The 12 Biggest Winners and Losers of 2025 MLB Regular Season

From 60-homer catchers and low-budget juggernauts to gambling scandals and colossally disappointing teams, the 2025 Major League Baseball regular season was loaded with big-time winners and losers.

While the various postseason crashers and September 'collapsers' have dominated headlines in recent days with their dramatic sprint/limp to the finish line, those marginally better than .500 ball clubs are a far cry from our focus today.

We're looking instead for the bigger, full-season trends and surprises that defined the past six months.

Winners and losers are presented in no particular order, aside from oscillating between those two extremes.

Remember when last year was supposed to be the end of Milwaukee's run of relevance?

From 2018-23, the Brewers went a combined 103 games above .500, making the playoffs in five out of six years and missing the cut by just a one-game margin in the outlier. But then the Cubs stole Craig Counsell from their dugout, Corbin Burnes was traded to Baltimore, Brandon Woodruff was slated to miss the entire 2024 campaign and Devin Williams was going to miss the first half of the year with a broken back.

After 92 wins in 2023, all the forecasting models had them down for a slightly below .500 season in 2024.

They won 93 games. Whoops.

But, come on. They overachieved, right? With Williams and Willy Adames also exiting stage left this past winter, surely the low-budget Brewers would finally regress in 2025.

Uhh...nope!

The Brewers put together not only the best record in baseball this season—including a 6-0 record against a Dodgers team that will be paying an estimated tax bill ($168M) which is almost 20 percent greater than Milwaukee's entire $141M payroll—but also a franchise record for wins in a single season.

As with the Big Dumping Mariners, we shall see if this incredible run culminates in the first World Series title in franchise history. For most of this summer, though, the Milwaukee Brewers were an inescapable, seemingly inevitable marvel.

But...next year...

Yeah, next year is when they'll fall off.

Definitely.

Maybe.

Eh, probably not.

By some miracle, the 2025 Colorado Rockies didn't suffer the most single-season losses of the past two years, winning a few more games than the Chicago White Sox managed in 2024.

By most other measures, though, this was the worst team in a long, long time.

The Rockies became one of just three teams since 1940 to allow at least 1,000 runs in a single season, joining the steroids era 1996 Detroit Tigers (1,103) and 1999 Rockies (1,028) in that ignominious club.

At least the "26 years ago" version of the Rockies could score some runs of their own, though, racking up 906 on offense. This year's bunch might not get to 600 and would have ranked dead last in the majors in both runs scored and runs allowed if the Pittsburgh Pirates hadn't been slightly more hapless on offense.

As a result, Colorado ended up with the worst run differential in the past 125 years of Major League Baseball, and it wasn't even close. The Rockies entered this final weekend at a minus-419. The previous "live ball era" record belonged to the 1932 Boston Red Sox at minus-349.

Even last year's White Sox only ended up at a minus-306.

Here's the really funny/depressing part: Their team-wide bWAR is a minus-3.6.

In other words, the Rockies theoretically would have been a slight underdog against a 26-man roster of replacement-level players from Triple-A and the heap of "no one wanted to sign them" free agents.

Hard to believe they entered the season with a payroll that ranked 21st, $5.5M ahead of the Milwaukee Brewers; $20M ahead of the Cleveland Guardians.

In a mostly irrelevant Sept. 24 game between the Minnesota Twins and Texas Rangers, Byron Buxton stepped into the batter's box against Jacob deGrom and tattooed the second pitch of the night 447 feet to dead center.

For Buxton, it was his 32nd home run and 78th RBI of the year, further improving what were already career-best marks before September even began. It was also his 123rd game played after seven consecutive seasons of missing at least 35 percent of Minnesota's contests.

For deGrom, it was the lone blemish in what was otherwise another fine night at the office. Making his 30th start of the season—after a combined total of 35 starts in the previous four years—the two-time NL Cy Young winner locked in from there, allowing just one more hit while lowering his ERA to 2.97.

deGrom is likely going to receive some down-ballot votes for AL Cy Young. Buxton should also get at least a little bit of love in the AL MVP mix.

Both teams still missed the postseason, but what a fun little trip down Nostalgia Lane with those stars.

Mike Trout also appeared in at least 120 games for the first time since 2019. Granted, he was nowhere near the unstoppable force that he used to be, but all those trips to the plate did enable him to reach 400 career home runs. And his two-homer night against the Astros on Friday was a sweet little bit of revenge for the past the decade of looking up at them in the standings.

Trevor Story had quite the renaissance year, too, setting a career high for games played while amassing 25 home runs, 96 RBI and 31 stolen bases—compared to 21, 90 and 29, respectively, in his first three seasons combined with Boston.

And how about Matthew Boyd becoming a star by staying healthy for a change? The last time he was available for anything close to a full season, he allowed more earned runs and more home runs than any other pitcher in 2020. But until Cade Horton showed up and catapulted into the NL Rookie of the Year mix, Boyd was the only reliable asset in Chicago's rotation.

No Anthony Rendon this season, though. Can't win 'em all.

There were seven free agents this past offseason who signed multi-year contracts with an average salary of greater than $25M. And each of those seven players—Juan Soto, Alex Bregman, Blake Snell, Corbin Burnes, Max Fried, Pete Alonso and Willy Adames—was pretty darn good, when healthy. All three pitchers ended up with a sub-3.00 ERA, and though Adames got out to a brutal start to the year, he rallied and the four hitters combined for around 130 home runs.

But while that top tier panned out nicely, the players who signed deals with salaries ranging from $16M to $20M were disastrous.

Those eight players were:

*Thanks to a "games started" escalator clause, this has since turned into a two-year, $45M contract

All told, that's an AAV of $143M for 2.6 wins below replacement. Only Flaherty was allegedly worth more than a replacement-level player, and even he went 8-15 with a 4.64 ERA.

Now, we're not suggesting that this particular tier of spending in free agency is always going to end poorly. The Cubs' $17.5M flyer on Cody Bellinger turned into NL MVP votes in 2023. Same goes for Matt Chapman's $18M salary in 2024. But it just so happened to be brutal across the board this year.

Stay tuned to see if they can finally put an end to the "only active MLB franchise to never reach the World Series" stigma, but the 2025 regular season belonged to the Seattle Mariners.

Cal Raleigh and his bodacious backside were, of course, the biggest phenomenon of the year.

The "best season ever by a catcher" chatter had begun well before the All-Star Break as he demolished Johnny Bench bests. The few who still didn't know much about Raleigh by mid-July fell in love as he won the Home Run Derby. It eventually turned into a "Best season ever by a switch hitter?" debate as he blew past Mickey Mantle's top single-season HR total. And we'll surely spend some of this offseason digging into where Raleigh's 2025 run ranks among the greatest seasons—period.

But the M's also had Bryan Woo open the season with 25 consecutive starts of at least 6.0 IP, blossoming into the fourth ace-caliber pitcher in this rotation. They also made major waves at the trade deadline, bringing in Eugenio Suárez, Josh Naylor and Caleb Ferguson to address the three clearly weakest links in the chain. And since the deadline, they've been maybe the best team in baseball, winning the AL West for the first time since 2001.

From July 11 through the division-clinching game on Sept. 24, Julio Rodríguez hit .305, slugged .615 and operated at 162-game paces of 52 home runs, 127 RBI and 32 stolen bases. But with so much else buzzing around this club, the baseball world barely seemed to notice that 65-game rampage by what was easily Seattle's most recognizable star heading into the season.

Technically, from a "How much did they miss their win total by?" perspective, the Atlanta Braves were the biggest disappointment of the 2025 season. The Baltimore Orioles were certainly in the mix there, too, at least through the first two months. And goodness knows the Colorado Rockies were a historic disaster.

Both Atlanta and Baltimore really should be back in the running for the playoffs in 2026, though, and Colorado fans never had any delusions of celebrating anything this season.

Meanwhile, the Minnesota Twins take the crown of thorns awarded to the franchise who did the most damage to its fan base's "Hope Meter."

It's one thing to underachieve, which the Twins certainly did. By a slim margin, they were the preseason favorite to win the AL Central with a win total of 84.5. (Something I never understood, for the record.) But take out the brief-but-impressive 19-5 surge from late-April into mid-May and they never looked like a contender, going 50-86 with a minus-155 differential.

It's also one thing to sell at the trade deadline, which, again, the Twins certainly did. They scattered nearly half of what had been their 26-man roster across the country, much like the Rays and Blue Jays did the previous summer.

But it's something else altogether to burn it all down, trading away players with multiple years of team control remaining, including one of the faces of the franchise.

It's as if the Pohlad family decided: Well, if no one wants to buy the team from us, we're at least going to sell it for parts.

The decision to not only part with Carlos Correa but retain a reported $33M of his remaining contract while getting just one, unremarkable prospect in return sure looks and smells an awful lot like that Nolan Arenado disaster from February 2021 that set the wheels in motion for the Rockies to become the pit of despair that they are today.

That isn't to say the Twins are now destined to be a total dumpster fire in 2030. Plenty of other terrible decisions along the way contributed to Colorado's bottoming out. But aside from a promising start to Luke Keaschall's career, it's hard to find silver linings in this Twins season. (And even Keaschall's season ended in a thumb injury.)

Aaron Judge vs. Cal Raleigh for AL MVP has become the most feverishly debated major award race in MLB that I can ever recall. Yes, there have been plenty of split decisions, but nothing quite like this where we already know the second-place finisher—Unless there's a tie!—is going to end up being heralded for producing the most incredible non-MVP season since some of those HGH-inflated absurdities in the 1998-2001 timeframe.

But if Judge ends up edging out Raleigh, we would almost certainly have Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Tarik Skubal and Paul Skenes winning the two MVPs and two Cy Young awards—each of whom entered the season as the betting favorite to secure that honor.

For the Rookie of the Year trophies, however, it is a drastically different story.

Despite not getting called up until late April and not really starting to hit until late May, Athletics slugger Nick Kurtz has hit 35 home runs and is going to win AL ROY. Boston's Roman Anthony had an outside shot at supplanting him, right up until Anthony suffered an oblique strain in early September. Most books took AL ROY off the board at that point and haven't put it back, because it's that much of a foregone conclusion.

The NL race is much closer, but Cubs pitcher Cade Horton is considered the slight favorite over Atlanta's Drake Baldwin. Wins above replacement would certainly give the nod to Baldwin, but Chicago sitting about 15 wins above Atlanta is a pretty big feather in Horton's hat.

When USA Today's Jon Hoefling posted Rookie of the Year odds on March 27, neither Kurtz nor Horton was top 20 in either league. Per BetMGM's Shane Jackson, they both opened the season at +8000, which means a two-leg parlay on each to win would have had +65,600 odds. (For a $153 investment, you maybe could have become a millionaire.)

Speaking of betting odds, though...

On May 13, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred officially reinstated Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe Jackson and more than a dozen other deceased former players who had been on the "permanently ineligible list" for getting caught either betting on baseball or otherwise implicated in a gambling scandal.

Phew! Baseball resolved its betting problems! No more stain on the game!

51 Days Later

On July 3, Cleveland Guardians RHP Luis Ortiz was placed on non-disciplinary leave as part of MLB's investigation into an unusual volume of "micro bets" placed on whether he would throw a ball with his first pitch of a given inning. But it wasn't until a few weeks later when Cleveland's three-time All-Star closer Emmanuel Clase was placed on leave for the same thing that this blossomed from an unusual situation into a full-blown threat to the integrity of the game itself.

On the one hand, the measures the sportsbooks have in place to police this type of nefarious activity seem to have worked—at least in these two situations.

On the other hand, Manfred may as well have announced the suspensions while wearing a hot dog costume, claiming we're all trying to find the guy who did this, with freshly ironed FanDuel, DraftKings and BetMGM banners plastered behind him.

This all came barely a year after five players were suspended (one for life; four for one year) for "unrelated violations of the league's gambling policy." And those happened a couple months after MLB's whole Shohei Ohtani/Ippei Mizuhara public relations nightmare.

It didn't derail the entire 2025 MLB season. (If anything, it somehow fixed Cleveland's season, as the Guardians had one of the best records in baseball after losing Clase to the restricted list.) But you better believe it's a problem that MLB's top minds are trying to figure out how to nip in the bud.

To be sure, we already knew that Kyle Schwarber could mash a baseball.

Not even factoring in his absolutely preposterous run of 16 home runs in 18 games with the Washington Nationals in June 2021, he hit 131 home runs in his first three seasons with the Phillies, trailing only multiple-time MVPs Aaron Judge (157) and Shohei Ohtani (132) in that department. Schwarber also struck out more than anyone and drew the most walks of anyone not named Judge or Juan Soto.

In all three years, he finished in the 15th-19th place range of the NL MVP vote, getting a wee bit of down-ballot love for his spot-on impersonation of "Three True Outcomes" king Adam Dunn.

But in his final season before hitting free agency again at the age of 32, he kicked it up a few notches.

What had been an .832 OPS over the past three years is a .940 this year. He leads the National League with 56 home runs and leads the majors with 132 RBI. Both are career-best marks, as, too, are the 111 runs, 146 hits and .571 slugging percentage.

Somewhere along the way, people finally began to realize that WAR tends to do a terrible job of evaluating full-time designated hitters. We've revolted against the supposition that Schwarber is merely the fourth-most valuable player on the Phillies—as both FanGraphs and Baseball-Reference would have you believe—and have instead reached an agreement that he is probably the fourth-most valuable player in all of baseball, behind only Judge, Ohtani and Cal Raleigh.

It's hard to put a price on just how good Schwarber has been, even setting an MLB record for most home runs (23) hit by a lefty off a lefty in a single season, per The Athletic's Matt Gelb. But the Phillies are going to have to figure out that price, as he is surely headed for a raise after the way he stormed through his expiring four-year, $80M deal.

Ready for the semi-hot take of the day?

Pittsburgh's handling of Paul Skenes has been perfectly fine.

Try to trade him away and you'll never get fair value for what is now four remaining years before free agency. It took an absolute haul for the Padres to get 2.5 years of Soto, and no one is giving up even more than that for a pitcher.

Try to sign him to a long-term extension now and you run the risk of simply crippling the franchise if he ends up being the next Mark Prior. Besides, the Detroit Tigers never extended Tarik Skubal, and while they might wish after next season that they had, what a ride that has been thus far with one year still to come.

But what became more painfully clear than ever this season is that owner Bob Nutting's handling of basically everything aside from Skenes is not perfectly fine.

Stingy always has been the name of the game in Pittsburgh, ending each of the past 21 seasons ranked 23rd or lower in payroll, per Cot's Baseball Contracts. It hasn't even been a decade since Gerrit Cole became the latest in a long line of Pirates who were traded for a platter of nothing special just as soon as they got a little expensive.

Still, refusing to legitimately invest in winning when you've got a possibly generational talent doing historic things on the mound is inexcusable.

Even more so inexcusable was that whole "Bucco Bricks" debacle from earlier this season.

They subsequently traded away Ke'Bryan Hayes less than halfway through his long-term extension, and also discussed trading away Mitch Keller in year No. 2 of his five-year extension. Meanwhile, rather than try to get something in return for impending free agents Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Andrew Heaney, they just released those veterans ahead of the waiver deadline to save a buck.

They have maybe the most beautiful ballpark in the majors as well as probably the best pitcher in the majors. Yet, even when Skenes is on the mound for a home start, they still can't get butts in the seats. Nor score any runs. It's a disgrace, and the chants and billboards begging Nutting to sell the team are justified.

Despite signing Anthony Santander, Jeff Hoffman, Max Scherzer and Yimi Garcia to contracts of a combined total of $156M...

Despite some wheeling and dealing with the Cleveland Guardians to add Andrés Giménez, Myles Straw and Nick Sandlin to the equation...

Despite locking down Vladimir Guerrero Jr. for the long haul on a $500M extension signed in early April to mercifully put an end to mounting trade speculation...

Toronto was never expected to be this good.

The Blue Jays opened the season at +6000 to win the World Series, good for the 20th-best odds overall, ahead of only the Angels, Athletics and White Sox among AL teams.

Their win total line was 78.5, the lone AL East team that was 'supposed' to finish below .500.

But Bo Bichette bounced back from a rough 2024, becoming one of the premier free agents of this year's class. George Springer recently turned 36, but he put together one of the most impressive seasons of his career. Ernie Clement, Nathan Lukes and Addison Barger blossomed into key assets, seemingly out of the blue.

And maybe, just maybe, one more trip back to the Cleveland well to acquire Shane Bieber ahead of the trade deadline will turn out to be the final piece of the puzzle that gets Toronto back to the World Series for the first time in 32 years.

What a change from six months ago, when we thought they could be headed for quite the trade deadline fire sale in advance of a rough few years of rebuilding.

The old adage that you can't win a pennant in April but you sure can lose one has never rung more true than it did with this year's Atlanta Braves.

We knew long ago that they wouldn't have Spencer Strider on the mound or Ronald Acuña Jr. in the lineup on Opening Day, but the assumption was that a team that had competed in seven consecutive postseasons would be able to tread water before really taking off once those stars returned.

Instead, it all snowballed out of control in a hurry.

Their lone significant offseason move went up in smoke before the end of March, with Jurickson Profar getting hit with an 80-game suspension just four games into the season.

Not 24 hours later, Game 2 starter Reynaldo López landed on the IL with shoulder inflammation and never returned.

Meanwhile, on the field, they started 0-7 and had to scrap and claw their way back to an almost winning record by Memorial Day.

But between the many injuries, the Profar suspension, Strider's less than triumphant return from Tommy John surgery, five months of getting absolutely nothing out of the shortstop spot in the lineup, more than a few Raisel Iglesias implosions and maybe a dozen other factors, things just never came together for what was expected to be the second-best team in the majors this season.

By Game 125, the preseason "under 93.5 wins" line had already cashed. And even after a 10-game winning streak in September, they were still eight games below .500. Just a disaster from start to finish.