There are still seven months and 2,428 regular season games to go in Major League Baseball’s 2025 season. Plenty of time to chug vinegar.
Today, though, we’re looking at the sweeter side, a world devoid of contention (we’re talking a lack of heated disagreement, not the world the Colorado Rockies live in year after year).
Look, there’s plenty of dark times in this game, and in a couple of years we’ll be fortunate to have an Opening Day, what with the labor storm already projected to come ashore after next season. For now, how about we appreciate the best of what’s around and adopt a positive attitude as another season tips off in earnest Thursday?
Let’s call it the non-hater’s guide to the 2025 season:
The Dodgers are a Major League Baseball team
As every unproven or unmotivated owner grouses about how some guys have all the luck, this year and the next shape up to produce binary outcomes:
Dodgers don’t win World Series – Everything is fine, see, and anything can happen in October.
It’s never that simple, of course, especially in a league that’s at its best when championship contention tends to be cyclical, at least when a majority of teams exhibit some level of competence and desire.
But that piece of it has proven elusive in many quarters, even in a competitive landscape where 22 franchises have advanced to a World Series this century. And though 36 years lapsed between the Dodgers’ full-season World Series titles, you’d think their 2024 crown capped a run of Kansas City Chiefs-like monotony.
Baltimore Orioles owner David Rubenstein, approaching the one-year anniversary of taking the reins in Charm City, got through one tepid offseason and decided to sing the praises of a salary cap. Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner, holding the line strongly at a mere $310 million payroll, strangely sang a similar tune.
And then there’s Rockies owner Dick Monfort, whose club has lost between 87 and 103 games in 11 of the past 13 full seasons, yet nonetheless crowed to the Denver Gazette that “competitive balance has gotten to the point of ludicrosity. … We need a salary cap and a floor.”
That might help things, but has Monfort tried many of the industry’s other delicacies, such as effective management or avoiding questionable and uncreative hiring practices?
Yes, two things can be true: Economic disparities exist among franchises. And securing the keys to Fort Knox would have sliced into the Rockies’ 37-game deficit in the NL West only so much.
Appreciate Ohtani while you can
With all the Dodger hating going around, you’d think Shohei Ohtani would be impervious to all abuse.
But just to be sure, we’re here to once again say it: Appreciate this man.
To the average fan, Ohtani might represent All That Is Wrong, given that he joined a massive-market, perennially prosperous team and signed the biggest contract in the game’s history (at that point).
Yet it’s also kind of funny how narratives can flip. Just a couple of years ago, the conventional wisdom was that the Los Angeles Angels wasted away Mike Trout and Ohtani’s careers, as if possessing a pair of iconic baseball players correlated to winning championships like trotting out Shaq and Kobe or Taurasi and Griner.
So it goes in today’s Ring Culture, a corrosive discourse that fits baseball like mayonnaise on a hot dog.
Well, Ohtani now works at a place where they print money, surround his MVP exploits with excellence and win a championship in his first season. His unprecedented 50-50 season came on a grand stage, for a playoff club, with a raucous October that followed.
This year, he’ll add pitching back into the repertoire. And odds are excellent we’ll see some two-way brilliance come the postseason, the delicious possibility a man could win a World Series game with his arm and bat, all at once.
And that’s what everyone wanted. Right?
Major League: Back to the minors
Pity the motorist in greater Tampa or West Sacramento who simply wants a frozen treat served with dispatch, only for a charter bus filled with 30 Tampa Bay Rays or Athletics to pull in front of their car at the Dairy Queen drive thru.
OK, so maybe those major league franchises won’t totally cosplay as minor league outfits this year. Yet various disasters of the natural and human kind (Hurricanes Helene and Milton and a guy named John) are forcing both squads into temporary minor league digs for 2025 – and beyond for the A’s.
Sure, they won’t call peanut butter sandwiches dinner, and no one will rock-paper-scissors to avoid sleeping near the lavatory door on a 10-hour bus ride. Yet the Rays and A’s – and, most notably, their opponents – won’t be able to avoid some of the minor league trappings.
The long walk to the visitor’s clubhouse beyond the outfield in Sacramento. The blazing heat and pounding rain that kick in right around Mother’s Day in Tampa. The weird feeling that if they play well enough to reach the postseason, where, exactly, will they play?
Yet necessity can often be the mother of invention, for better or worse. The truncated 2020 season gave us the permanent ghost runner and a foreshadowing of the current expanded playoff format. If nothing else, the Rays’ one-year gig in Tampa should shore up and grow their following on that side of the bay.
For a franchise whose stadium efforts remain curious – from imploding a deal that was finally in place to weird dalliances with a 10-year Tampa Bay commitment to a Montreal-Florida timeshare – perhaps the greater exposure will inspire a permanent solution, even if from a new ownership group.
As for the A’s, well, they’re just a few months from really, totally, for sure breaking ground in Las Vegas, even as the owner seeks more investors. But a three- to four-year stopover in Yolo County might inspire a solid fallback option should Vegas fall through or at least reignite sparks that greater Northern California can support two teams.
Surprise attack
This is where the soliloquys about hope and fresh starts and next year finally arriving and most everyone starting 0-0 should go, and our cynic’s reflex is to gloss over all that pablum.
Hope is not a strategy, they say, and that very crack-of-the-bat, smell-of-the-grass deodorant is most typically used by franchises equally reluctant to show good-faith competitive efforts to fans.
But this is the non-hater’s guide to 2025, right?
So we’ll allow a moment to dream on that surprise season coming out of nowhere, even as this year’s predictions look like so much chalk. Maybe it’ll come in Pittsburgh, where a handful of developing arms might join forces behind the generational Paul Skenes and make the Pirates a threat.
Perhaps it will be in San Francisco, where half-measures at contending look an awful lot like fourth place but the vibes are stronger. Or maybe those wayward Rays, or the “resetting” Cardinals, an ironic twist given their stated desire to burn the place down, yet arrive at the starting line with a representative team.
No, conditions are primed for a just-good-enough team to max out all its projections, mess around and land on 88 wins, somehow. The disappointments? We’ll get to them in time.
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