ohtani’s 2021, it’s not sufficient. He’s the 11th player to hit as many as 33 home runs before the All-Star break, but of course the first to do so while also pitching regularly .
Bonus Time
The Derby returns this year, and aside from Alonso, the remaining seven participants are all first-timers. The event is taking place at Coors Field on Monday, July 12, with the first batter getting started just after 8 p.m. As with 2019, the prize pool for the contestants totals $2.5 million, with the winner receiving $1 million of that total. The 2021 Major League Baseball Home Run Derby was a home run hitting contest between eight batters from Major League Baseball . The derby was held on July 12, 2021, at Coors Field in Denver, CO, the site of the 2021 MLB All-Star Game. He led off against Royals catcher Salvador Perez with 35 homers in the opening round.
He did it by launching 57 total homers , including 20 in a semifinal victory over Ronald Acuña Jr. and 23 in the final showdown with Guerrero. Alonso earned bonus time in all three rounds by hitting at least three homers 440-plus feet, but he never actually needed it -- walking off his opponent before the end of regulation. • Alonso set the rookie home run record with 53 in 2019 and leads the Majors with 86 total dingers since the beginning of that season. He also ranks first in that span in homers hit 110-plus mph , and he's tied for first in homers hit 440-plus feet . • Gallo hits some of the most extreme dingers in the game.
Less than two years after he was diagnosed with colon cancer, Mancini is back to mashing baseballs in Baltimore this season. The 29-year-old has hit at least 24 home runs in each of his first three full-time seasons. There’s nothing quite like watching a home run swing, when a batter really gets ahold of one and sends the ball into orbit. That only happens a few times per game if you’re lucky, though. • Ohtani isn’t just hitting homers -- he’s destroying baseballs. His 16 homers of 110-plus mph, including six of 115-plus, lead MLB, as do his 17 of 420 feet or longer.
Due to the thin air in Denver, the Rockies instituted what is effectively a large humidor to keep balls from drying out. Denver remains a great park for hitters, but the “humidor” has helped. However, we will not see it in use for the Derby, which hopefully means we see a boost in home runs. Trevor Story just survived a ferocious comeback by Joey Gallo, and if he keeps hitting dingers like his record-setting second of the first round, he could go far.
After the 2020 MLB All-Star Game and Home Run Derby were canceled due to the COVID-19-shortened season, All-Star festivities are back in full… swing. The field is loaded with some of the game's top power hitters, and the mile-high altitude in Denver at Coors Field should make dingers even easier to hit. • Gallo wasn’t having a huge power season by his standards -- until, suddenly, he was. He homered in five straight games from June 26-July 1 and joined Josh Hamilton as the only players in Rangers club history to hit at least seven big flies in any five-game span. After producing 11 homers in his first 66 games this season, Gallo went deep 13 times over his final 19 first-half games. • While Guerrero may have made the biggest impression in the 2019 Derby, it was Alonso who walked away with the trophy (and the $1 million prize).
The participants were seeded and paired off based on their home run totals as of last Tuesday. Ties were broken by awarding the higher seed to the player with a higher home run total in 2020. Trey Mancini did not play in 2020, however, so the tie between him and Pete Alonso was broken using 2019 home run totals.
Will this be the night he adds Home Run Derby champion to his impressive collection of 2021 achievements? If the final pre-Derby BP blast he hit to the deep, deep reaches of Coors Field is any indication, it just might. For a second there, it looked like Shohei Ohtani was going to put up a goose egg in the first round against Juan Soto, but he recovered just in time to tie him. It took a final swing-off, in which Soto hit three towering moon shots and Ohtani hit a grounder in his first swing, for the whole thing to finally be resolved.
Ties in any round are broken by a 60-second tiebreaker with no bonus time or timeouts. If a tie remains, the contestants will engage in successive three-swing swing-offs until there is a winner. Each contestant receives 30 seconds of bonus time after the regulation time expires. Additionally, the contestants can receive an additional 30 seconds of bonus time if they hit at least one home run that equals or exceeds 475 ft (144.78 m) during regulation. Each contestant is entitled to one 45-second timeout in each regulation period.
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