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Jordan Walker was down to his last swing. Then he got another, and another, and another. When he finally stopped swinging, he was the Home Run Derby champ.

The Cardinals right fielder won the 2026 Home Run Derby in Philadelphia on Monday with five straight do-or-die swings. Hometown favorite Kyle Schwarber led off the final round and hit 11. That brought Walker to the plate under a chorus of boos from fans at Citizens Bank Park — boos that persisted and only grew stronger with every home run.

Walker tallied just eight homers in his 15 allotted swings for the final round, but new Derby rules this year did not allow rounds to end on a home run, so batters could keep swinging so long as they kept going yard. And so Walker kept swinging — and kept going yard. He launched his ninth and 10th long balls before crushing a 450-foot shot to left center to tie Schwarber. Walker took a brief pause to catch his breath, then took one last swing to end it.

The trophy arrived to even more boos from Phillies fans, who booed everyone and everything that wasn’t Schwarber or Bryce Harper.

“I was once told you don’t boo nobody,” Walker said with a smile after the event.

“My thought was ‘Philly is brutal,’ honestly,” he said. “But I think it’s pretty special because they love their players. That’s what you want from your home — where you play. I’ve never heard people cheer so loud for Schwarber and Harper.”

The prize for first place was $1 million, which is more than the $799,400 Walker will make in 2026 on the league’s minimum salary.

As Davy Andrews noted in our Derby preview, this feels like Walker’s year. He was a top prospect when he debuted in 2023, but he struggled over his first three seasons, with an 89 wRC+ in a bit more than 1,000 plate appearances through 2025. After showing some promise in his rookie season (.276/.342/.445, 16 home runs, 116 wRC+), he was optioned to Triple-A about a month into the 2024 season, when he had a .155/.239/.259 slash line, no home runs, and a 42 wRC+ in 67 plate appearances. He spent four months in the minors, and though his performance when he returned for good at the end of August (.242/.273/.463, five homers, 103 wRC+ in 99 plate appearances) still fell short of what the Cardinals expected from him, it felt like something he could build upon the following season. Instead, things got even worse, as Walker ran a 66 wRC+ with just six home run and -1.3 WAR over 111 games in 2025.

During the offseason, he went to Driveline to learn what had gone wrong and figure out how to fix it. He honed his mechanics to get his body in a better position before the swing and help his bat take a more direct path to the ball during it. He wanted his optimized mechanics to become second nature, so that he didn’t have to think about them while he was at the plate. Yet for all the work he put in, he still struggled during spring training, to the point that the Cardinals kept him out of the lineup for three days to get right in the batting cage. Working with assistant coach Casey Chenoweth, Walker went back to the basics and let it rip. According to Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

“I’m just going to hit these balls as hard as I can,” Walker said he told Chenoweth. “I did that. I took a few more. I took a few more athletic swings. I caught some barrels. Then I’m like: I’m going to dial it back a bit for an in-game swing. It worked. I went forward from there. I didn’t think about mechanics, but later looking at the video and it was what I was trying to do.”

He hasn’t looked back since then. Across 93 games and 395 plate appearances this season, Walker is batting .294/.354/.532 with 22 home runs, a 143 wRC+, and 2.7 WAR. The biggest change seems to be his ability to lift the ball, helping get the most out of his uber-fast swing.

That new swing was on display for all 31 homers Walker needed to win on Monday. He advanced from the first round with 13 dingers, tying Willson Contreras for the most in a round. In the semi-finals, Walker faced Junior Caminero, the runner-up in last year’s Derby and the only player in the majors with a faster average bat speed than Walker. Caminero hit just five homers, and Walker quickly topped that mark to advance to the finals.

In total, competitors hit 131 home runs at an average distance of 430 feet, or about 10.7 total miles of homers, according to Baseball Savant.

The Home Run Derby remains one of the most bizarre events on the baseball calendar. It’s fun to see great sluggers hanging out with their friends and families, swatting flies in a business casual setting. But the presentation can make for a dizzying spectacle for the at-home viewer.

The event this year was broadcast exclusively on Netflix. I was not subscribed to Netflix, and then for a few hours I was, and now I’m not again. Coverage kicked off about an hour before the Derby, with roundtable banter and just enough swearing to let you know this wasn’t your grandparents’ Home Run Derby. Then Michael Buffer, flanked by umpires, announced the contestants into a boxing ring set-up at second base. The players trotted out in what appeared to be the Fourth of July jerseys they wore in games earlier in the month.

Once the Derby began, the broadcast was fine. It’s hard to describe 131 home runs, and the announcers generally didn’t try, treating the event closer to a live podcast than live news. Without timed rounds, it didn’t quite have the manic pace of years past, but there was still the identifying camera cuts, from throw to swing to fly to stands to baseball-adjacent celebrity reaction to T-Mobile commercial to throw again, repeat.

The whole thing felt very smooth. Perhaps too smooth at times, as some have described the event as boring, sleepy, juiceless, etc. There wasn’t anything necessarily controversial or historic or newsworthy that happened. It all felt very… fair. In fact, it wasn’t until Walker’s final do-or-die swings that there was anything specific to say about this Derby at all. Everyone just kind of stepped to the plate, hit homers, and had a good time.