Home Run Derby

Well yeah, Prince Fielder won the MLB Home Run Derby Contest … but who cares about him?

Congratulations to Wendy H, who won HomerDerby.com’s 2009 Home Run Derby Contest!! 

Her entry, Woo Woo Crew, had the most Home Runs (53) and won the contest on a tiebreaker.

Here’s her selections:

• First Round: Albert Pujols (7)*, Prince Fielder (11), Nelson Cruz (11), Carlos Pena (6)*
• Second Round: Albert Pujols (6), Prince Fielder (6)
• Champion: Prince Fielder (6)
• Tiebreaker – HR Derby Champ Total HR:  16

*Includes Bat-Off HRs.

It came down to the first tiebreaker.  Failcouer Forever also had 53 HR, but predicted a total of 37 Home Runs for the HR Derby Champion.  Prince Fielder hit 23 bombs.  Woo Woo Crew was off by 7.  Failcouer Forever was off by 14.  Woo Woo wins. 

Here’s the comparison of their teams  …

Home Run Derby Contest Results

I feel kinda bad for Joe of Failcouer Forever, since he picked every player that moved on to the next round.   But the contest was based on Points for Home Runs hit by Your Players and not Points per Correct Pick. 

Them’s the breaks – there was no 2nd Prize.

Some stats on the Derby Contest.

•  We had over 500 entries.  I’m impressed by that number considering all the server trouble we had on Monday.
• Albert Pujols was picked as Champion by over 50% of the entries.   
• Only 9% took the actual champ, Prince Fielder.
• Only three entries picked the combo of Prince Fielder and Nelson Cruz as the Finalists. 
• Seven entries took Brandon Inge as their Champion.  That was Dumb.
• The perfect score would have been 56 HR.  Pujols-Cruz-Fielder-Howard, Fielder-Howard, Fielder.
• One entry correctly predicted the entire Derby progression.  He lost in a tiebreaker.
• No one picked the 13-HR sucktastic loser combo of Gonzalez-Inge-Pena-Mauer - the players eliminated in the 1st round.  I thought someone would have picked it and I could have ripped on them.  But …
• One person picked the 14-HR loser combo of Pujols-Gonzalez-Mauer-Inge with Inge beating Gonzalez in the Final.  Jason of Willie Mays Hays … you are the fart catcher of this contest.  Anti-Congrats.

Because of the aforementioned server trouble, some people who tried to submit entries got timed out and we did not receive their submissions.  If you didn’t get a confirmation page, you didn’t get in.  I tried to test it myself a bunch of times and it crapped out on me every time before the “Congrats you entered the Derby!!” page came up.

Awesome traffic is the combined blessing and curse of having a website named Home Run Derby on Home Run Derby day.

I feel terrible about the fact that people who wanted into the contest couldn’t get in.  I was constantly on the phone with my webhost and pounding my fist knowing that there were people locked out. 

By the way, the people at InMotion Hosting did an truly incredible job of working with us to keep the site up as much as they did.  If we were still using BlueHost (worst … customer service … ever) the site would probably still would be down.

We’re working on ways to keep this from happening next year.

We’ll be having more contests later this season!!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Contests, MLB Home Run Derby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.