Power vs. Production: A WAR Breakdown for the 2025 Home Run Derby Participants
As the MLB All-Star break comes to a wrap, we saw a great show of the premier power hitters in the league during the Home Run Derby. Cal Raleigh continued upon his regular season dominance, by winning the 2025 Home Run Derby, but many young and veteran names all gave a great effort. Although the focus is on homeruns during this event, there is so much more to a player's contribution in a game. The Wins Above Replacement (WAR) statistic measures offensive and defensive contributions from a player compared to the teams backup for them, their replacement. In this study, I focused on analyzing the contribution of homeruns to each Home Run Derby contestant's WAR statistics for the 2025 season. The data was sourced from Pro Baseball Reference and then filtered to only include players with at least one homerun and eliminate duplicates of players that switched teams mid-season. Determining the Average HR Contribution to WAR When looking at the 2025 season and MLB players with at least...