Ordered by most first-half home runs, your eight Monday mashers to watch.
1. Cal Raleigh, Mariners
Baseball’s shocking home run king.
It’s not all that hard to see how he’s done that either, as we dove into deeply in June. It’s because he hits it hard and pulls the ball in the air, which is basically what Ted Williams said to do. No one pulls it more in the air this year, with his nearly 38% air-pull rate narrowly edging out Isaac Paredes, and that undersells it a little, because only one season in the entire Statcast tracking era (since 2015) has had a higher air pull rate. Throw in the 90th percentile bat speed, and you can see the idea here. “Hit it hard, in the air, to the pull side.” It’s not always a mystery.
But of course, there are two Raleighs, given that he’s a switch-hitter — and they’re both dangerous, to the point that over the course of his career, they’re completely indistinguishable in production. No, really: Raleigh is in his fifth season with Seattle, and his career OPS of .787 as a left-handed batter is close to his career OPS of .800 as a right-handed batter. While that hasn’t quite been the case in 2025, where he’s been stronger from the right side, it does at least tell you that no matter which side he slugs from in the Derby, he doesn’t have a weak half here.
While the bat speed and swing path are almost identical from both sides of the plate, there are some slight differences depending on which side he’s coming from.
This won’t come as a huge surprise since you already know that he pulls it in the air more than anyone, but no one catches the ball farther out front than Raleigh from the right side does. The average hitter has an intercept point of 32 inches in front of their center of mass, and some, like Paul Goldschmidt, let it get so deep that they’re catching it only 20 inches out front. But Raleigh, from the right side? Just about 40 inches. It’s a clear strategy here — find that power out front, put it in the air to the pull side.
Lefty Raleigh stands a little farther back in the box (3 inches) and a little closer to the plate (2 inches), and doesn’t quite let it get so deep (5 inches farther back) as his right-handed counterpart.
2. James Wood, Nationals
You don’t have to pull it if you can hit it this hard to all fields.
Take absolutely everything we said about Raleigh pulling it in the air and throw it right in the trash can here, because we’re swerving wildly in the opposite direction for Wood, a big part of Washington’s return in the 2022 trade that sent Juan Soto to San Diego.
Wood doesn’t lift the ball, and he doesn’t pull it, either — at times aggressively so, to the point that he made it nearly a month into the season before his first pulled ball in the air. (It was, of course, a massive blast to right.) His roughly 10% air-pull rate this year is barely half the Major League average. It’s less than one-fourth of Raleigh’s. His almost 51% grounder rate is one of the 25 highest in the Majors. It’s not your traditional power profile.
Wood knows this, and he knows the lingo, too. “Ideally, I hit it at like 28 or 30 degrees,” said Wood in April, talking about launch angle. “But I just think you go up there hoping for hard contact.”
There’s no need for hoping, because Wood is turning that into reality, often, and that’s how he’s overcoming the somewhat suboptimal power-angle issue. Wood swings one of the 10 fastest bats in the Majors, and that has him tied for eighth-best hard-hit rate on the 2025 leaderboards. There’s a lot of science that goes into “swing fast -> hit hard,” but also there’s not. Swing fast, hit hard.
When he gets it in the air, which again is not as often as you’d like, only Shohei Ohtani has a longer average distance, and that’s why only three hitters — Ohtani, Aaron Judge, and Raleigh — have a higher rate of their air balls turning into homers than Wood’s 20%. If you’re going to hit it to all fields, that’s fine, but you’d better do it with violence to find some power. No one in baseball hits the ball harder to straightaway or the opposite field, with Wood’s 98.0 mph exit velocity ranking above Judge, Ohtani, and Soto.
It’s an untraditional power profile, at least for the modern game. But it’s a loud one, too.
3. Junior Caminero, Rays
The next bat speed king?
Caminero’s impressive bat speed has been noted in scouting reports for years, including when he was acquired by the Rays from Cleveland as an 18-year-old prospect back in 2021. Once he got to the Majors late in 2023, the data backed up exactly what the eye test and reports all said: elite, elite bat speed. His 78.0 mph mark is second only to Oneil Cruz among qualifiers, and tied for third among those with 100 swings. (Giancarlo Stanton reigns supreme, as always.)
Caminero, however, has the flattest swing path of any of the competitors in the Derby, and also has the lowest attack angle. (This is part of why he’s challenging for the ‘record’ of most grounded-into-double-plays in a season, not that he’ll have runners on base in front of him in a Derby.)
That hasn’t prevented him from having the second-most homers by any third baseman in the game, of course, largely because there’s some Wood-esque “it doesn’t matter because he swings just so fast” in there. There’s also this: The trend toward getting it in the air to the pull side is real, and it’s not at all hard to see why — as the season has progressed, he’s opened his stance, and added more loft to his swing.
April wasn’t that long ago. The Caminero we’re seeing now might already be a different swinger.
4. Byron Buxton, Twins
Stop thinking he’s just a speed-and-defense guy.
Because Buxton has spent a decade showing off elite speed and best-in-class defense, it can be easy to forget just how much raw power he’s got, too. If we go all the way back to 2019, you might be surprised to learn that he’s fifth in slugging percentage, behind four names you absolutely know: Judge, Mike Trout, Ohtani and Yordan Alvarez. He’s outslugged Soto, Bryce Harper, Freddie Freeman, Alonso, and everyone else.
He’s slugged so much, in fact, that in the history of the Twins since they moved to Minnesota in 1961, only Harmon Killebrew has slugged higher than his .485 (he’s tied with Justin Morneau). Just a month ago, he blasted a 479-foot homer that stands as the fourth-longest a Twin has hit since tracking began in 2015.
Buxton enters the break with 90th percentile bat speed and stands 10th in hard-hit rate, which is to say: he does everything fast.
5. Brent Rooker, A’s
The best home run hitter you don’t know enough about.
Rooker was a first-round Draft pick by the Twins in 2017, but bounced from Minnesota to the Padres to the Royals before finding a home with the A’s, for whom he’s on track to post his third consecutive 30-homer season. If that sounds like a lot of homers, it is; only eight sluggers have more than Rooker’s 89 in the last three years. He’s cut his strikeout rate down from 33% to 29% to 22%, too. It’s a nice trend.
That Rooker posted the first two of those 30-homer seasons calling the relatively pitcher-friendly Oakland Coliseum home should allay any fears that this is a West Sacramento phenomenon, because as offense-boosting as Sutter Health Park seems to be, he’s got more homers on the road (12) than he does at home (8) this season.
As you’d expect, Rooker has good bat speed (78th percentile), which closely matches his hard-hit rate (79th percentile), though neither will by themselves wow any onlookers. Instead, it’s more because he’s willing to voice his approach in a way that few hitters seem to be able to do.
“I mean, look, just about every swing I’ve ever taken in my life, I’ve been trying to hit a home run,” Rooker said after being selected.
It’s worked 89 times over the last three seasons.
6. Matt Olson, Braves
The hometown slugger who led the Majors in homers two years ago.
Olson may have been a late injury replacement for teammate Ronald Acuña, Jr., but it’s not like the lefty-swinging first baseman is short on power of his own. He’s done the Derby once before and showed well, hitting 22 home runs in Colorado in 2021, including a 495-ft blast, though he failed to advance as Trey Mancini hit 23. By the time the next season began, he’d been traded to his hometown Braves, for whom he’s continued to be one of baseball’s most prodigious sluggers, with the fifth-most dingers in the game over the last four seasons.
Yet it hasn’t exactly been consistent, either. Olson led the Majors with 54 homers in 2023, but like many of his teammates he took a big step back in 2024, losing 150 points in slugging. In what’s otherwise been a slog of a year for Atlanta, Olson has been a bright spot, posting a line nearly 40 percent above average as one of the team’s best hitters behind Acuña and Drake Baldwin. The hard-hitting ability that had taken a precipitous downturn in ‘24 sure seems to be back to normal now.
Olson’s 75th percentile bat speed is still quality, if not quite the 85th percentile mark he had in his magical ‘23. But if we want to get really deep, his underlying expected quality of contact stats for this year mirror what he had in 2023 almost exactly, and make it clear that last year’s troubles weren’t just about ‘bad luck’ so much as ‘making worse contact.’ No such problems, this year.
7. Jazz Chisholm Jr., Yankees
The biggest barrel improver in baseball.
Chisholm was traded from Miami to New York last July, and he’s missed a handful of weeks with an elbow injury late last year and an oblique injury in 2025. Despite that, he’s still in the Top 25 for most homers in that time, even though he’s taken 200 fewer plate appearances than sluggers such as his teammate, Judge. Among those with 20 homers since his trade, only seven hitters have a higher rate of at-bats ending in homers.
While Chisholm’s raw metrics land more on “good” than “eye-popping,” as he’s got 70th percentile bat speed and 56th percentile hard-hit rate, there’s one particular area where he stands out: barrel rate.
A “barrel” is defined as the perfect combination of exit velocity and launch angle — an important combination, one would think, for the Home Run Derby — and Chisholm enters the Derby with the seventh-best barrels per batted ball rate in baseball, behind some absolute aircraft carriers in Judge (the 2017 champion), Cruz, Ohtani, Alonso (a two-time Derby champion), Raleigh and Seiya Suzuki. He’s got the largest improvement in baseball in that measure from 2024, ahead of Spencer Torkelson and Corbin Carroll.
He’s not going to light up the exit-velocity leaderboards, really, as his 110.9 mph max exit velo for this year is in the 68th percentile, and might be considered a soft tapper from Wood or Cruz. But for as much as hitting the ball hard matters in terms of converting pitches into homers, there’s not any bonus points in the competition for exit velocity, either. Almost no one turns batted balls into that perfect exit velo/launch angle combination better than Chisholm has this year. He’s a sneaky contender to watch on Monday night.
8. Oneil Cruz, Pirates
No one has ever hit a ball harder, as far as we know.
The eighth seed might just be the most interesting case in the entire Derby. Cruz swings the bat as fast as anyone this side of Stanton, but it’s not Stanton who owns the record for “hardest-ever hit ball tracked by Statcast.” It’s Cruz, coming back in May when he took a Logan Henderson fastball down the pipe and crushed it into the Allegheny at 122.9 mph off the bat.
He’s got the top two, actually, and three of the top six. We’ll never ever know, obviously, how hard Barry Bonds or Willie Mays or Babe Ruth hit the ball, but given the fact that Stanton had the hardest-hit ball for every season for nearly a decade and then was topped by Cruz, it’s at least possible that Cruz owns the hardest-hit ball ever.
Cruz’s swing path and attack angle are about average, but the speed numbers — in terms of both bat speed and exit velocity — are so overwhelming that it’s hard for this to be a story of anything other than “man with unreal bat speed hits baseballs at unreal speeds.” (And distances, too; only Wood and Ohtani have a longer average distance on balls hit in the air.) Cruz is first in exit velocity, and third in hard-hit rate. He mashes baseballs, and his biggest issue in the regular season — making contact — probably won’t be much of a concern here.
“I like to hit balls far. I think I’m going to enjoy it a lot,” Cruz said, via interpreter and coach Stephen Morales, who will also serve as his Derby pitcher. Well said. We think we’ll enjoy it a lot, too.
