I have never been a huge fan of the Home Run Derby. Like most, I have found it to be long with a format that gets mundane quickly.
MLB has heard the critics and will be making some good changes for the 2015 Derby in Cincinnati.
The positives:
Baseball got this part right. Make it faster. Make it timed. Eliminate the waste. That has greater appeal to the "I need it now" and "140 characters or less" generation.
We also love single-elimination bracket play. BCS, NCAA basketball, there is nothing more exciting in sports than win or go home.
What I love about the timed rounds is that they eliminate the trend of batters not swinging at consecutive pitches no matter what the pitch. Sammy Sosa put this on the map in 2000 at Turner Field. Others have since followed, dragging out the already painfully slow event.
The timed rounds also eliminate the ad nauseam act of non-Derby participants coming out and toweling off a hitter and giving him a drink of Gatorade. I won't miss that self-serving delay at all.
And this is where baseball should have stopped with the new format. But unfortunately there is more:
With one minute remaining in each round the clock stops with each HR hit and doesn't start again until A) a non-HR is hit, or B) a batter swings and misses. So if you're going to go on a consecutive home run tear, wait until there is less than a minute to go in your round, and feel free to take every other pitch following a home run, Sosa style.
Bonus time is also available based on how far a participant hits his home runs:
Now 480 feet gets you 30 seconds; 480 feet and 421 feet get you one minute; 480, 421 and 455 get you one minute and 30 seconds. Ugh.
I like the new rules. They're definitely better and should improve the pace of the event. It feels like MLB may have overdone it with the clock stopping at one minute and the availability of bonus time based on distance.
To be fair, we should wait and see how it plays out. Although I suspect those will be the snags. One thing is for certain: There will be a group crying for baseball to go back, back, back ... to the old rules, but I don't think anyone wants to see that.
