The offseason is fully underway, the World Series having been in the books for two weeks now. That means there’s no better time to look backward, and see just how we all did at predicting the 2025 season.
As we all know, you can’t predict ball, and I suspect that as we go through this exercise, most of us will be humbled to remember just how differently we thought certain parts of the 2025 MLB season would go.
For the purposes of the contest, we awarded one point for each correct slot in the standings.* For numerical predictions, we awarded two points for the closest guess, and three for getting it right on the money. Correct guesses on player awards and leaders received two points. We also offered a bonus point if you happened to sweep the category.
*For the AL East, we awarded half a point if the Yankees were first or if the Blue Jays were second since they finished with the same record, but per the tiebreaker rules, Toronto was awarded the division. And as alluded above, if anyone nailed all five picks in the same division, they got a bonus point.
2025 AL standings
It’s startling looking back to before the season, to see that the highest any of us had the Blue Jays finishing in the AL East was… fourth place. It goes to show how hard any of this is to predict, with Toronto going on to win the division and coming within inches of winning the World Series. For the most part, we were high on the Yankees’ chances of winning the division, and while they lost on a tiebreaker, they did at least make good on our positive projections for them.
The AL Central felt pretty wide open heading into the year, this the only division where four teams got at least one of our votes to win. No one could have foreseen what actually happened, with the Guardians staging a stunning comeback (or, rather, the Tigers staging a stunning collapse), overtaking Detroit in the final week after trailing by as many as 15.5 games.
We had the bottom of this division pretty well-pegged, with the A’s and Angels finishing fourth and fifth, respectively, as most expected. But only John predicted a Mariners division title, Seattle emerging down the stretch to overtake the fading Astros. We seem to have harbored optimism for the Rangers, which did not pay off in a pretty middling season for Texas.
2025 NL standings
Not a whole lot of correct calls on this, the NL East. There truly were three very fair choices to win this division preseason, but the Braves quickly removed themselves from the conversation with a dreadful start. Shout out to Dan, who must’ve been one of the only people out there to call for Atlanta to finish fourth.
We’ve got three perfect predictions here! Well done by Jeremy, Nick, and Michael, who all nailed the AL Central. The Brewers started the season off in nightmarish fashion, the Yankees dismantling them in historic fashion in the first series of the year, but Milwaukee was rock solid after that, cruising to a division title that most of us predicted.
A couple more perfect divisions, with John and Andrew leading the way on the NL West. There was no disagreement on the ends of this division, with every one of us calling for the Dodgers to win and the Rockies to finish last. LA was much less dominant than usual, but they ultimately made good and took home yet another division tittle. Most disappointing were the Diamondbacks, our consensus second-place pick never hitting their stride in 2025 and falling to fourth.
2025 Yankees leaders
The Yankees Leaders picks aren’t too hard these days; you can reliably just type in “Aaron Judge” and be right. Less easy to predict was the team’s ERA leader; Devin Williams seemed like a slam dunk pick, so of course the once dominant closer had a bizarre season, posting a 4.79 ERA in pinstripes. Instead, the starter Fried outpitched everyone in the bullpen.
Miscellaneous Yankees statistics
Nicely done by Madison, Nolan, and Estevão for calling Aaron Judge’s 53-homer total. We were all too high on Williams’ save total, and also too low on Giancarlo Stanton’s games played. Stanton missed just over half the season, yet still came in above all our predictions at 77 games.
2025 MLB leaders
It was no shock that Aaron Judge led the league in WAR again, but no one foresaw him leading the majors in batting average. It’s amazing that he is still finding ways to surprise us. Paul Skenes was an unsurprising ERA leader, but Cal Raleigh’s 60-homer campaign of course caught us all off guard.
Miscellaneous MLB statistics
Shockingly enough, no one thought the Brewers would lead MLB in wins in 2025. Also telling is the fact that Milwaukee led the way with 97 wins, far below what most of us thought the league leader would post. This felt like a year with more parity than most of recent MLB history, with no super teams and a whole lot teams in the average-to-good range. We also didn’t anticipate just how awful the Rockies were capable of being, with Colorado giving the 2024 White Sox a good run for their money, at times looking like they might set the record for most losses in a season. Still, Bud Black was not the first manager fired — that distinction belonged to the Pirates’ Derek Shelton, who was canned on May 8th.
2025 MLB awards
Aaron Judge is a three-time MVP, something most of us predicted entering the year. It’s a bit surprising that Tarik Skubal only garnered three preseason Cy Young votes, however. There was also no buzz around Nick Kurtz, the young Athletic smashing 36 homers in a brilliant rookie campaign.
Paul Skenes and Shohei Ohtani were the preseason consensus picks for us for NL Cy Young and MVP, and here, chalk prevailed. However, the preseason NL RoY favorites, Roki Sasaki and Dylan Crews, didn’t pop, with Andrew coming up with an excellent call on Drake Baldwin’s Rookie of the Year win. (Editor’s note: And a swing and a miss on the MVP! Oh, Elly.]
2025 playoff results
For these, we awarded one point for getting a correct Wild Card prediction, two for a correct LCS prediction, and three for any correct World Series predictions. Toronto’s rise really blew up most of our postseason predictions, as none of us even had them making the playoffs, much less the ALCS or World Series. Six of us did pick the Dodgers, an unexciting pick that ultimately proved correct.
Overall staff results
Congrats to Nick Power, the winner of our staff contest for 2025! Estevão had won the last two back-to-back but now there’s a new champion. May the Yankees follow a similar path in 2026 of unseating a back-to-back champ.
How did you do on your predictions for this year? Let us know in the comments below!
Thanks to Andrew for tallying this year’s results.
