Now that the dust has settled, it’s come time to look back at how we did with predicting the 2025 season. We’re still waiting on the results of some seasonal awards, so we’ll have to wait until next to week
to review our regular season predictions, but now we can take a look at how we did at predicting the 2025 playoffs.
To determine our winner, we’ll award one point for correct Wild Card Series picks, two for the Division Series, three for the Championship Series, and five for the World Series. If you got a Series MVP correctly, you got an extra two points each. There are some second-chance predictions in here, so if you got a CS or World Series pick correct on the first try, you received an additional point for difficulty (and two extra for the Fall Classic because it was so far out at the end of September).
The Wild Card Round was pretty chalky, with only the Cubs really surprising us in the first round. We all had the Yankees moving past the rival Red Sox, and the two games they won to come back in that series provided some of the best highlights of 2025 for the team.
We all had the Yankees moving on here too, and we were sadly mistaken. They provided one scintillating win and a memory for the ages, but ultimately got outplayed by the Blue Jays in four games. We mostly were on Seattle to make it to the ALCS, but we were split on whether the Brewers would get there, and most instructively in my opinion, most of us didn’t have the Dodgers advancing. The narrative around the Dodgers at this point is one of an invincible team breaking baseball, so I think it’s worth remembering that as recently as six weeks ago, it was very much in doubt whether they’d even reach the NLCS.
Fittingly enough, not a single one of us had the Blue Jays making the World Series, just as hardly anyone before the season expected Toronto to be major players for the AL East crown. They proved us wrong in the regular season, and they did so again in the postseason. Five of us did call the Dodgers taking the NL pennant, with three correct picks of Shohei Ohtani for NLCS MVP. His exploits in Game 4 against the Brewers will be etched in our memories forever.
But wait! In the middle of the playoffs, we also did revised League Championship Series predictions now that we knew the participants. Here’s what we said for the Junior and Senior Circuit, respectively:
The only one of us to get either of the LCS predictions exactly right was… Dr. Randomatic 5000, who called a Dodgers sweep. We were on the whole pretty split about who would emerge from the ALCS, while the group favored Los Angeles once we knew the MIL vs. LAD matchup.
These are our World Series predictions pre-playoffs, with Michael forecasting the Dodgers’ win, and Nolan doing a nice job here in somehow calling both an LA title and a Yoshinobu Yamamoto World Series MVP. Again, I think it’s worth noting that for all the Dodgers’ inevitability, nothing about their march to this title was actually inevitable. They needed a few minor miracles to best the Blue Jays, and before October started, few of us actually picked them to win. And it’s not just us; you can check out FanGraphs’ playoff predictions, for example, where the Dodgers received just one vote to win the World Series before the postseason started.
Remarkably, only one of us, John, picked the Dodgers in 7 just before the series, with Josh smoothly switching to a Yamamoto WS MVP call. Unsurprisingly, we favored an Ohtani WS MVP scenario, but Yamamoto’s heroics were too much, the righty going 3-0 and famously pitching the final 2.2 innings of Game 7 on zero days rest.
Michael: 25
Nolan: 25**
John: 23
Peter: 22
Kevin: 20
Estevão: 19
Matt: 19
Jeremy: 17
Jake: 15
Nick: 14
Josh: 13
Dr. Randomatic 5000: 13*
Madison: 12
Andrew: 11
Sam: 11*
Dan: 8*
Jeff: 8*
Kunj: 8
*second-chance picks only
**pre-October picks only
Nolan and Michael split first prize, as the only two to forecast the Dodgers winning before the postseason started. Thanks to all who played along: how did your predictions for the 2025 playoffs turn out?
