Home Run Derby Rules: Format, Timer and Bonus Time

Major League Baseball's Home Run Derby, held the night before the All-Star Game, has eight hitters and three rounds, and since 2026 each round is measured in swings rather than minutes. Every hitter gets 20 swings in the first round and 15 in the semifinals and again in the final. Every swing counts against the allotment, home run or not. A hitter who homers on his last swing keeps going until he fails to clear the fence. The four best first-round totals go into a seeded bracket, first against fourth and second against third. A first-round tie is broken on the longest home run; a tie in the bracket goes to three-swing swing-offs.

That format is new. From 2015 through 2025 the Derby ran on a clock, and in its last two years the clock came with a pitch cap of 40 (27 in the final) and an untimed bonus period that ended on three outs, with a fourth out for a 425-foot home run. Many fans still describe the event in those terms, and most of the records were set under them, so this guide explains both: the 2026 rules first, then the timer and the bonus time they replaced.

One caution before the detail. The Derby is an exhibition, it sits outside the Official Baseball Rules, and the league has rewritten it more often in the past decade than it has touched almost anything else on its calendar. Four different scoring systems have been used since 2014. The league's announcement for a given summer is the final word.

The Home Run Derby format in one pass: eight hitters, three rounds

The event belongs to All-Star week and is staged in the host ballpark on the Monday, with the game itself on Tuesday. How the players in that game are picked is a separate process, covered in our guide to how MLB All-Stars are selected; the Derby field is chosen differently and several entrants each year are not All-Stars at all.

Three rounds, shrinking from eight men to four to two.

Round	Hitters	2026 swing allotment	2024–2025 limit	How a hitter advances
First round	8	20 swings	3 minutes or 40 pitches, then bonus outs	Top four totals go through; ties broken on longest home run
Semifinals	4	15 swings	3 minutes or 40 pitches, then bonus outs	Head-to-head, seed 1 against 4 and seed 2 against 3
Final	2	15 swings	2 minutes or 27 pitches, then bonus outs	Head-to-head for the title
Swing-off, if needed	2	3 swings each, repeated	60 seconds, then 3 swings each	Used only for ties in the semifinals and final

Under the 2026 rules a turn has one simple shape. The hitter swings until his allotment is used up, and his total is the number of those swings that left the park. The only extension is the streak at the end: if the last swing of the allotment is a home run, he swings again, and again, until one fails to go out. A hitter who is hot at the finish can add three or four home runs that way, which is exactly what decided the 2026 final.

Totals do not carry over. A hitter who puts up 13 in the first round starts the semifinal at zero like everyone else, which is why a big opening round guarantees nothing beyond a seed.

• 8Hitters in the field
• 3Rounds to win the title
• 20Swings in round one
• 15Swings in the semifinals and final

Figures from the format MLB used in 2026, the first Derby since 2014 without a clock. The league can and does change them between seasons.

Round one: eight hit, four go through, and distance breaks the tie

Until 2024 the Derby opened with four head-to-head matchups. A hitter could post the second-best total of the round and go home because he happened to be drawn against the man who posted the best. The current first round fixed that by removing the bracket from it altogether. All eight hit, the totals go on one leaderboard, and the top four advance.

It is a fairer round and a slightly flatter one to watch, because nobody is chasing a specific opponent. The tension moves to the cut line. The fifth-place hitter on the board spends the back half of the round watching other men try to pass him.

Why a first-round tie is not settled by swinging

Eight hitters make ties at the cut line likely, and a swing-off for every one of them would stretch a round that already runs long. So MLB breaks first-round ties on a statistic the hitters have already produced: the longest home run each one hit during the round, as measured by Statcast's projected distance. The longer ball advances.

Cal Raleigh and Brent Rooker in 2025 are the case study, and probably will be for as long as the rule stands. At Truist Park in Atlanta they finished round one with 17 each, tied for the fourth and last place in the semifinals, and nobody took another swing. Raleigh's longest was measured at 470.61 feet, Rooker's at 470.53, a gap of eight hundredths of a foot. Statcast projects where a ball would have landed had the seats not been in the way, so the figure is an estimate carried to two decimal places, and a tiebreak resting on the second decimal is resting on the limits of the measurement. The rule is clear. Whether it is precise enough to bear that weight is a different question.

The same tiebreak sets the seeds, and the 2026 rules kept it unchanged. In Philadelphia that year Willson Contreras of the Boston Red Sox and Jordan Walker of the St. Louis Cardinals both hit 13 in the first round; Contreras took the top seed on a 490-foot drive against Walker's 470.

What the seed is worth

Less than it looks. In both of the pooled first round's first two years the champion came out of round one in fourth place: Teoscar Hernandez of the Dodgers at Globe Life Field in 2024, then Raleigh in Atlanta. In 2026 the second seed, Walker, won, and the fourth seed, Kyle Schwarber of the host Phillies, reached the final. The top seed's reward is a matchup against the fourth-best first round, and in an event where every total resets, the fourth-best first round is one decent night away from being the best semifinal.

The semifinals and final: a seeded bracket, and a shorter final until 2026

From four hitters on, the Derby is single elimination. The leaderboard's first-place finisher meets the fourth and the second meets the third. The winners hit for the title.

In the bracket rounds the two hitters go one after the other, and the man hitting second has a real edge. He knows the number. If the first hitter posts 9, the second needs 10 and not one swing more, and his round ends the instant he gets there. No swings are wasted on balls that no longer matter, and no energy either. The higher seed takes that second turn, which is the one tangible thing a strong first round buys.

Under the 2026 rules the semifinals and the final are the same length, 15 swings each, five fewer than round one. In 2024 and 2025 the final was the shorter round: two minutes and 27 pitches instead of three minutes and 40. The stated reason was fatigue. A finalist had already taken two full turns plus two bonus periods, and a third three-minute round late in the evening used to produce a visibly slower contest than the first. The 2024 final showed what the shorter version could do: Hernandez hit 14, and Bobby Witt Jr. of the Kansas City Royals, hitting second, made his last bonus-period out on 13, one home run short of a tie. Raleigh's final a year later was less close, 18 to 15 over Junior Caminero of Tampa Bay.

The first final under swing limits was the closest yet. Schwarber, hitting first in front of his home crowd, posted 11. Walker, three behind with one swing of his allotment left, homered on it and on three more streak swings after it, and won 12 to 11. He homered on his last six swings of the night, and his title was the first by a Cardinals player.

The rest between turns is uneven, and nobody has found a way to fix it. The winner of the first semifinal has the length of the second one to recover. The winner of the second can be back in the box within minutes if the seeding puts him first in the final, having just emptied himself to get there.

A point that confuses people every July: the three rounds are not three "innings," and a hitter does not get multiple turns within a round. One allotment of swings, plus any streak at the end of it, and he is done until the next round, if there is one.

The Home Run Derby timer: three minutes or 40 pitches, 2024 to 2025

The clock is gone, but it defined ten Derbies between 2015 and 2025 and it explains most of the records, so it is worth knowing how it worked in its final form.

The clock started when the pitcher released the first pitch. From there the timed period ended on whichever arrived first, zero on the clock or the last pitch of the allotment: three minutes or 40 pitches in the first round and the semifinals, two minutes or 27 pitches in the final.

The pitch cap, added in 2024, was the piece that changed the look of the event most. From 2015 through 2023 the only limit was time, and the winning tactic was obvious to everyone within a year or two: throw as fast as possible. An official was supposed to signal the pitcher when the fate of the previous ball was clear before he delivered the next one, but nothing else slowed him down, and by the end of that era the best rounds were a blur of far more than 40 pitches in three minutes and a hitter gasping by the two-minute mark.

Forty pitches in three minutes works out to one every four and a half seconds if a hitter used the full clock, which is brisk batting practice and nothing more frantic than that. It also reintroduced a choice the timed-only format had erased. Under a pure clock, taking a pitch cost a second or two. Under a cap, a taken pitch was gone from the 40 for good, so a hitter had to weigh a bad pitch against the allotment.

The 2026 swing limit went one step further and removed the clock and the pitch count together. A taken pitch now costs nothing, because only swings are counted, and pace no longer matters at all.

The timeout

In the timed formats each hitter could stop the clock once per round, and in the format's last years the timeout lasted 45 seconds. It could be used only in the timed period, never in bonus time. Almost everyone took it, usually a little past halfway, and it did two jobs: the hitter got his breath and a towel, and his pitcher, throwing at a pace no batting-practice session ever asks of him, got to reset. With no clock to stop, the 2026 format has no need of one.

Bonus time, three outs and the 425-foot swing (2024 to 2025)

When the timed period ended, the hitter stayed in the box. From 2015 through 2023 what followed was a slab of extra seconds. In 2024 and 2025 it was something older: outs.

The bonus period had no clock and no pitch cap. The hitter kept swinging until he had made three outs, an out being any swing that did not produce a home run. Hit ten in a row and all ten counted. The turn was over only when the third such swing failed to leave the yard.

Then the wrinkle. If any home run in the bonus period traveled at least 425 feet by Statcast's projection, the hitter earned one more out, a fourth. In a pitcher's park on a cool night 425 feet is a serious drive; in the thin air of Denver, where the 2021 Derby was held under a different rulebook, it would have been routine. The ballpark and the weather decided how much that fourth out was worth, the same way they decide a great deal else about fly balls, as our explainer on park factors and why no two ballparks are equal sets out.

1. 1First pitchThe clock started when the pitcher released the ball. Three minutes and 40 pitches were available, or two minutes and 27 in the final.
2. 2Timed periodEvery swing was free. A ball that stayed in the park cost nothing but a pitch from the allotment.
3. 3TimeoutOnce in the round the hitter could stop the clock for 45 seconds to rest and regroup with his pitcher.
4. 4Clock or capThe timed period ended when time expired or the last permitted pitch had been thrown, whichever came first.
5. 5Bonus periodWith no clock running, the hitter swung until he had made three outs. Any swing that was not a home run was an out.
6. 6Fourth outA bonus-period home run of 425 feet or more added one extra out.
7. 7TotalHome runs from both periods were combined into the round's score.

The sequence of a single round in the last two years of the timed Derby. The 2026 format replaced all of it with a fixed number of swings.

The 2026 streak rule is a direct descendant. Bonus outs gave every turn an ending that a crowd could feel, a hitter trailing by two with one out left being on his last strike in the plainest sense. The swing format keeps that pressure in a smaller dose: the last swing of the allotment is do-or-die, and a home run on it buys another.

It rewards a different skill, too. The old timed period favored stamina and tempo. A fixed count of swings favors a hitter who can clear the fence on demand with no margin, and those are not always the same man.

How many outs in the Home Run Derby, and what uses up a swing

The question "how many outs in the Home Run Derby" has had several different answers since 1985, which is why the confusion persists. Under the 2026 rules the answer is none: there are no outs, only a count of swings. In 2024 and 2025 it was three, sometimes four, and only in the bonus period. From 2015 through 2023 there were no outs at all, just a clock. Before that, ten outs per round was the standard for nearly three decades, with seven in 2014.

Situation	2026 swing format	2024–2025 timed period	2024–2025 bonus period
Swing that produces a home run	Counts toward the total; uses a swing	Counts toward the total	Counts toward the total
Swing that puts the ball in play short of the fence	Uses a swing	No penalty; one pitch used	One out
Swing and miss, or a foul ball	Uses a swing	No penalty; one pitch used	One out
Pitch taken without a swing	Not a swing, so nothing is used	No penalty; one pitch used	No out
Ball that clears the fence in foul territory	Uses a swing; not a home run	Not a home run; one pitch used	One out

Two lines in that table deserve a comment. Under swing limits, as in the old bonus period, a taken pitch costs nothing, so a hitter can and should wait for one he likes. And a foul ball over the fence is still a foul ball. A Derby home run is a fair ball over the wall in flight, judged the way it would be in a game, and the rules that sort fair from foul down the lines are the ones in our guide to foul ball rules in baseball.

Older fans remember a Derby that ran entirely on outs: ten per round, no clock, a hitter free to take as many pitches as he pleased. It produced some of the event's best nights and some of its dullest stretches. A patient slugger could let pitch after pitch go by between swings, and with eight or ten entrants nothing in the rules capped how long a first round ran. Outs were abandoned for 2015, largely because an event with no clock had become too long and too unpredictable to schedule. The three-out bonus period of 2024 brought the old idea back in a small dose, and the 2026 swing count is a cousin of it: a fixed budget of chances, where the ten-out Derby gave a fixed budget of failures.

Breaking a tie in the bracket: the swing-off

Distance settles a tie in round one. It does not settle anything after that. When two hitters finish a semifinal or the final level, they hit again.

1. 1Level after both turnsThe two hitters have the same home run total once both allotments, and any streak at the end of them, are complete.
2. 2Three swings eachEach hitter takes three swings. Every swing counts whether or not it is a home run.
3. 3CompareThe hitter with more home runs from his three swings wins the round.
4. 4RepeatIf the three-swing totals match, another round of three swings each follows, until one hitter is ahead at the end of a round.

The tiebreak sequence for head-to-head rounds under the 2026 rules. From 2015 through 2025 a 60-second swing-off came first. First-round ties are handled differently, on the longest home run, with no extra swings.

The 2026 rules simplified this. From 2015 through 2025 a tie first went to a 60-second swing-off: one minute on the clock, no pitch cap, no timeout and no bonus outs to rescue a poor minute. Only if that was level did the three-swing rounds begin. With the clock gone from the rest of the Derby, the one-minute stage went too, and the three-swing round is now the whole tiebreak.

Three-swing rounds are close to sudden death without being it. Both hitters complete their three before the totals are compared, so the second man is never beaten before he has swung. The 2019 semifinal in Cleveland between Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Joc Pederson is the reason this stage of the rules is known at all: level after regulation at 29, level after the one-minute swing-off, level again after a round of three, and decided only in the next one, 40 to 39. Hernandez also needed a swing-off to get past Alec Bohm of Philadelphia in a 2024 semifinal, after the two were tied at 14 in regulation, on his way to the title.

Home runs hit in swing-offs are added to a hitter's total for the night, which is why the record totals discussed further down are inflated for anyone who went through one.

Who pitches in the Home Run Derby

Each hitter brings his own pitcher. The league does not supply one, and the pitcher is not trying to get anyone out. He stands in front of the mound behind an L-shaped screen and throws batting-practice fastballs to a spot the hitter has asked for, usually thigh-high and over the inner half.

Most choose a coach from their own club, the man who throws them batting practice every afternoon from March to October. The appeal is obvious. That pitcher's release, speed and timing are already in the hitter's hands. A fair number go another way and bring family. Bryce Harper won at Nationals Park in 2018 hitting off his father, Ron. Robinson Cano won in 2011 off his father, Jose, a former big-league pitcher. Raleigh's 2025 title was a family production twice over, with his father, Todd, throwing and his younger brother catching. In 2026 two of the eight, Ben Rice of the Yankees and Jac Caglianone of the Royals, hit off their fathers.

And then there is Clay Council. Josh Hamilton's choice for the 2008 Derby at the old Yankee Stadium was a 71-year-old volunteer coach who had thrown him batting practice as a boy in North Carolina. Hamilton hit 28 in the first round, a record for the ten-out era, with a man older than most of the crowd's grandfathers lobbing them in.

Why the pitcher decides more than he should

A Derby round is won or lost on pitch quality more often than on the hitter's swing. Under the 2024–2025 cap, a ball six inches off the plate was one of 40 gone, and three or four of those in a row would sink a round. Under swing limits a bad pitch can be taken for free, but a hitter who chases one has spent one of only 15 or 20 swings. The pitcher has to hit the same spot at the same speed, pitch after pitch, in front of forty thousand people, which is a job nobody practices for. Coaches who do it well tend to get invited back by other hitters.

The pitch cap raised the stakes on accuracy and lowered them on speed of delivery, and the 2026 format removed speed from the equation entirely. Before 2024 the best Derby pitchers were the fastest workers. Now the best ones are the most boring. The discipline that the major-league game imposes on its own tempo, described in our piece on the pitch clock and what it changed, has a loose cousin here: a limit that turns pace from an advantage into a neutral fact.

How the field of eight is chosen

Nobody qualifies. There is no home run threshold, no ranking and no fan vote. Major League Baseball invites hitters, the hitters say yes or no, and the league keeps asking until it has eight.

The invitations follow a recognizable logic. The season's home run leaders are asked first. A player from the host club is nearly always in the field, because a home crowd is the best guarantee of noise: Todd Frazier won in Cincinnati in 2015, Harper in Washington in 2018, and Ryne Sandberg at Wrigley Field back in 1990. Young players with a following are favored. Being named to the All-Star team is not a requirement, and in most years one or two entrants are in the building for the Derby alone.

Nor is the field balanced by league any longer. Through 2014 the Derby was built as American League against National League, with an equal number of hitters from each and, for a few years, a captain picking his side. The bracket did away with that, and an uneven split between the leagues is now unremarkable.

Declining is common and carries no penalty. Aaron Judge won as a rookie in Miami in 2017 and, through 2026, had not entered again. The reasons hitters give in public are consistent: the All-Star break is four days long and the only rest of its kind in a 162-game schedule, a three-round Derby is a hundred or more full-effort swings in one evening, and a nagging wrist or oblique does not improve under that load. Some clubs are quietly glad of a refusal.

Money pulls the other way. In 2019 MLB raised the winner's prize to $1 million, a sum that for a player in his first few seasons can be larger than his pay for the year. Pete Alonso, then a rookie with the Mets, won it that first summer. Young hitters have had an obvious reason to say yes ever since, and the 2026 champion, Walker, was 24.

The Derby curse and what the second half shows

Every July someone warns that the Derby ruins swings. The belief has a patron saint in Bobby Abreu, who hit 24 home runs in one round at Comerica Park in 2005, 41 on the night, and then hit six in the second half of the season after 18 in the first. It has a mechanism, or a claimed one: three rounds of trying to lift and pull everything supposedly teaches the body a longer, loopier swing that takes weeks to unlearn.

The trouble is the comparison being made. Hitters are invited to the Derby because they have just had an unusually good three months of power. Players at the top of the home run chart at the break are, as a group, playing above their own established level, and they would be expected to come back toward it in the second half whether or not they spent a Monday night swinging for the seats. The fair test is to set Derby participants against hitters with similar first halves who stayed home. Analysts who have run that comparison across many seasons have generally found the two groups decline by about the same amount, which is another way of saying they found regression and no curse.

The format has also changed underneath the argument. A hitter in the ten-out years took his swings at whatever pace he liked, watching as many pitches as he wanted between them. A hitter under the 2024–2025 cap saw up to 40 pitches in three minutes, plus bonus time. A hitter under the 2026 rules takes 20 swings in round one and 15 in each later round, at his own pace. Whatever load the old Derby put on a swing, the present one is a different load, and evidence gathered in one era says little about the other.

Individual cases cut both ways, as they would if nothing were going on. Judge slumped badly in August 2017 after winning in July, then hit 15 home runs in September and finished with 52. Alonso had 30 at the 2019 break, won the Derby, and hit 23 more to end with 53, a rookie record. Neither proves anything. Nor does Abreu.

What can be said honestly: there is no good evidence the Derby damages a healthy hitter's second half, and fatigue or a tweaked muscle from a hundred-odd maximum-effort swings is a real if modest risk that players are entitled to weigh. That is a reason to decline. It is not a curse.

How the Home Run Derby rules got here, from ten outs to a swing count

The first Derby was an afterthought. It was staged in 1985 at the Metrodome in Minneapolis as part of the workout day before the All-Star Game, and Dave Parker won it with six home runs. Hitters were grouped by league and given ten outs apiece, split across two turns of five. The 1988 edition in Cincinnati was rained out and never made up.

Years	Core rule	What decided a round
1985 to 1990	League against league; ten outs per hitter in two turns of five	Outs
1991 to 2013	Three rounds of ten outs, with the field cut after each; details varied by year	Outs
2014	Bracket format with seven outs per turn	Outs
2015	Eight-man single-elimination bracket on a clock, four minutes per turn	Time
2016 to 2019	Four-minute turns, with bonus seconds earned by long home runs	Time
2021 to 2023	Three-minute turns and a two-minute final, plus bonus seconds	Time
2024 to 2025	Clock with a pitch cap; pooled first round; bonus period of three outs	Time, pitches and outs
2026	No clock; 20 swings in round one and 15 in each later round; a home run on the last swing extends the turn	Swings

The three-round structure arrived in 1991 and lasted, with tinkering, for more than two decades. The tinkering was constant: totals that carried from round to round in some years and reset in others, a 2005 field picked by country to promote the first World Baseball Classic, captains choosing teams. Underneath it the engine stayed the same. Ten outs, and a hitter could take all night.

That was the problem. Nothing in the rules limited how long a round could take, and too much of the evening was spent watching sluggers watch pitches. MLB's first fix, in 2014, was to cut the outs to seven and introduce a bracket. The second, a year later, was to throw the outs away. The 2015 event at Great American Ball Park was planned around five-minute turns, cut to four that afternoon because storms were forecast, and it worked so well with Frazier winning at home on his final swings that four minutes became the standard.

The clock era had its own drift. Bonus time was first earned by distance: in 2015 two home runs of 425 feet or more were worth an extra minute, and from 2016 through 2019 two of 440 feet or more were worth an extra half minute. In 2021 the turns were trimmed to three minutes with a two-minute final, and the bonus became automatic, 30 seconds for everyone plus 30 more for a home run of 475 feet; in 2022 and 2023 the extra 30 seconds again required two home runs of 440 feet. There was no Derby in 2020, when the All-Star Game was canceled.

By 2023 the totals had ballooned and so had the complaints. Rounds in the thirties and forties were being produced by pitchers who never stopped throwing, and hitters were finishing the first round too spent to contend in the third. The 2024 package answered each complaint in turn: a cap to slow the pitching, a pooled first round to stop good totals going home early, and outs in bonus time to give every turn an ending.

It lasted two summers. For 2026 MLB removed the clock altogether and kept the pooled first round and the seeded bracket, so a Derby round is now a fixed number of swings, 20 and then 15, with a home run on the last one buying another. It was the first Derby since 2014 in which time played no part, and the totals fell accordingly: Walker's 31 home runs across three rounds won it, ten fewer than Julio Rodriguez hit in a single first round in 2023.

The record book, the repeat winners and a 1960 television show

Derby records need a warning label. A total from the ten-out era, one from the four-minute era, one from the pitch-cap era and one from the 2026 swing count are measurements of four different contests, and totals that include swing-offs are larger again. With that caveat, the marks below stood through the 2026 Derby, and any of them can move in a single night, although under swing limits the biggest totals look out of reach.

Vladimir Guerrero Jr., 201991home runs

Randy Arozarena, 202382home runs

Julio Rodriguez, 202281home runs

Pete Alonso, 202174home runs

Vladimir Guerrero Jr., 202372home runs

Totals across all rounds and swing-offs, through the 2026 Derby. All five came under the three- and four-minute clock formats of 2019 to 2023, before the pitch cap and the swing count.

Show the numbers

Largest single-night home run totals in Derby history

Item	Value
Vladimir Guerrero Jr., 2019	91home runs
Randy Arozarena, 2023	82home runs
Julio Rodriguez, 2022	81home runs
Pete Alonso, 2021	74home runs
Vladimir Guerrero Jr., 2023	72home runs

Guerrero's 91 in Cleveland is the most by anyone in one Derby, and he lost the final to Alonso, 23 to 22. Arozarena's 82 in Seattle four years later also ended in defeat, 25 to 23 in the final against Guerrero. For scale, Bobby Abreu's 41 in 2005 was the single-night record of the ten-out years, and it stood until Giancarlo Stanton hit 61 under the clock in 2016. The largest single round belongs to Julio Rodriguez, who hit 41 in the first round at his home park in Seattle in 2023 and was eliminated in the next. Under the outs format the benchmark was Hamilton's 28 in 2008. He did not win either; Justin Morneau took the final. A pattern is visible. The great Derby round and the Derby title have a habit of going to different people, and the career and season records for the real thing, kept in our guide to the MLB home run record, have almost no overlap with this list.

Ken Griffey Jr. is the only three-time champion, with titles in 1994, 1998 and 1999. Alonso, Yoenis Cespedes and Prince Fielder have each won twice, Fielder once for a National League club and once for an American League one. Guerrero's 2023 win made him and his father, the 2007 champion, the first father and son to hold the title.

Year	Winner	Club	Ballpark
2015	Todd Frazier	Cincinnati Reds	Great American Ball Park
2016	Giancarlo Stanton	Miami Marlins	Petco Park
2017	Aaron Judge	New York Yankees	Marlins Park
2018	Bryce Harper	Washington Nationals	Nationals Park
2019	Pete Alonso	New York Mets	Progressive Field
2021	Pete Alonso	New York Mets	Coors Field
2022	Juan Soto	Washington Nationals	Dodger Stadium
2023	Vladimir Guerrero Jr.	Toronto Blue Jays	T-Mobile Park
2024	Teoscar Hernandez	Los Angeles Dodgers	Globe Life Field
2025	Cal Raleigh	Seattle Mariners	Truist Park
2026	Jordan Walker	St. Louis Cardinals	Citizens Bank Park

Where the name came from

The phrase is a quarter century older than the event. "Home Run Derby" was a half-hour syndicated television series filmed at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, a minor-league park with friendly power alleys, and shown in 1960. Two sluggers per episode, nine innings, three outs an inning. Anything that was not a home run was an out, and so was a pitch taken in the strike zone, which is a rule the modern Derby has never dared to copy. The winner collected $2,000 and came back the following week.

Mickey Mantle beat Willie Mays in the first episode. Hank Aaron won more money than anyone. The host, Mark Scott, died later in 1960 and the series ended after its single run of 26 episodes, to find a second audience in cable reruns decades later, around the time MLB's own version was finding its feet. The modern event's exit-velocity graphics and distance readouts, explained in our piece on exit velocity and launch angle, would have baffled Scott. The premise would not: one hitter, one pitcher throwing strikes on purpose, and a fence.

For the rest of the sport's rules and history, the baseball section is the place to start.