The 2025 Baseball Season Is Here
Began: March 1, 2025. Ended: April 3, 2025
The difference between excellence and mediocrity is commitment -Vince Lombardi
The 2025 Baseball season has arrived. Spring Training is over. The weather is warming. Will the season be epic or just another fleeting figment of some lucky fan’s imagination. In some ways, this is the best of times. Now is the time for dreaming about Baseball. In no particular order, the following story lines are first and foremost in my mind this year.
1. The Los Angeles Dodgers (trajectory to the top)
If you do not look forward to finding out how the Los Angeles Dodgers play in 2025, you are probably not a true baseball fan. In my opinion, the 2025 LA Dodgers have the potential to be the greatest team of my lifetime, the 1927 NY Yankees of the 21st Century. Of course, the possible 2025 outcomes are endless. Will the Dodgers break the single season record of 116 wins? Will these men in blue win between 100 and 115 games? Will injuries, bad luck, and bad player years take the team down? If the team wins just 99 games or less, will the season be considered a bust? What if they just steamroll their opposition but lose or not even get to the World Series? The team is filled with interesting subplots. Will Mookie Betts actually play as their shortstop for entire season? Will Shohei Ohtani have another season in the batter’s box comparable to 2024? Or will Ohtani split his value between hitting and pitching as he did from 2021 to 2023? Will Freddie Freeman finally begin to decline as age catches up to him? Will the Dodger’s pitching staff have a semblance of health and overwhelm the opposition with wave after wave of high octane hurlers? Will the LA Dodgers become the first team in the 21st Century to win back to back World Series? The 2025 Los Angeles Dodgers are the equivalent of a steroid infused monster rampaging through the field. It will be interesting to see if they dominate, fall apart with injuries, or end up somewhere in-between.*
*The Dodgers started the season by winning their first eight straight games. They look almost unbeatable.
2. Players & Career Trajectories
Every Baseball season is another chapter in the story of each player. To be a Baseball fan is to root for individual players in addition to (usually) your favorite team. Will Ohtani have his greatest year in 2025? Will Judge break his home run record? Will Bobby Witt get even better? This goes down the line to questions like: will this promising rookie player establish himself or will that fading veteran be able to hang on for just one more year? During the season, it is all about the direction or trajectory – up or down and good or bad – of the player’s actual performance. In some ways, the off-season is all about trajectories too. But instead of being about the game on the field, it is basically just financial. The great Juan Soto, 26 years old with his best years almost surely ahead of him, quickly received an enormous contract of 51 million dollars annually for 15 years (765 million bucks)! But, as happens almost every year, other players loitered and lingered around in the free agent marketplace. Whether these players best years were ahead of them or already behind them was the question. Alex Bregman was one of the last free agent players to sign. A superstar in 2018-2019, his seasons from 2021 to 2024 were nowhere near as good. There were troubling signs in 2024 (his on-base percentage cratered). How much did he have left in the tank? Of course, Bregman eventually signed a lucrative 3-year contract for some 120 million dollars. Now the real fun begins. Baseball fans get to see how the next chapter of Bregman’s career unfolds on the field. To me, watching the player’s careers wax and wane is one of the great joys of Baseball.
3. Boston Red Sox Redux (a team trajectory)
The Red Sox won World Series titles in 2004, 2007, 2013 and 2018. By that metric (4 World Championships in 15 years), the team is the most successful Baseball franchise of the 21st Century. If the 30 current Baseball teams took turns winning World Championships, it would take a each team exactly 120 seasons to win five Championships. By that logic, the fifth Red Sox World Championship would be due in 2124, long after all current Baseball fans are dead. But Baseball fans are always greedy for their favorite teams. Those 4 Championships were already in their rear view mirror. So when the Red Sox decided to step back, not really compete, and reload after that 2018 season, their passionate fan base was decidedly unhappy. Oddly enough, the Red Sox never truly tanked. In 2019, they went 84-78. In the lost covid year of 2020, the BoSox crashed to 24-36. But it was a weird year for all of Baseball. In 2021, some luck (players having good years and lack of injuries) swept the team to a 92-70 record and quick exit from the playoffs. From 2022 to 2024, the BoSox sank into comfortable mediocrity [78-84, 78-84 again and 81-81]. During this time, the Red Sox built a deep farm system. Now they are back, trading their rookie talent surplus for an ace, trying to integrate the best of their prospects into the Major League team, and having pundits predict their ascension back to the top of the standings. In other words, the plan was good. But the team’s communication of the plan was terrible. From 2019 to 2024, the team has denied that they were reloading and done a bad job of gaslighting their fans about it. It is always interesting to me how teams often have the same personality as their owner. John Henry, the Red Sox owner is obviously a very smart man. But communication doesn’t seem to be his strong suit.
Conclusion:
During the off-season and spring training there were many articles ranking players (top ten, one through fifty, or even 1 to 100). While messing around, I invented (probably too strong a word for what actually happened) my own ranking system. So I will post some little essays based on this ranking. But, of course, they will really be about my favorite subject, the career trajectory of the player. As proof that the system works on a basic level, the number 1 and 2 players were, of course, Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani.