Random 2025 MLB Predictions Sure to Go Wrong

Any attempt to predict baseball is a famous-last-words endeavor, akin to getting face-to-face with a king cobra and asking, "Is this snake venomous?"

This, however, is simply the time of year when predictions must be offered up to the baseball gods. The only thing to do is hope they bless them, and chances are they won't feel that way after getting a load of these predictions.

In keeping with tradition, I've compiled a list of predictions that are highly random and very specific. They're not about which teams are making the playoffs or which players (at least not specifically) are winning awards. They're about all sorts of things, really.

We have eight to get to, starting with four player-related predictions and ending with four team- and league-related predictions.

This prediction is a slap to the face of recent history.

At least one hitter has made it to 50 home runs in each of the last three seasons, with Shohei Ohtani (54) and Aaron Judge (58) clearing the threshold by plenty in 2024. And each of them is...[checks notes]...yup, still around.

Yet here's the deal with Judge and Ohtani: One is older and more vulnerable and the other is about to have more on his plate.

Judge will turn 33 on April 26, which is significant because the only 33-or-older hitters to top 50 homers in a season are all old-timers and Steroid Era guys. He also doesn't have Juan Soto hitting in front of him, which likely means bye-bye to all the extra strikes he got to hit in 2024.

As for Ohtani, it's back to the mound for him at some point in 2025. Exciting stuff, no doubt, but it's a tax on his body that he didn't have to pay as he recovered from elbow surgery last season. Historically, he's a better hitter when he's not pitching.

Apart from Judge and Ohtani, it's hard to identify other prime-aged hitters who could challenge 50 homers this year. To wit, ZiPS doesn't project anyone other than those two to even clear 40.

I must be out of ideas and looking for a hill to die on, because I made this prediction for 2024 and it didn't come true. Four pitchers topped 200 innings last season.

But rest assured, the death of the 200-inning workhorse is coming.

Four pitchers crossing the 200-inning threshold is nothing by the standards of even recent history. There were 28 who did so as recently as 2015, and 45 as recently as 2010. When only four did so in 2024, Old Hoss Radbourn wept.

This issue is often framed as a crisis, and the injury component at play does lend some credence to that. But it's also the result of a league-wide lowering of standards.

Even among the guys who logged 200 innings in 2024, Logan Gilbert led the way by merely making it to 208.2 innings. It's the lowest ever innings count for a league leader in a non-shortened season.

Because they're still in their 20s, Gilbert (27) and Logan Webb (28) are candidates to log 200 innings again in 2025. But Seth Lugo and Zack Wheeler? Not so much. They're in their mid-30s, with Wheeler at 34 and Lugo at 35.

Welp, somebody mentioned Logan Webb. Per the rules of the universe, we must now get serious about his chances of winning the NL Cy Young Award.

They are, in short, good. The righty has placed in the voting in each of the last three seasons, across which he's made 98 starts and pitched to a 3.22 ERA. He is as reliable and as durable as any starter in MLB today.

But what if Webb isn't the only San Francisco Giants hurler with a shot at the Cy Young in 2025?

Also in black and orange will be Justin Verlander, who already has three such awards among his career inventory. And you can shout "But he's 42!" all you want, but the Giants are a good fit for him and it was after a low point in his career that he won his last Cy Young in 2022. Ruling him out of anything is foolish.

The Giants also have another former Cy Young Award winner in Robbie Ray, who has largely been forgotten about since he went off for that magic season in 2021. Yet he is healthy for the first time in a while, and he's looked terrific this spring. In 9.1 innings, he's allowed two runs and fanned 17 of the 34 hitters he's faced.

Besides, the Giants haven't had a Cy Young Award winner since 2009 despite playing in the most pitcher-friendly park in the majors. They're due.

Two MVPs from the same divisional bracket? It's not as weird as you think. Heck, it happened four times just in the 2010s.

It hasn't happened since then, however. And if it does happen in 2025, it's more likely to be an East-East or West-West affair. Think Aaron Judge and Juan Soto. Or maybe Shohei Ohtani and Julio Rodríguez.

But let's instead give the Central divisions some love, if for no other reason than it just plain feels hard to do these days.

Both the AL Central and the NL Central are the ugly ducklings among their respective leagues. There's nary a big-budget team among the 12, and not one of them has better than a 4.0 percent chance of winning the World Series at FanGraphs.

When it comes to MVP contenders, though, Bobby Witt Jr. stands to be the main beneficiary if the 2025 season cuts the 6'7", 282-pound Judge down to size. Unless one prefers José Ramírez, who has a permanent residence in the AL MVP race.

In the NL Central, meanwhile, this is Kyle Tucker's time to shine in his last season before free agency. It's otherwise step-forward time for Elly De La Cruz, Jackson Chourio and Paul Skenes, the latter of whom is good enough to go where no full-time pitcher has gone since Clayton Kershaw in 2014 and Justin Verlander in 2011.

I would tell you I have no idea which team will finish 2025 with the best record, but that would be a lie. The Los Angeles Dodgers, duh.

But the best record at the end of April? Give me the Seattle Mariners.

This is not to say that Justin Turner doesn't have a gripe about the way the Mariners handled their offseason. But if they're going to feel the effects of that, it probably won't be until later in their schedule.

The Mariners will play 30 games between their opener on March 27 and the close of April. Of those, only six are against teams that made the playoffs in 2024. The other 24 are all against teams that finished no better than .500.

It's a schedule that should suit Seattle. While the team only went 85-77 overall in 2024, it put a whupping on losing teams to the tune of a 45-31 record.

The only question is whether Julio Rodríguez will find his bat earlier than he usually does. Yet the Mariners' strategy in this regard is to give him more reps in spring training, and it's thus paid off in a .911 OPS and three homers.

As the Mariners face the A's right out of the gate, the last prediction would imply that the former Oaklanders are in for some early turbulence.

They'll be fine, though. Not good, mind you. But fine.

Per MLB.com's recent survey, players around the league are more bullish on the A's to surprise people in 2025 than they are for any other team. It's an opinion that feels simultaneously weird and yet...also kind of obvious?

The A's were dismal in losing 112 games in 2023, and it was more of the same as they went 37-61 in the first half of 2024. But then they went 32-32 in the second half, wherein Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler were the AL's best hitting duo this side of the now-defunct Aaron Judge-Juan Soto pairing.

Cut to now, and the A's actually have some pitching to go with those bats. Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs are good starters, while José Leclerc is just the setup guy that Mason Miller, noted terrifying closer, needed.

The A's are a bit too thin otherwise for anyone to see the playoffs in their future. But a winning record? Yeah, sounds doable.

It has never been easier to make the playoffs in Major League Baseball. This is not an opinion, but rather a statistical fact.

As recently as 2011, only eight of the league's 30 teams qualified for the playoffs. Now 12 do. It's a 50 percent increase in postseason qualifiers next to a zero percent increase in the number of teams overall.

Still, don't be surprised if half of the teams that made the playoffs in 2024 fail to make it back again in 2025.

Call it a play on the odds, which it literally is. According to FanGraphs, six teams from last year's playoff field—namely: the Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Guardians, Detroit Tigers, Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers and San Diego Padres—have less than a 50 percent chance of making the 2025 postseason.

Otherwise, the odds are too kind to the Houston Astros (53.1 percent) and New York Yankees (63.8 percent).

With Kyle Tucker and Alex Bregman having left town, the Astros lost two of their best players over the winter. The Yankees should have bought stock in bandages prior to spring training, and will especially miss Gerrit Cole atop their rotation as he recovers from Tommy John surgery.

Let's end on another repeat from 2024, thereby confirming the whole out-of-ideas, hill-to-die-on theory.

In my defense, I came close last year. It was the second year in a row that the World Series concluded in five games. And like with the Arizona Diamondbacks versus the Texas Rangers in 2023, it's hard to make the case that the New York Yankees deserved better against the Los Angeles Dodgers last fall.

More broadly, the World Series has been trending shorter. We got four series that went the full seven games in the 2010s. It has yet to do so once in the 2020s.

Baseball is also overdue for a World Series sweep. The last one was in 2012, and it was no great anomaly when it happened. It was the sixth Fall Classic sweep out of 14 dating back to 1998.

Otherwise, has anyone else noticed that this year's crop of American League contenders just sort of stinks?

The ostensible favorite according to FanGraphs is the Yankees. Even setting aside their bumps, bruises and growing collection of gray hairs, their World Series odds (5.7 percent) pale in comparison to the NL favorites: the Atlanta Braves (15.7 percent) and Dodgers (23.5 percent).

Save for the potential beneficiaries, nobody wants to see a rout in the World Series. But since it's bound to happen eventually, the rest of us had best steel ourselves for one now.

Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.