The homers! The distances! The crowd! The audio issues! The 2026 All-Star Home Run Derby had great moments, plenty of drama, and a disappointing broadcast from Netflix.

The opening was promising. A boxing ring in the shape of home plate was set up at second base and the participants walked out of the dugout and into the ring while being introduced by boxing public address announcer Michael Buffer. It was great in concept, but lost a little something with Buffer slurring his way through many a pronunciation and seemingly almost forgetting where he was. Bryce Harper climbed on to the ropes of the ring to the delight of the very Philadelphia-friendly crowd, but the ropes were so loose, he never made it more than three feet above the canvas. Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, and Jimmy Tatro attempted to provide jokes. Ferrell has a new show coming on Netflix. They were enjoying themselves, but the jokes were generally stale.

Fans made no secret they were pulling for Harper and Kyle Schwarber. Fortunately, the players from other teams took the boos directed their ways as playful jabs rather than actual attacks. The fans quickly supported those players in the first two rounds except when Harper and Schwarber were competing.

This year’s competition featured the removal of the clock for hitters. It appeared that Anthony Rizzo would be co-hosting the event, which was a good sign. Rizzo has always been open and personable during his time as a player. He talked about how difficult it was to have the timer and applauded the changed.

Instead they had 20 swings in the first round, with 15 in the second and final rounds if they made it that far. Upon reaching their “final” swing of a round, the player’s designated batting-practice pitcher would grab a “magenta ball” that was half magenta and half traditional white in honor of event sponsor, T-Mobile. It wasn’t until the final round that anyone hit a magenta ball for a home run and it was obvious that the promotional stunt was interfering with the competition.

The main threesome -including Matt Vasgersian and Hunter Pence– attempted to set the scene from a broadcasting platform on the field. Pence was super animated as expected but a lot of what he said was either riddled with bad grammar or was almost undecipherable because the crowd noise was so loud. We tried the game with a speaker and with normal television sound. If your house was like mine, people watching were into the contest and the distances. For some reason, Netflix went from showing the distances on a large graphic on the right of the screen during Willson Contreras‘ turn to a much smaller number on the bottom left for everyone else. The big graphic was cool. The little number was not.

We don’t get to see Contreras a lot on the west coast. I had no idea he had that kind of generational power. His long of 490 was surrounded by many balls 450 or better.

Also uncool was Netflix’ failure to tell us how far two foul balls went that were hit. One appeared to leave Citizens Bank Park. Call me crazy, but it would have been nice to know how far that was.

I’d also like to know how far Major League Baseball and its broadcast partners will go with this campaign to get this generation of viewers to normalize the steroid era players. Alex Rodriguez is on multiple platforms and adds very little to those broadcasts. A Roger Clemens game appearance was recently heavily advertised. And for the All-Star Game, none other than Barry Bonds shared a stage with Albert Pujols and Elle Duncan. In fact, Bonds is listed as the “headliner” in the Yahoo Sports page preview of the game. Having Bonds -who was convicted (later thrown out on a technicality) related to the BALCO performance-enhancing investigation as part of the broadcast is yet another attempt to accept this group of players back into the fold, despite their involvement in schemes to cheat the game and steal records from previous generations of players. Bonds also let his best friend (trainer, Greg Anderson) go to prison instead of testifying in court.

Bonds had two decent points about the swing of one player but kept saying his hands needed to be above the ball in order to hit line drives. I know what he was trying to say, but it was confusing and I would have much rather heard from Pujols…for multiple reasons.

Some might say the crowd was rude to boo all of the players not named Schwarber or Harper, but I found it fun, as did the competitors. The pink T-shirt wearers shagging balls on the field were also booed for missing fly balls and many fans came away with souvenirs thanks to giant, blue Geico gloves.

Split-screening is technologically possible. Netflix apparently doesn’t know that. One massive Munetaka Murakami blast went into the upper deck, but the producer cut to CC Sabathia talking to someone about something while we were all talking about how far that ball went.

Junior Caminero‘s event ended with a ball that passed the foul pole, but the event went to advertisements (in split screen) that prevented us from seeing which side of the pole the ball went.

Going back to the lack of a timer, I believe it helped the event. Players didn’t feel like they had to swing at every offering. Schwarber in particular was very patient, which helped him get to the finals against Jordan Walker of the St. Louis Cardinals.

The event ended with Walker accepting the role of villain to Schwarber’s hero. Schwarber got on a hot streak and hit 11 in the final round. It looked like Walker might be cooked when he got to eight home runs with only one swing left. But, because they got another magenta ball if they hit the last one out, Walker got a tenth bite at the apple, then an eleventh, and finally the twelfth and final bite that sailed deep into the crowd in the left-centerfield bleachers.

Hunter Pence was screaming, drowned out by the fans and Barry Bonds was nowhere to be seen. The event came down to terrific drams: a great young power hitter drowning out a full stadium (except his parents) rooting for his opponent, who has been one of the game’s best power hitters for a decade.

After the last ball sailed over the fence, the event ended with Cardinals players celebrating with Walker -just ahead of Schwarber who showed tremendous sportsmanship in embracing the young man and telling him he was proud of him.

No announcers or brightly-colored anythings or disgraced former ballplayers intruded on that, which was nice. But, the fact they were really close to being able to should be taken into account by Netflix. This is the first year of a three-year contract to broadcast the event.

All-in-all, this was fun, which was the point. Hopefully, the off-field failures from this year don’t return next year.