Zach Wilt: Manny Machado and the Home Run Derby

For the third consecutive season, an Orioles player will be participating in the Home Run Derby. Chris Davis represented Charm City in 2013 and Adam Jones donned the orange and black at the Derby a year ago. This year, 23-year-old Manny Machado will step into the batter's box and look to be the first Oriole to win the contest since Miguel Tejada in 2004.

In 2015, the Home Run Derby has a few changes. For starters, it's now a single-elimination bracket-style tournament, where players are ranked and matched up according to their home run total. Who doesn't love a good bracket? With 19 homers, Machado is ranked fifth and matches up against the four seed, Dodgers outfielder and NL Rookie of the Year candidate Joc Pederson, who has hit 20. That should be an awesome contest between two of the game's premiere young talents.

One of my big complaints about the Derby is the time it takes to get to the final round. This season, each batter will have five minutes to hit as many homers as possible. The timer will begin at the release of the first pitch. Homers hit within a minute remaining will stop the timer and it will not begin again until the batter hits a ball that isn't a home run or swings and misses at a pitch.

Major League Baseball will also be using its Statcast technology to measure exit velocity, hit distance and launch angle of each home run, and contestant will receive bonus time based on how far their homers travel. Two homers that equal or exceed 420 feet are worth a minute of bonus time. Every homer over at least 475 feet is worth 30 extra seconds.

Confused? Yeah, it's a lot to keep track of, but I like that Major League Baseball is rewarding monster home runs and I think the new changes will pick up the pace of a neat event that has historically dragged on just a bit too long.

With three games remaining before the break, Manny Machado is one pace for 36 homers. He's already five over his season-high home run total set in 2013. Last season, Jones had 16 at the break and finished with 29. Davis crushed 37 in the first half in 2013 and ended the year with 16 more to lead baseball with 53.

The furthest home run that Machado has hit this season came against Blue Jays pitcher Miguel Castro on April 23 when he sent a ball 422 feet at Rogers Centre. That poor baseball traveled 110.1 mph off the bat. Earlier in the game, Machado blasted a homer that was recorded at 111.3 mph off the bat when he went yard against Drew Hutchison in the sixth inning.

There's always chatter about the effect that participating in the home run has on a hitter in the second half. We've seen big name sluggers turn down the invite because they're worried about how it'll impact their game when they swing for the fences for two to three hours. Bobby Abreu blamed the Derby after he hit just six homers in the second half of the 2005 season. He entered the contest with 18. Josh Hamilton had similar results in 2008 after he crushed 28 home runs in the first round at Yankee Stadium. Hamilton had 21 homers at the break and hit just 11 in the second half.

Over the years, some great baseball minds have researched and concluded that the Home Run Derby doesn't, in fact, have a negative impact on players in the second half. Just under a year ago, Ken Woolums and Daniel R. Braunstein of ESPN's FiveThirtyEight.com concluded that most of the regression from participants was expected, despite their involvement in the contest. Of course, with this year's rule changes and the addition of a clock, I wonder if further studies will have to be done.

Because of those changes, I feel like making predictions on the Derby is incredibly difficult. I would think that Albert Pujols has the best chance of winning the whole thing, but who knows how he will handling the pressure of five minutes? Maybe Josh Donaldson, who hit a homer 481.2 feet, will claim the crown because of the distance he'll be able to put on the longball. Or maybe Machado will deliver under pressure, like he has so many times for the O's in the first half.

Zach Wilt blogs about the Orioles at Baltimore Sports Report. Follow him on Twitter: @zach_wilt. His views appear here as part of MASNsports.com's season-long initiative of welcoming guest bloggers to our pages. All opinions expressed are those of the guest bloggers, who are not employed by MASNsports.com but are just as passionate about their baseball as our roster of writers.