Halfway Home
Every team has now played at least 81 games. How are they doing?
With the All-Star Game in Atlanta not for another couple of weeks, we’re already into the second half of the 2025 season, with all 30 teams cresting the midway point.
Here’s where things stand.
The Colorado Rockies – despite debuting a new corporate patch partner this week (so it’s not all bad news, I guess) – finished their first half 18-63, on a pace for making the wrong kind of history.
Here are some other awful starts, all of them from deep in the depths of time, when mustaches were mustaches.
As for the present day, Bleacher Report graded each team at their halfway point, while MLB.com writers picked each team’s first-half MVPs.
In terms of shaking things up for the second half, the trade deadline is at the end of this month and Jim Bowden pulls together some opinions on which players might be most likely to be traded. As Bowden says: “what really stood out was the number of teams that didn’t really know where this year’s trade market is headed.”
“An American League general manager told me, “We are all waiting for teams to decide if they’re going to sell, but it might take until close to the deadline for teams like the Diamondbacks, Orioles, Red Sox, Guardians and Angels to make that call.”
Before that, there’s MLB’s draft to look forward to on July 13. The Washington Nationals will make the opening selection with, as Keith Law points out, no real obvious first pick (although it could end up being the younger brother of 2022’s #1 pick…)
Talking of the All-Star break, I’ve only been to two All-Star Game festivities – in New York in 2013 and Cleveland six years later. I couldn’t actually afford to go to the main event at either, which was fine. (And don’t get me started on the pantomime of inanity that is the Home Run Derby.)
I much prefer to take in the Futures Game and get a sense of who I’m going to be watching over the next few seasons as well as – and this happens more regularly these days – seeing the kids of players I’d enjoyed watching not that many years previously.
Rather than inter-league play, the 2013 Futures Game at Citi Field was between the USA and the Rest of the World, with the teams managed by two former Mets, Mookie Wilson and Edgardo Alfonso. The US won 4-2, behind starter Noah Syndergaard.
The 2019 game at Progressive Field finished with the AL and NL in a 2-2 tie after the regulation seven innings plus one more as a potential tie-breaker. The youngest player in the game that day was an 18-year-old shortstop called Wander Franco.
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Batting Around
With the pros and cons of a likely Automated Ball-Strike System (ABS) being increasingly hotly debated, JJ Cooper has a data-heavy analysis at Baseball America this week that suggests umpires are “getting better” at calling balls and strikes. He writes:
“I’m sure you’re stewing about some blown call against your favorite team that happened last night or a couple of games ago. It still happens.
“Many of you are probably screaming for robot umpires at this moment. But if you look at the consistency of the strike zone, it’s remarkable how much things have changed in the past 18 seasons. Even as pitchers have gotten better and better at throwing high-octane pitches with baffling movement, the strike zone is much more consistent and the number of missed calls has dropped dramatically.”
Joe Lemire, meanwhile, writes about the lessons from Korea.
“The Korean Baseball Organization has had ABS in place for two seasons. Its robot umpires call every pitch, as opposed to the two-challenges-per-game system in place in Class AAA and expected in MLB, following a spring training trial.
“MLB’s own testing has been rigorous, dating to the MLB-affiliated Atlantic League’s usage back in 2019 and continuing through all levels of the minor leagues. But the KBO represents an opportunity for learnings from the third-most prominent league in the world.
“We have a nice back and forth with KBO and NPB on these rule issues,” [MLB Commissioner Rob] Manfred told SBJ, referring to the Korean and Japanese pro leagues. “We pay a lot of attention to those sorts of experiments, how they’ve worked. They were very satisfied with the way it played out in Korea, and we take that as encouraging as well.”
There’s some good informative commentary here about how the integration of the system is likely to work, from back during Spring Training:
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Lately, it always seems to be the unpredictable O’s and Rays who wind up making headlines when they meet. A couple of weeks ago in their previous series, the O’s jumped out to an 8-0 lead in the second, only for Tampa to score 12 unanswered runs to tie the biggest comeback in their franchise history. The O’s also tied their record blown lead for half a century.
Nine days later, last Friday, the boot was on the other foot as the Rays put up a six-run second before the Orioles came back to win 22-8, becoming the first team in either the American or National League to win by at least 14 runs after trailing by six.
The score was one run shy of the team’s record since moving to Baltimore.
The O’s Coby Mayo notched his first big league homer, saying afterwards he had visions of “striking out to a position player and going 1-for-6 today.”
Both teams have been playing unpredictable quadruple-A ball at times this season. And yet, the Rays put their early problems behind them to scratch back to within a game of the AL East-leading Yankees. The O’s are propping up the division a further 10 games back.
It has been a particularly strange and frustrating half-season for the Orioles. You might also be interested in this post from a couple of months ago. Or, indeed, you may not…
Wings, Clipped – What happened to the Baltimore Orioles? (May 22)
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Bobby Bonilla Day served once again to remind everyone how insane deferred contracts have become, as Jenna West and Dan Shanoff at The Athletic outlined.
But as Cody Williams writes, if you thought the Mets were paying through the nose to Bobby Bonilla, they've got nothing on the Baltimore Orioles.
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In what’s probably the best bobblehead of the season, the New York Yankees will honor their former assistant to the travelling secretary George Costanza at ‘Seinfeld Night’ on Aug 21 against the Red Sox.
Brooks Peck at The Athletic reported that “pre-sales of the item have already been purchased on eBay for up to $250 while tickets to the game are still available for as little as $53.”
And if that’s not enough fun for you, the Detroit Tigers double-A Erie Sea Wolves will become the Erie Moon Mammoths as part of a renaming skit by John Oliver’s HBO show.
AP reported that:
“The name was inspired by the 1991 discovery of woolly mammoth remains by George Moon, a Summit Township resident who found a bone while scuba diving in Lake Pleasant, about eight miles south of Erie. The mammoth remains are housed in the State Museum of Pennsylvania in Harrisburg.”
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Finally, Dave Parker, former MVP and Hall of Famer, passed away aged 74.
He was elected to the Hall of Fame on December 8, 2024 by the Classic Baseball Era Committee along with Dick Allen, and will be inducted on July 27, 2025.
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As always, thanks for reading. I try to write a baseball-related post mid-week and a politics wrap at weekends.
Usually one is more sane than the other. I hope you enjoy them both.
You can read the full States of Play archive here
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