How each MLB team can make the 2025 playoffs. (Yes, even the Rockies and White Sox)

New York Times

25-03-2025

In the first week of the baseball season, there's a war going on in the hearts and minds of baseball fans — a battle between what you so desperately want to believe can happen and what you think will really happen. It's the gap between the naivete of youth and the realism of experience, played out over 162 games.
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I'm here to tell you it's OK to dream a little. This is the time to think big about breakthroughs and bouncebacks, about capturing magic in a bottle and somehow prolonging it for six weeks or six months. This time last year, the Kansas City Royals were coming off 106 losses, projected to be the fifth-worst team in baseball and barely better than the Chicago White Sox. The Royals played in the Division Series, losing to a Yankees team that itself had come off a mediocre 82-80 season to win the pennant.
In 15 of the last 19 years, half of baseball's postseason teams had not qualified the prior year. That includes a 50-percent turnover rate in each of the last three seasons. Four of the last six pennant winners had not made the playoffs the prior season.
So to divine the future this October, let's look to the past. For all 30 teams, I've looked at their projected win total (via Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA system) and found a historical analogue since 2008 — another team projected to win a similar amount that nevertheless made the postseason. The fits aren't perfect and the methodology had to improvise — some teams are projected to be really bad — and they're not all best-case scenarios, because only so many teams have won the World Series. Yes, I'll occasionally get tongue-in-cheek, but the exercise here is mostly earnest. Because somebody on this list is about to stun the world.
Here is last year's piece, which correctly predicted the 12 teams that would make the postseason. Unfortunately, I was wrong on each of the 18 teams that did not make it to October.
This comparison worked out so well for the Dodgers last year that I'm running it back (said sincerely). Teams are rarely projected to win in triple-digits; it's happened only six times in the last two decades, all of them since 2020. And of course, five of them belong to the Dodgers, which means they're basically in a class by themselves.
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The 2020 team played 60 games at a record-tying 116-win pace. The 2025 team should, knock on wood, have a chance to play 162 games this season to see if it can match that squad.
Atlanta is the other team that's been projected for more than 100 wins in the last two decades, and that was last year's squad that ended up with only 89. It was a disappointing season but a justifiable one, given the absurd run of injuries that sapped the roster of much of its star power.
A healthier season, on its own, should push Atlanta back into the mid-90s in wins, and the 2017 Astros represent a version of the best-case scenario, where the offense clicks on all cylinders and the pitching staff proves deeper than anticipated.
I don't claim to be the most creative person in the world. So when a team in New York acquires Juan Soto and opens a season full of supercharged expectations in Houston, it reminds me of a recent team in New York that acquired Juan Soto and opened a season full of supercharged expectations in Houston — en route to the pennant.
Merely matching expectations last season was good enough for the Yankees to win their division and claim home-field advantage throughout the AL playoffs. Methinks 92 or even 94 wins won't be good enough to do either for the Mets this season. But incorporating Soto into a lineup that improved significantly during last season and welcoming back Kodai Senga into a rotation that outperformed anyone's expectations leaves this New York squad with room for growth.
It's a frustrating byproduct of postseason expansion that a team's legacy can be defined more by what happens during three days in October than over the previous six months. And so it is for the '08 Cubs, who ran away with the NL Central only to get stomped in a Division Series sweep by the 84-win Dodgers.
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While these Cubs are not coming off a division title like those Cubs, there's real reason to believe Chicago could be a contender in the National League as a whole. Kyle Tucker is the kind of star who makes the complementary players around him look that much better. Maybe Justin Turner provides the kind of turn-back-the-clock season that Jim Edmonds did in 2008. Maybe Justin Steele and Shōta Imanaga give the rotation a pair of All-Stars anchors like Ryan Dempster and Carlos Zambrano. And maybe October goes a little better this time.
This is the first time in the sample that no American League team was projected for even 90 wins. (It happened in the National League in both 2010 and 2012; Rangers fans would prefer not to be reminded of that stretch.) The last time neither the Yankees nor Astros was projected to lead the AL in wins was 2016, when Cleveland was projected to win 92. The 2016 club was also one of the last teams to be projected a pennant frontrunner despite not making the postseason the prior season, much like Texas this year.
That Cleveland team made a leap because of the strength of its infield, specifically Francisco Lindor and José Ramírez, and the breakthrough of Corey Kluber in the rotation. The Rangers' infield has a considerably longer track record, the roster has the same kind of upside from its youth as that 2016 Cleveland team, and the rotation has multiple breakout candidates, ranging from the young in Kumar Rocker to the old in Jacob deGrom.
Sometimes a roster comes together so cohesively, so dominantly early in the season that you feel dumb for not seeing it beforehand. The 2018 Red Sox were an obvious wrecking ball by the middle of April, when they were 17-2. They had a transcendent outfielder in Mookie Betts, an excellent shortstop in Xander Bogaerts and the best versions of J.D. Martinez and Andrew Benintendi to lengthen the lineup.
These Mariners lack the recent pedigree of those Red Sox, who had won consecutive division titles. But it would surprise nobody if Julio Rodríguez put together a Betts-like MVP season. J.P. Crawford, Cal Raleigh and Randy Arozarena aren't perfect matches for the rest of that Boston lineup, but they don't need to be given Seattle's outstanding rotation. The Mariners have a one-through-five other that teams dream of — the kind that could look very early like a wrecking ball.
Life comes at the core of a baseball team fast. The best team in the American League from the start of 2023 through the end of June last season, the Orioles stumbled to the finish, got swept in the playoffs (again), and now face questions about just how good this current group can be.
There's still loads of talent here, mostly on the position-player side
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The 2018 Nationals had fallen back, winning 15 fewer games than they had the season before, and infamously losing 31 of their first 50 in 2019. (Baltimore dropped 10 wins last season). But the top-line talent of the Nationals roster eventually shined through, surging back to win a wild card and storm through to a championship. The Orioles, despite some present skepticism, still have loads of talent, mostly on the position-player side, and possess the highest ceiling of any team in the junior circuit.
So this was the Giants team led more by its offense during the regular season than its pitching staff. San Francisco basically ran out an eight-man lineup of above-average hitters, headlined by Buster Posey, to overcome an inconsistent starting rotation behind Madison Bumgarner. In the postseason, Bumgarner and the bullpen — when they weren't one and the same — carried almost the entire load for the pitching staff.
No, the Twins don't have the same recent success in the postseason that those Giants did, and they don't have Bumgarner ready to sling up zero after zero in the highest-pressure situations. But the lineup is projected to have nine above-average regulars, and the pitching staff could do quite well in October if shortened considerably.
Hey, we can all be forgiven for forgetting the 2014 Angels were the American League's best team — an absolute buzzsaw that in one stretch in the summer went 55-22, only to be swept by the upstart Royals in the Division Series. The Astros have largely run the AL West in the decade since — apologies to Jeff Banister's overperforming Rangers teams — though the trendline is going in the wrong direction. Houston joins the White Sox, Angels and Cardinals as the only team to fall short of its projections in each of the last two seasons, and the 87-win projection here is the lowest for the franchise since 2016.
That Angels lineup was built around MVP Mike Trout, with Albert Pujols, Howie Kendrick and Kole Calhoun as the complementary pieces. Yordan Alvarez isn't quite Trout, but José Altuve, Isaac Paredes and Christian Walker make the top four as formidable if not more so. And Hunter Brown — whom your savviest friends are pegging as a Cy Young candidate — gives this pitching staff more upside than that of those Halos.
Add Corbin Burnes to the team that just scored the most runs in baseball, and you like its chances of making some noise. For Arizona, the question is how much of last season's offensive firepower can be replicated. Sometimes that's with the same players — which version of Eugenio Suárez shows up this year? — and sometimes that's trying to replace departures, with Josh Naylor stepping in for Christian Walker and Pavin Smith for Joc Pederson.
The '08 Phillies were able to replicate a lot of the good things they'd done a year earlier in, like Arizona, an 89-win campaign. Ryan Howard and Chase Utley and Jimmy Rollins were all still good, and Cole Hamels was even better. A sturdier bullpen with Brad Lidge paid it off in a championship.
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It's a bit outlandish to start, but look closer and you start to see some similarities here. Zack Wheeler can be the kind of shutdown pitcher Zack Wheeler was for those 2022 Phillies, and Bryce Harper can lead the lineup just like Bryce Harper did.
Jokes aside, this Phillies team sure looks to have a higher ceiling than the one that fell two wins shy of the championship. That team started the year with Didi Gregorius at short, not Trea Turner. It had Kyle Gibson and Bailey Falter in the rotation, not Cristopher Sánchez and Jesús Luzardo. Corey Knebel led a makeshift bullpen, not José Alvarado and Orion Kerkering.
Of course, real success may all come down to the first paragraph here: Wheeler being Wheeler, and Harper being Harper in the biggest moments.
While the Rangers hadn't been to the postseason in more than a decade (it was tougher then), they were coming off an 87-win season, and winning 90 and the AL West wasn't a shock. Coming through in October, though, by upsetting the Rays and Yankees was more of a surprise.
For San Diego, it's that last part that eludes it. The Dodgers appeared invincible by the time the World Series was over last year, but it had been only three weeks since the Padres had them on the brink. If Fernando Tatis Jr. doesn't hit into that double play — well, let's not be cruel with hypotheticals. Although the bottom part of the Padres roster leaves much to be desired, the top half still sparkles. Those Rangers got by with uncharacteristic lineup holes to win a pennant.
This century, the Cardinals have finished above .500 in all but two seasons, they've made the playoffs 16 times and won the World Series twice. But the two years they won the World Series were not the years you'd have expected: the 83-win squad in 2006 and the 2011 team that needed miracles in September and across multiple innings of Game 6 of the World Series.
Although the Yankees are the only team with more playoff berths this century than St. Louis, expectations are lower than normal the week of Opening Day. The Yankees lost Juan Soto in free agency and Giancarlo Stanton and Gerrit Cole in spring training, and the PECOTA forecast has dropped accordingly. So you can imagine, years from now looking back at New York's long run of success, and saying, 'Really? 2025? That's the team that won it all?'
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I haven't asked the people at Baseball Prospectus specifically about this, but it's my understanding there's no multiplier they throw into the PECOTA algorithm for 'vibes.' If so, Toronto probably would get knocked down a peg or two, given another offseason of relative disappointment and the inability to extend Vladimir Guerrero Jr. before the start of spring training.
But the talent is still there. Guerrero is an MVP candidate. Bo Bichette can't be as bad as he was last year. The only member of their starting rotation that casual baseball fans don't know, Bowden Francis, took like six different no-hit bids into the eighth inning after last year's All-Star break. And Andrés Giménez is here, which ties it all back to last year's Guardians — who despite a disappointing season and offseason, relied on their best players playing like great players. José Ramírez posted another top-five MVP finish, Emmanuel Clase was lights out, and the bullpen did the rest.
While there is not much precedent for a team playing its home games in a minor-league park, it's all pretty good precedent. The 2020 Blue Jays, playing in a Triple-A stadium in Buffalo, made the postseason. The 2021 Blue Jays, who played in their spring training facility in Dunedin and Buffalo before returning to Toronto, won 91 games.
As for the comp here, Atlanta in 2021 was not the best team in the National League at any point of the season, until it hit its stride thanks to some unexpected contributions by the end of the year. Tampa Bay does not stick out as a frontrunner just yet, but those unexpected contributions can come in the form of a pitching staff returning to health and an offense that should smash in the tinier confines of Steinbrenner Field.
The 2009 Giants had made the big leap, from 72 wins to 88. Naturally, projection systems were skeptical it was all replicable. After all, could a rotation fronted by Tim Lincecum and Matt Cain do that again?
The Royals face the same challenge. They've completed Step 1, leaping from 56 wins all the way to 86 and the playoffs last season. Now the challenge is backing it up a year later. Lincecum and Cain weren't as good individually in 2010 as they had been in '09, but they were joined by Jonathan Sánchez and Madison Bumgarner. Seth Lugo may not be the Cy Young runner-up in 2025, but Cole Ragans can still be better, and the bullpen provides more depth to the staff as a whole.
And there, no one else has ever previewed the 2025 Royals season or reviewed the 2010 Giants season without mentioning Bobby Witt Jr. or Buster Posey, respectively.
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By the end of the Fall Classic, after the Rangers had dispatched the Diamondbacks and won their first World Series, it made a fair amount of sense. Why wouldn't a lineup that featured Corey Seager and Marcus Semien batter opponents all season long? The rotation was good enough, and if the only thing holding you back is a bullpen getting hot at the right time, well let me tell you about the joy and mysticism of Tyler Matzek and Ryan Brasier and some guy off every other World Series champion.
The Red Sox have become a trendier pick since adding Alex Bregman last month, and it's become easier to see them not just contending in the American League but taking it all the way into the World Series. Bregman and Rafael Devers and Jarren Duran are good players, Garrett Crochet and Walker Buehler have high ceilings as starters, and there's youth here to push the Sox across the finish line, same as Texas had. Oh, and Aroldis Chapman can play the role of Aroldis Chapman.
The 2015 Mets are good evidence that you never quite know how talented a roster is until you see it in action. New York's rotation had promise, for sure, even with Zack Wheeler requiring Tommy John surgery that spring. But nobody could have foreseen the quartet of Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz clicking the way it did at exactly the right time, to chase down the Nationals in the NL East and get by the Dodgers and Cubs into the World Series.
Cleveland's rotation should be better than it was last season — it has to be better than it was last season — and it has the kind of youth that can bring unexpected, ceiling-raising breakouts. And the Guardians wouldn't need to trade for an offensive anchor like those Mets did; they already have José Ramírez.
The Brewers are attempting to do what the Pirates couldn't in the middle of last decade: Build a sustainable, year-after-year winner in the NL Central and break through in the postseason. Milwaukee has most of the former down; it hasn't quite achieved the latter.
The best team in Pittsburgh in a generation, the 2015 Pirates, picked a profoundly bad year to win 98 games. It wasn't enough to win the NL Central — St. Louis crossed into triple digits — which meant it drew only a single-elimination wild-card game against the starting pitcher on the hottest end-of-season run in recent memory (Jake Arrieta).
Overperforming to win 98 this year should give the Brewers a better chance of making October noise than that Pirates team had, given the division around them and the playoff format. To get there, Milwaukee will rely like Pittsburgh on a pair of outstanding outfielders in Jackson Chourio and Christian Yelich.
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Sure, the 2014 Royals had made their late-season push, they'd won a ridiculous Wild Card Game and made it all the way to Game 7 of the World Series. But, come on, presented with the challenge of 162 games again, could that roster really be as good? Be even better, somehow?
The Tigers face a similar challenge. They had a magical month last September, chasing down several teams ahead of them to end a 10-year postseason drought, and then they beat the mighty Astros in the Wild Card Series. Can they really capture that magic again for 162? Tarik Skubal's one very good reason why that's possible, as is the return of Jack Flaherty, the development of Jackson Jobe and the continued growth of Riley Greene, Kerry Carpenter and maybe even Spencer Torkelson. 'Development isn't linear' doesn't fit on a T-shirt quite like 'Trust the process,' but hey, the Royals won a ring living it.
Cleveland didn't enter the 2022 season at a high point. It had drifted down to 82 wins the previous season (St. Louis had 83 last year) and its 77-85 projection was its worst since 2011. And then the Guardians rode the sustained excellence of José Ramírez and Shane Bieber, along with breakout seasons from Andrés Giménez and Tristan McKenzie to a division title.
For the Cards to be like the Guards, it will probably take Nolan Arenado and Sonny Gray being All-Stars again. It will require an unexpectedly large step forward from Masyn Winn (to become an MVP candidate the way Giménez did) or by Jordan Walker or Andre Pallante to become above-average contributors.
Here's the thing about the 2014 Royals (ring the bell): You kind of forget how good that rotation was. Yes yes, the bullpen was incomparable at the ends of games, the team speed could be overwhelming, and the offense Texas-leagued you to death sometimes. But James Shields and Yordano Ventura led a rotation with the fourth-best ERA in the American League.
And that's where San Francisco has to be unexpectedly good this season. Logan Webb remains terrific. Justin Verlander is a year removed from being quite good. And for the Giants to beat expectations like it's 2021, they'll need Robbie Ray to pitch like it's 2021.
The 2024 Tigers didn't look like an archetype for a potential postseason run — not this time last year in spring training, not at the trade deadline when they sold, not after the first week of September when they were a .500 outfit sitting in ninth in the American League. But one wild, dare-we-say chaotic month can change things, and the Pirates wouldn't mind following Detroit's blueprint.
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Pittsburgh already has Paul Skenes to play the role of Tarik Skubal, plus more depth in the rotation than the Tigers had by late September. Oneil Cruz and Bryan Reynolds could be Riley Greene — the standout of an otherwise underwhelming offense that does just enough to win games. And maybe David Bednar recaptures his old form and the Pittsburgh 'pen proves as bewildering to opponents as the Tigers' did down the stretch.
The Diamondbacks' modest outperformance of the projections showcase a reality of the expanded postseason: Almost any team is 10 regular-season wins and a hot October away from history. Even these Angels.
Arizona's run was propelled by youth — by Corbin Carroll being even better than anticipated, by Gabriel Moreno breaking out — and a bullpen that locked down when it mattered. Zach Neto and Logan O'Hoppe haven't had the same prospect hype as Carroll and Moreno, but there's a solid floor there with upside. Kenley Jansen and Ben Joyce can shut the door late. And since this is all about best-case scenarios, man, the best-case scenario for Mike Trout is still pretty damn good.
In writing up the Reds last spring, I said they possessed the same kind of cohort of young talent that could make a dramatic leap forward — not just to the postseason but to real October contention — as the 2014 Royals. And then Cincinnati went out and lost 87 games.
But I'm undeterred. Let's raise the (regular-season) bar to the 101-win Orioles from two years ago, when Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson carried them to a division title. For Cincinnati, Elly De La Cruz and Hunter Greene did make leaps last year. Matt McLain and Christian Encarnacion-Strand are back, Jeimer Candelario and Noelvi Marte can't have a worse year (right?), and the rotation is full of interesting pieces. And then there's Terry Francona, whose first team in Boston won the World Series and whose first team in Cleveland improved by 24 games to make the playoffs.
Few franchises made PECOTA look sillier in the 2010s than the Athletics, who routinely outperformed the preseason projections to win division titles if not Division Series. The 2012 team might have been the most fun: A heavy underdog to the established Texas in the AL West, five games under at the end of June — and then a surge out of nowhere to catch and pass the Rangers in the final weekend of the season at the Coliseum. Even now, you're probably thinking of Stephen Vogt and Josh Donaldson and Sonny Gray and nope, wrong A's. This was rookie Yoenis Céspedes and newcomer Josh Reddick, this was Jarrod Parker and A.J. Griffin.
And in that vein, this year's A's have a little more of a track record entering the season than that squad. Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler were both really good last year, and Luis Severino and Jeffrey Springs raise the floor of the rotation. Crazier things have happened for the Athletics before.
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The Orioles got a Nationals team, the Nationals get an Orioles team. Kismet!
The O's and A's start to show up a lot toward the bottom here because those franchises have consistently beaten expectations over the last 15 years or so. The 2016 Orioles were carried by Manny Machado (in one of his best overall seasons), a lights-out Zack Britton and terrific seasons from Kevin Gausman and Chris Tillman at the top of an otherwise pedestrian rotation.
Washington doesn't have someone as talented right now as Machado was in 2016 — but CJ Abrams, James Wood and Dylan Crews are all capable of significant leaps. MacKenzie Gore and Michael Soroka can be Gausman and Tillman. Good luck finding someone as good as Britton, though, but that's a thing I say a lot.
We've reached the point where teams projected this low in our sample have not made the postseason. And so the method switches, from finding a team with similarly low expectations that made the playoffs, to finding a team that outperformed expectations enough to make the playoffs plausible for this group.
First, it's startling that a White Sox team that set a modern record for losses in a season and then traded its best player away does not rank 30th on this list. Projecting Chicago for merely 100 losses feels pretty optimistic — which is crazy when you step back and think this team won its division four years ago.
The 2012 Orioles were in the midst of a much longer rut, if not one as deep. They'd posted a losing record for 14 straight years, with at least 90 losses in the last six. They overachieved in 2012, thanks to a baseline of competence around the roster and an otherworldly, mostly no-name, bullpen that led it to a 29-9 record in one-run games. If the White Sox are going to do something ridiculous this season, it's going to take something aberrational like that.
Heading into the season, Xavier Edwards and Jonah Bride are the only Marlins Opening Day hitters projected to be above the league average, and no offense to them, they're not exactly Ruth and Gehrig holding up an offense. The long-vaunted Miami pitching staff will begin the year with four starters on the IL, again. And Miami plays in a brutal division.
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So let's really squint here. Sandy Alcántara is back, Edward Cabrera and Ryan Weathers will be soon, and Max Meyer was pretty good, briefly, to begin last season. The rotation could end up in the top half of the league. And it wouldn't shock anybody if Connor Norby or Kyle Stowers or Matt Mervis or Otto López or Griffin Conine became an above-average hitter; so what if three or four of them did at the same time? Outpacing the projection by 21, like an Athletics team lifted up by Matt Chapman, Khris Davis and Edwin Jackson, still might not be enough for a playoff berth. But it gets Miami in the conversation.
For the Marlins, a lot of things need to break right to contend for the playoffs. For the Rockies — whose 55-win projection ties for the lowest in PECOTA's history — everything needs to go right. And there's only one team in recent memory for whom everything seemed to go right in the regular season: the 2021 Giants.
Those Giants outperformed their projection by 32 — six more than any other team in the sample. San Francisco excelled by basically only playing good players. Simple, right? Most every at-bat was taken, most every pitch was thrown, by a player who performed above the league-average that season. Last year's Rockies were nearly the inverse of that. And so to exceed its expectations by 30-plus games, Colorado will need the occasional big jump — say, Ezequiel Tovar and Brenton Doyle becoming top-10 MVP finishers — and scores of smaller ones: Michael Toglia hitting for the same power but getting on base more, Kris Bryant playing more than half the time, and the trio of Kyle Freeland, Germán Márquez and Antonio Senzatela turning back the clock in the rotation.
Like so many of these, it's probably too much to really ponder. But imagine leaping forward in time, opening up the Baseball-Reference standings on that Monday after the season ends and seeing the Rockies listed there with 87 wins. Insane! you'll say. When's the last time a team outpaced what everyone thought of it like this? And the answer will be, 'Yeah, only four years.'
(Top photo of the Los Angeles Dodgers celebrate winning the 2024 World Series: Elsa / Getty Images)