Oneil Cruz certainly wowed the crowd at Atlanta’s Truist Park and the baseball world on Monday at the 2025 T-Mobile Home Run Derby. He was the sixth Pirate to participate in the derby, joining Bobby Bonilla (1990), Barry Bonds (1992), Andrew McCutchen (2012), Pedro Alvarez (2013), and Josh Bell (2019).
Cruz, despite his struggles at the plate this season, was undoubtedly an excellent choice for this competition. He holds the Statcast record of the hardest hit ball in an MLB game at 122.9 MPH, and
in the derby, he had 9 of the 10 longest home runs hit.
Cruz started slow but heated up quickly, earning the #1 seed in the semifinal with 21 home runs in the first round. His eighth home run is what everyone is talking about, as it traveled 513 feet, which tied Aaron Judge for the longest home run in the derby outside of homers hit at Coors Field in 2021.
513 ft is preposterous
— MLB Europe (@MLBEurope) July 15, 2025
Oneil Cruz hit the longest homer in #HRDerby history outside of Coors Field and had some of MLB's biggest stars in shambles! pic.twitter.com/ozkEbFSV5N
Cruz was inconsistent getting hang time in the semifinal, as he hit a lot of hard line drives and only hit 13 home runs, which gave the “Big Dumper” Cal Raleigh a comfortable victory with his 19 homers. Raleigh would go on to beat Junior Caminero in the final with 18 more home runs.
Hopefully, Cruz can carry some momentum from this derby into the second half of the season, because his first half was not good enough. Despite 16 homers, he’s hitting .212/.414/.733 with 116 strikeouts. Some players who have had monster first halves and participated in the home run derby have slumped in the second half (2019 Josh Bell), but for someone like Cruz, who’s always swinging for the fences, things shouldn’t get worse for him this year, at least you would think.
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