Look closely at each of the American League East’s top playoff contenders, and a pattern will emerge. The Blue Jays, Red Sox, and Yankees all have at least one established veteran turning back the clock and delivering a season we haven’t seen from them in quite a long time. Let’s have a look at these players providing a big impact in what remains, by all accounts, a three-team race
for the AL East title.Yankees
Giancarlo Stanton (DH)
2025 numbers: .281/.358/.609 – 19 HR, 164 wRC+, 60 games
Out of all the players on this list, Stanton
is the only one who has missed significant time, which means we take his numbers with a grain of salt. If Stanton were able even remotely to maintain anything near this level of production, he wouldn’t just have a great season but an MVP-level campaign. Even what he’ll deliver in a limited sample is immensely valuable — from a simple fWAR perspective, his 1.7 thus far tops not only his healthier 2024 (0.8), but his All-Star 2022 as well (1.1).
Stanton’s age-35 performance has been so impactful that it enforced a new reality with him coming back to the outfield while Aaron Judge could only DH, something that seemed far-fetched as recently as a couple months ago. If you hit well enough, though, teams all of a sudden become very willing to accommodate you defensively, and that was the case here. The Yankees knew they had to get creative to keep Stanton’s sizzling bat in the lineup.
Heading into the decisive weeks of the 2025 regular season, Stanton is by far and away the team’s second-best hitter behind Aaron Judge. And as of right now, he has been good for one homer every three games (19 in 60), setting himself up to become the 41st player in MLB history to reach 450 career before season’s end; he currently sits at 448.
Blue Jays
George Springer (OF)
2025 numbers: .301/.395/.547 – 27 HR, 160 wRC+, 4.0 fWAR, 120 games
Many things changed to take the Blue Jays from where they were a year ago to where they are now. Right at the top of this list, you have Springer flipping the switch from declining veteran to the best hitter on a team that also has Vladimir Guerrero Jr.
Springer signed a big contract with the Jays after the 2020 season. After playing at his customary perennial All-Star level for the first two years of that deal, one of them severely hampered by injuries, the former Astros World Series MVP started to tail off aggressively in 2023. Last season, the veteran outfielder posted the worst numbers of his career, and it looked like the final few years of that deal with Toronto weren’t going to be pretty.
All of a sudden, Springer came out in 2025, mashing at age-36 like he hadn’t in years with a bat speed nearly two miles above where he was last season (73.6 in 2025 and 71.9 in 2024). Despite dealing with more than an occasional issue here and there, Springer is also in line to play over 130 games for his fourth straight season. He was somewhat strangely snubbed from the AL All-Star team and his stellar second half has only made the omission more glaring.
Red Sox
Aroldis Chapman (RP) &
Trevor Story (SS)
Chapman’s 2025 numbers: 0.98 ERA – 29 SV – 81 K – 0.636 WHIP
Story’s 2025 numbers: .262/.308/.436 – 23 HR, 27 SB, 101 wRC+, 2.9 fWAR
By every single measure, Chapman has been the best closer and reliever in general this season, putting up absurd numbers and virtually erasing one of his biggest flaws throughout his career, the high walk rate. Chapman, who until this season, had a career-walk rate of 12.6 percent, cut that number down to 7.1 percent in 2025. He hasn’t allowed a free pass since August 19th. His last hit, and run? July 23rd.
At 37 years old, Chapman shows no signs of slowing down, with the fastball velocity up half a tick from where it was last season. The sinker, which he now throws 34 percent of the time, has complemented his arsenal perfectly, generating whiffs and avoiding contact at the highest levels.
Although Story hasn’t been anywhere close to elite like Chapman this season, his simple availability, producing like a slightly above league-average bat, is a massive improvement on basically two lost seasons. He’s the youngest player of this article’s quartet at age-32 (33 in November), but it’s a testament to the void felt from those lost seasons that he still fits in here. Story averaged a little over 30 games the past two years, dealing with elbow and shoulder injuries, and he’s finally healthy as the planned Xander Bogaerts replacement the Sox thought they were signing back in March 2022.
Further, since the infamous Rafael Devers trade on June 15th, Story has been their second-best position player at 2.4 fWAR, trailing only the now-injured rookie standout Roman Anthony. Had Story not turned on the jets in wake of the Devers deal, Boston might be on the outside looking in at a playoff spot rather than contending for the division.
Considering the fact that Story is under a contract for a hefty sum until the end of the 2027 season, when a team option comes into play for 2028, his bounce-back to form is all the more important for the Red Sox. He could even opt out after this year, though that’s a question for another day.
