Fixing the Home Run Derby

I am, perhaps, unusual in that I kind of like the Home Run Derby. Well, except for Chris Berman's announcing. That guy is a menace to sporting event telecasts everywhere. But I like the event itself, unlike most sophisticated baseball fans. I don't really have a great lead-in from that fact to the topic of this piece itself, I just sort of thought it was useful background information. So, with that in mind, here goes.

I just saw on FanGraphs an article proposing "the easiest possible fix for the Home Run Derby." Currently, the Derby winner is determined through a three-round structure, where those with the highest home run total in or after each round advance. (As of 2013, I believe, the totals are cumulative in Round 2 but the two remaining players start from scratch for the final round, which has been criticized.) The alternate approach advocated by the article would be to scratch the separate rounds altogether and simply award the victory to the player who hits the longest fair ball over the wall. This, it is argued, would create a focus on the home runs that are actually impressive, i.e. the absolute bombs; it would potentially create a focus on a different kind of player, those with silly raw power rather than the best in-game home run hitters (something many fans have apparently been longing for); and it would keep the drama at its highest until the very last swing of the tournament. If there's a 520-foot shot on the board, well, whoever's got that last swing better swing for a little more than the fences.

Okay, that's reasonably interesting. But there was a modified version proposed in the comment thread that aligned with my own intuition: instead of letting the longest single home run win, have the winner be the player with the most total feet of home runs. But as other commenters were quick to point out, this collapses pretty quickly back to "most total home runs." At Citi Field, for instance, a line drive into Utley's Corner down the right-field line might go 330, while a Mark Reynolds-style blast into the Acela Club could be close to 500. But the difference between those two is miniscule compared to the difference between the wall-scraper and a 407-foot fly ball to straight-away center, which would count for precisely nothing. There's an advantage at the margins to hitting longer home runs, but ultimately it's only a marginal advantage.

So here's my idea: MLB already thinks it can estimate how far a home run ball would've flown before landing had there not been a stadium concourse in the way. Presumably it's not that hard for them to estimate where the ball would've landed, or where it crossed the fence, or something. So it shouldn't be difficult at all to calculate how far past the wall a ball flew. Again at Citi Field, a 450-foot home run to straight-away center would have carried the wall by 42 feet. So my idea is, rather than either having the winner be the guy with the most total feet of bombs or the guy with the single longest bomb, make it the guy who cleared the fences by the most total feet, between his various home runs. Unless I'm missing something, this is a way to balance between the competing goals that doesn't produce any perverse distortions. Raw power is rewarded, but more than one mammoth blast would be demanded. There would be no pre-determined relationship between the winner and either the guy with the most total home runs or the guy with the single longest one; it would be whoever could craft the best balance between those two desires. It would also increase the volatility, because on any one swing a player could make up an awful lot of ground, rather than just scoring a single point. Obviously MLB isn't going to make this kind of change any time soon, but I think it probably would make the whole thing a bit more interesting.