Which Home Run Derby participants are built to hit at Truist Park?

New York Times

2 days ago

The Home Run Derby field is set — and it's an impressive group that has launched a combined 176 homers already in 2025. Accordingly, the odds are also set, with MLB home run leader Cal Raleigh leading the way as the favorite to win the contest (+275 at BetMGM). Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Oneil Cruz (+350) originally opened at the top of the betting board, but has since been surpassed by the hot Seattle star.
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So, how do we pick a prospective winner in this year's contest? We look at the numbers, of course.
First, we looked at the data to see which contestant is best set up to smash baseballs out of Truist Park specifically.
For some of the Derby hitters, we have a large sample of data in Atlanta to draw from. Ronald Acuña Jr., who was initially slated to participate before pulling out with a back injury, hit 92 career HRs in 1,442 ABs at his home ballpark, by far the most substantial track record of anyone who was set to compete on Monday. His Braves teammate Matt Olson, who'll replace him in the festivities, has 62 HR in 1,052 ABs at Truist Park. And from his time as a member of the division-rival Miami Marlins, Jazz Chisholm Jr. also has 99 career ABs (with 5 HRs) at Truist Park.
But everyone else in the Derby lineup has 25 or fewer career ABs there, including Junior Caminero and his zero lifetime appearances in Atlanta. So clearly, to get a sense of who might get a charge at The Battery, we'll need to turn to other statistical tricks and approximations.
Along those lines, one of the coolest Statcast features tracked by Baseball Savant is its adjusted home run projections — which look at all of a player's batted balls, estimating how many of them would have gone out of every park in MLB after accounting for hit distance, temperature, elevation, wall height and other factors. Using these numbers for the Derby contestants, we can judge how many home runs each would have hit if they'd played every game at Truist Park, comparing that with their actual HR rates.
Here's a chart showing the change in home runs per AB — using at-bats rather than plate appearances to remove cases where a player walked or otherwise never got the chance to swing for the fences — between a player's actual numbers and his Atlanta-projected stats, looking at a weighted average from the past three seasons (with 2025 stats receiving more weight than 2024, and so forth):
Because Truist is a hitter-friendly park (relative to average) for home runs and hard-hit balls in general, many of our HR Derby contenders would have received a bump to their power stats if they'd played every single game in Atlanta. But there are a few notable exceptions. Olson, for instance, actually would have hit fewer HRs over the past three seasons (97 versus 100) if he didn't play any road games. Caminero's batted-ball profile would have resulted in one fewer HR this season if he'd played every game at Truist Park. And Raleigh, whose actual three-year HR/AB rate of 7.7 percent leads all HR Derby participants by nearly 1.5 percentage points over Brent Rooker (6.3 percent), would see his figure dip to 7.0 percent in Atlanta — while Rooker would rise to 6.5 percent under those same conditions, setting up a much closer comparison than the unadjusted stats would imply.
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Of course, Raleigh's adjusted HR/AB rate of 7.0 percent would still come in tops among the Derby field, which lines up with his strong 25.0 percent implied probability to win the contest (based on the BetMGM odds, after removing the juice). But not every player's odds align with what we might expect based on their projected HR stats at Truist Park. The scatter plot below compares each player's Atlanta-projected HR per AB rate with their implied chance of winning the Derby:
The big outlier is Cruz, who is one of the favorites to win the whole thing despite hitting just 39 Atlanta-adjusted HR in 876 at-bats since 2023 — good for a weighted rate of 4.6 percent that actually ranks last among the Derby field by far. (Next-lowest is James Wood at 5.3 percent.)
What accounts for this huge disparity? Mainly, Cruz has loads of other non-home-run-related power indicators, such as his league-high (or near it) marks in exit velocity (maximum and average), hard-hit ball rate and bat speed. This potentially places him within a long tradition of HR Derby winners with eye-popping measurements in those underlying metrics, regardless of how many of those batted balls would have actually gone over the fence in Atlanta.
Clearly, then, bettors are placing more stock in Cruz's monster power potential than in-game results like homers or even isolated power, where he rates next to Cody Bellinger, Isaac Paredes and José Ramírez (i.e., hitters with far less raw power). Conversely, a hitter like Rooker, with excellent in-game power but less stunning exit-velo or hard-hit rates, might be getting underrated in the odds, particularly relative to how Atlanta would have provided him with even more HRs than he actually had.
In addition to Cruz versus Rooker, the biggest question marks in this data are whether Raleigh will see at least some of his fearsome, league-leading power sapped by a poor fit with the host ballpark, and how Truist Park will treat Olson, who'll certainly get fan support, but perhaps not a boost for being more suited to hitting at his home park.
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The big takeaway is that Chisholm Jr. figures to benefit the most from ballpark fit, with a HR/AB rate projected to be 0.4 percentage points higher if he played every game at Truist. And Rooker would be right behind him, which means Rooker and Chisholm Jr. present more value than the odds are giving them credit for. On the flip side, Raleigh (because the stadium hurts him) and Cruz (because his in-game HR rate isn't as good as Statcast metrics would predict) present less value.
Ultimately, the park-specific HR projections suggest a tighter race than the odds imply, though we'll have to see who actually goes deep once the big bats start swinging in Atlanta.
Editor's note: Stats were as of Saturday, July 12
Betting/odds links in this article are provided by partners of The Athletic. Restrictions may apply. The Athletic maintains full editorial independence. Partners have no control over or input into the reporting or editing process and do not review stories before publication.
Neil Paine is a freelance writer whose work also appears regularly at ESPN.com, NASCAR.com, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sherwood News and his eponymous Substack. He is the former Sports Editor at FiveThirtyEight, and was also an analytics consultant for the NBA's Atlanta Hawks.
(Photo of Cal Raleigh: Douglas P. DeFelice / Getty Images)