Every summer, a handful of the game's best sluggers turn down a chance at a million dollars and a Home Run Derby trophy. The official reason is almost always the same: The swing changes required to hit for pure distance can mess with timing for weeks afterward. For fans, this so-called Home Run Derby curse is real and the long-held belief that a night of max-effort swings can ruin a hitter's second half.
We analyzed every Home Run Derby participant from 2018 through 2025, comparing first-half and second-half production across 50 player-seasons. The results point to one conclusion.
The data says the Home Run Derby curse isn't real
Metric | Result |
|---|---|
Derby participants | 50 player-seasons |
Players who improved after the break | 24/50 |
OPS before Derby | .876 |
OPS after Derby | .850 |
IL stints within 3 weeks | 1/50 |
Across 50 player-seasons of Derby participants who had enough plate appearances on both sides of the All-Star break, OPS dropped from .876 before the Derby to .850 after. That's a real number moving in the wrong direction. But run the actual math on whether that drop means anything, and it falls apart. The gap isn't statistically significant. Home run rate slipped too, from 5.55 percent of plate appearances down to 5.01 percent, and that one gets close to mattering without quite crossing the line.
Here's the number that actually settles it: 24 of the 50 players hit better in the second half than the first. If a curse were doing anything at all, that number should be closer to 10 or 15. It's a coin flip. Derby participation doesn't explain what happens next, it's just the easiest thing to blame for it.
Ohtani and Soto are the perfect case study
Let's look at 2021, when Shohei Ohtani walked into the Derby as the best story in baseball, on his way to a unanimous AL MVP season nobody had seen the likes of since Babe Ruth. He lost in the first round. Then his OPS fell from 1.062 before the break to .839 after, a drop of 223 points in the same season he was historically great.
Ohtani's opponent that round was Juan Soto. Soto beat him. And in the second half of that same season, Soto's OPS didn't drop at all. It jumped 312 points, the single biggest swing in this entire dataset, in either direction.
Same night. Same event. Same level of max-effort, mechanics-scrambling swings. One got worse by more than anyone else in seven years of data. The other got better by more than anyone else. If the Derby breaks swings, it apparently only breaks some of them, and there's no telling in advance whose.
Pete Alonso proves confirmation bias
Pete Alonso has been in this thing five times, more than anyone else in the sample. For a while, his pattern looked like the cleanest rebuttal to the curse you could ask for: three Derbies in a row, 2022 through 2024, three second-half improvements. That's the kind of streak that gets repeated on broadcasts as settled fact.
Go back one more year, though, and the streak was never a streak. His 2019 rookie season, the one where he actually won the whole thing, his OPS fell from 1.006 before the break to .863 after. The same player who's supposedly Exhibit A for "the curse isn't real" is also sitting in the data as one of its more convincing case studies, depending on which years you decide to look at.
Why fans keep believing in the Home Run Derby curse anyway
Nobody remembers the years hitters got better. A guy takes 300 max-effort swings in July, cools off for two weeks in August, and the blame lands on the Derby by reflex, every time, regardless of what actually caused it. The players who get invited to the Derby are, by definition, running hotter than their own normal through the first half of the season. Some of that heat was always going to cool off, Derby or no Derby.
Let's be academic with a control group. I checked five of the best hitters who had monster first halves and skipped the Derby entirely:
- Mookie Betts in 2018
- Christian Yelich in 2019
- Aaron Judge in 2022
- Ronald Acuña Jr. in 2023
- and Bryce Harper in 2024
Three of the five still saw their OPS drop in the second half: Betts by 143 points, Yelich by 106, Harper by 190. None of them stepped in the box against a lobbed batting-practice fastball for a Derby appearance. It didn't matter. A long season wears on a hitter whether or not he ever picked up a bat outside a real game.
The injury argument doesn't hold up either
Which brings it back to the guys who actually skip it, and the reason they usually give. It's not the swing, they say, it's the body. Max-effort hacks for three straight rounds and something's going to give, right?
Seven years of transaction records say otherwise. I checked the injured list for all 50 player-seasons in this study, looking for anything that landed within three weeks of that year's Derby. One case turned up: Byron Buxton, rib cage inflammation, 13 days after the 2025 event. Maybe it was Derby swings that did it. Maybe it wasn't. There's no way to know for certain, and the injury surfaced while he was running the bases, not at the plate. But it happened close enough to the Derby that it could be related, so count it. Even then, one injury out of 50 player-seasons isn't a pattern. It's a single data point that doesn't build a case for anything.
So if the body isn't the real reason, and the numbers say the swing isn't either, what's actually being protected? Probably the same thing that's always been on the line: the scoreboard in center field, with your name on one side and someone else's on the other, in front of a stadium that showed up specifically to watch you win.
Data from FanGraphs qualified batter splits, comparing each Home Run Derby participant's first-half and second-half production for every Derby field from 2018 through 2025 (2020 excluded, no Derby was held). Injury timelines sourced from the official MLB transactions log. Derby fields and dates confirmed via MLB.com and Baseball-Reference.
Add us as a preferred source on Google