What is 'Dinger Score?' It just may help predict the Derby winner

By Mike Petriello | July 10, 2026

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What makes for a successful evening in the Home Run Derby?

It’s an incredibly difficult thing to prognosticate. That’s in part because it’s an annual exhibition of one single skill, with regularly changing rules and formats, but also because the eight participants each year have already been cherrypicked because they’re among the best power hitters in the sport. There’s no slap hitters here. Differences tend to be relatively minor.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t try, because we really have learned a lot over the last decade. We know how hard everyone hits the ball, and where, and, in recent years, a lot more about how fast they swing the bat and the way they make contact. There’s got to be a little something that tells us which players are more likely to do well in the Derby or not.

As it turns out, there is.

We went back and looked at the eight Derbies in the Statcast Era, dating back to San Diego’s in 2016, and checked out what participants had done in the first half leading up to the competition. Then, we compared a handful of prominent first-half Statcast batting metrics to see which held any predictive power over Home Run Derby success – or, in some cases, held none at all. We took all that and made it into a 1-99 “Dinger Score,” putting one number to a batter’s first-half Derby success to see how well they’d relate to advancement, with further rounds weighted more heavily.

(Why eight Derbies? There wasn’t one in 2020, of course, and for our purposes, we’re excluding 2021’s, which was played at Coors Field and understandably had some different properties of physics than will be present in Philadelphia on Monday night.)

That's 72 batters ranked: eight per year over eight Derbies, plus the eight more we'll see in 2026.

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Nothing’s perfect, obviously. There are always outside factors at play. For example, you can't forget how important and unpredictable the quality of each hitter-selected pitcher is, with a family member or amateur coach often stepping into the spotlight. In the end, this is more of a fun toy than a rigid, peer-reviewed metric. But if we’re trying to get to at least a little of “hey, what matters,” there’s something here. Remember, this is all just evaluating first-half performance entering that year.

Top Dinger Scores, 2016-present (excluding 2021)

Of the top nine scorers of 64 ranked in this tool, eight advanced beyond the first round, six made the finals – and four won the whole thing. Not bad! What about the other end?

Lowest Dinger Scores, 2016-2025 (excluding 2021)

Only Robert and Ramírez (2024) advanced out of the first round here, though Rutschman did put on a good show while losing to Robert. Of the bottom 30 of 64 ranked by this measure, that group went 5-25 in the first round, and only one, Todd Frazier way back in 2016, even made it to the Finals -- where he lost to Stanton.

So, that’s something. How does that work, and what does it say about 2026?

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We tested a variety of metrics to see which correlated to Derby success, and the ones that added the most value in the first half of a season are, in order:

“Adjusted exit velocity” is a version of exit velocity where it’s only the average of balls hit at least 88 mph, because anything underneath that is just a different flavor of poor contact.

Why “pull in the air,” when every homer in the Derby counts the same? Because that’s how it’s done in a competition like this. Of the more than 2,300 homers hit in Derbies over the last decade, three-quarters were pulled. In the last three years, only six total homers were opposite-field shots. That’s a happy accident in a Derby, not a plan. The rate of how often participants pull it in the air in the regular season doesn’t seem to matter much; how hard they hit it when they do, does.

Bat speed mattering so much shouldn't be surprising, given that it gives you margin for error if you tire. If you look at this year's Top 10 in bat speed, half of that group (Junior Caminero, Jordan Walker, Jac Caglianone, Kyle Schwarber and Willson Contreras) are in this Derby.

A blast, meanwhile, is a squared-up ball that’s also done with elite bat speed. Plenty of slower swingers, like Luis Arraez and Betts, square up the ball quite well. Many fast swingers don’t. The rare few who can do both – and this year, we’re looking at Caminero, Juan Soto and Yordan Alvarez in the top five – are stars. There’s a reason that on average, the Majors hit .562 with a 1.181 slugging and a 99.7% hard-hit rate on a blast, on squared-up balls with fast bat speed. It’s about the best thing you can do, and not being able to do so seriously limits your potential.

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One takeaway, for example, which shouldn't shock anyone: Hitting the ball hard in the first half really, really matters.

Each year, there’s a smaller, lighter slugger who relies on timing, athleticism and pulling it to exactly the right spot in order to get to in-game power. No one, obviously, is suggesting that the likes of Bregman (2018 and ‘19), Betts (2023), and Jazz Chisholm Jr. (2025) aren’t very good players, because of course they are. They also tend not to do well in a competition like this, where less raw power simply gives you less margin for error and demands perfect timing over dozens of swings, a worry if bat speed dips even slightly over the night as fatigue sets in.

You can even look back and learn something this way. For example, why did two-time champ Pete Alonso do a lot better in 2019 (when he won in Cleveland) and 2022 (when he advanced to the second round in Los Angeles) than he did in 2023 and ‘24, when he failed to advance out of the first round either time? By this view, because it was easily visible headed into the Derby that he wasn’t the same hitter in those latter years. (Again, this isn’t counting Colorado in 2021, which he won.)

Alonso, Dinger Score

Why? Because in ‘23 and ‘24, his first-half hard-hit metrics were noticeably down. In 2024, believe it or not, he had the weakest exit velocity on pulled air balls of anyone in the field. (For what it’s worth, Alonso’s underlying metrics are much better this year, if not quite his earlier peak, and if he’d been participating, he would have popped something like a 55 score in 2026, making him a slightly above-average candidate.

All that said, then, 2026’s crew looks like this:

2026 Dinger Score

A lot of this should intuitively make sense. Caminero leads the Majors in bat speed, just ahead of Walker. He leads the Majors in blast rate, with Walker, Caglianone, and Murakami not far behind. But it’s Caglianone who leads this group in ‘adjusted exit velocity,’ with Murakami, Walker, and Caminero not far behind.

Caminero gets no boost here for having made it to last year’s Finals, but it sure doesn’t hurt. The only thing that hurts him a little in this model is that for all his prodigious power, he ranks last in this field (though still excellent overall) in exit velocity on pull in the air. But the only effect there is that he’s merely tied with Caglianone for one of the best candidates we’ve seen, not ahead of him.

As for the bottom of the list, remember that we’re comparing to past and present Derby participants, not the Majors at large, so the bar is extremely high here. Rice has had a strong season, obviously, but he’s tied with Ramírez (2024) and just behind Betts (2023) for the slowest bat speed of any Derby participant since 2023, which pops as a red flag here.

But what should really stand out here isn’t who’s at the top of the list; it’s the rating at the bottom. Rice ranks here as being eighth of eight, but that’s not as much of an insult as it seems, given the 44 scoring on the 1-99 scale. That’s just outside the top 40 of our entire list of 72 players, and we showed you above how the weakest player in most years was showing ratings like 1, 10 or 15. What’s happening here is that the competition is deeper than ever, with all eight guys having something to really like.

That depth, and that lack of any real true non-competitor, means that if you were to average all the years, this one is by far the deepest and strongest field, ahead of 2022, when Rodriguez and Soto put on a real show.

Average Dinger Score by year

Rice, as it turns out, is ‘the best weakest’ player in any year, by kind of a lot. In 2024, he’d have been the fourth-strongest competitor, at least by this measure. That’s what the 44 means for him; he’s roughly average, ever-so-slightly below, compared to the last decade of Derby competitors, even if he’s at the bottom of this group.

There might not be a Judge or Ohtani this year, even if there’s at least two very likely Hall of Famers in Harper and Schwarber, with time enough for the younger players to make their name. But it’s a deep and talented field, and with youthful stars-in-the-making who swing the bat really, really hard. Throw in a pair of hometown stars who, eight years ago, staged one of the more memorable Finals matchups in recent memory, and it’s really got everything a Derby should have.

What more, really, could you want?

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