The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! Watch your swings today. Coming up:
Old, But New: Tonight, we go back in timeThe Home Run Derby returns tonight from Philadelphia, where All-Star festivities are happening this week. It will be a radically different experience than what we’ve seen in recent memory. But that doesn’t mean it’s new. Quick catch-up before we get to opinions:
Instead of outs, hitters will get a limited number of swings per round. That means no 40-homer rounds anymore, which we’ve seen twice since 2019. Hitters will get 20 swings in the first round, then 15 for the second and third rounds.
That means no timed rounds, either, which did produce some drama since the clock-based format emerged in 2015. That was also the last time the Derby featured swings instead of outs, and had been so since the Derby was born in 1985.
Why? The reason is twofold: One, to protect hitters. So much of the conversation around the modern derby focuses on All-Star sluggers tiring out by swinging 200 times, as hard as possible, in the Derby. Two, this Derby is on Netflix, which is trying to streamline the experience as much as possible. Read more on that here.
