When Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001, it was widely assumed that that mark would never be touched again. But Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh has 38 homers in 94 games, on pace for 65 over a 162-game season. It’s not entirely inconceivable that he could become the third player ever to hit 70 homers in a season, and Aaron Judge’s American League record of 62 in 2022 seems beatable, either by Raleigh or by Judge (35 homers this season).
Judge, the 2017 winner, won’t be competing, but Raleigh will. Big Dumper has the shortest odds to reach the final, at +130 on DraftKings Sportsbook.
While Raleigh is the best power hitter in baseball — most impressively, he has a pulled fly-ball rate 11.6 percentage points better than any other Derby participant — these odds are much too short for my liking. He doesn’t lead the field in every power statistic. Among Derby participants, he ranks second in barrel rate, fifth in average exit velocity, fourth in swing speed, and dead last in squared-up percentage.
The Home Run Derby tends to be pretty random, which means longer shots like Buxton are smarter plays to make the final. Last season was the first iteration of the new format — in which all eight hitters have three minutes or 40 swings in order to hit as many homers as possible, with the top four advancing to a knockout-style bracket — and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Teoscar Hernández won after going on a major tear in the first-round bonus swings to eke his way into the second round.
Going into the swing-off, Hernández was far from a sure thing. The two finalists, Hernández and Bobby Witt Jr., hit just 19 and 16 home runs prior to the All-Star break, which ranked fourth and seventh, respectively. Gunnar Henderson had 28 home runs headed into the competition and finished with just 11, the fewest of any player in the Derby, and Marcell Ozuna (26) was also eliminated early. Jose Ramírez, the only 20-homer man to make it to the second round, fell short against Witt.
Plus, Truist Park is slightly more homer-friendly to lefties than righties — it’s the seventh-most homer-friendly park for southpaws and just the 16th-most for righties — and the switch-hitting Raleigh’s slugging percentage is 310 points higher as a righty than a lefty this season, albeit in 193 fewer plate appearances. He has suggested that he’ll swing from both sides during the Derby, though he might spend more time swinging lefty given that his father Todd is right-handed. Either way, the park’s dimensions should favor the other southpaws — Cruz, Wood, Olson, and Chisholm — as well.
