The 2025 Baseball Season in Review
Began: November 16, 2025. Ended: November 17, 2025.
Believe you can and you’re halfway there – Theodore Roosevelt
The 2025 Baseball Season was quite wonderful. It had great pennant races, fascinating story lines, and ended with one of (if not the best) World Series of my life time. And I simply sat back and enjoyed it. But Baseball is gone until Spring training 2026 now…..so I figured that I would once again get my Baseball fix by once again posting about the game.
With the 2025 season in the rear view mirror, I figured that I would begin my Baseball scribbles by 1) posting capsule reviews about the 30 teams and 2) ranking the top players from 1 to 100 (or for however far I can get before the off-season ends). One year ago, I read two rankings of the players from #1 to 100 (I believe one was from ESPN and the other was MLB). One ranking had Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge as the two best players. The other did not. It ranked Ohtani first but Judge fourth!!!! I thought that was just plain stupid. It seemed obvious to me that Ohtani and Judge were one and two in some order and no one else was even close. So I came up with my own ranking system. And it ranked the great Ohtani and Judge as one and two with no one else even close. Perhaps a more objective person would have wondered if they were simply confirming their own bias. But objectivity may not be my strong suit.
The ranking system is actually quite easy. I ranked players by their bWAR (Wins Above Replacement by Baseball Reference) over the past three years. But I gave more weight to the most recent season. The formula was simply most recent season WAR multiplied by three, season before by two, plus the WAR from the season three years ago (without any multiplier) then divided by 6 [WAR from 2023×1+2024×2+2025×3/6=raw score]. Of course, one of the great joys of Baseball for some people is the numbers (and playing with the numbers). And I am definitely one of those people. Since my formula gave me the answer that I wanted, I decided to double down on it. To rank each team, I used a variation of the formula (substituting actual wins for bWAR). I thought ranking teams solely based on their most recent season was also absurd. Team records and actual talent can vary widely.
In 2025, the Milwaukee Brewers finished with the best record of any team (97-65). But I hardly believed that the Brew Crew were actually the top club. I thought the 2025 World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers were far and away the best team. Yearly team records can be heavily influenced by luck. Were a bunch of star players injured? Was everyone healthy? Did some players have career years? Did the best players simply under-perform? Did some of the players stupidly destroy their careers in a ridiculously petty gambling scandal? In 2021, the San Francisco Giants, a basically average team, caught a perfect wave of career years and good health. They finished 107-55, ahead of a great Dodger team that went 106-56. Were they actually all that good? Hell no! Rating teams over three years at least makes sure that a fluke like the 2021 Giants does not rate over a genuinely great team like the 2021 Los Angeles Dodgers.
All that being said, on with the actual posts. Post #48 will be either:
2025-26 Team Rankings: #1 Los Angeles Dodgers; or
2025-26 Player Rankings: #1 Aaron Judge, New York Yankees