The Big 2025 MLB Postseason Trivia Roundup!

I don’t know that I have much specific to say about this year’s entry in my annual Playoff Trivia Series. Especially not after last year’s version, where I had to fit writing the entire thing in after that last-day double header. This is so much nicer of an experience (especially coming right on the heels of the huge Playlist article that I just published over at Out of Left Field).

Anyway, as a refresher, for those of you looking for a team to bandwagon for this postseason, perhaps this column will be of some use! That’s how it started, as a way for me to compile a whole bunch of interesting factoids about each year’s set of playoff teams and maybe give neutral observers some direction on fun storylines like long droughts or deserving players searching for a win, and it’s been a fun routine for me to preview October every year. So after a brief interruption for the Hot Corner Harbor email list sign-up form, let’s get right into it!

Built with Kit

DROUGHTS

You may not have realized it if you haven’t sat and thought about it yet, but this is actually a fairly cursed set of playoff teams. Our dozen teams includes all four of the longest active World Series droughts. There’s of course Cleveland at the top (last win in 1948), they’re well into that upper-echelon of dry spells. You know, that point where almost every span above them got a fancy title “The Curse of”? I’m not sure if Cleveland fans have settled on a cause of their misfortunes yet, but this might be the point where they should start looking for one.

After them, it’s a bunch of expansion teams who have never won a title. Those usually don’t seem to get “Curse of” titles, for whatever reason; I guess because expansion teams are just expected to be bad? Now that the first wave of new teams from 1961 and ‘62 are all taken care of, the Padres and Brewers (established in 1969) share the runner up title, while 1977 additions the Mariners are our fourth-place team.

It’s not often you get the entire top four in October like this. By my count, the only other time it happened was 2015, which was thanks to the Cubs, Guardians, Rangers, and Astros all showing up. That kind of gets to an interesting point, which is that in the first quarter of the 21st century, we’ve actually lost a lot of our Mega-Droughts. Obviously you have the big three of the Cubs, Red Sox, and White Sox. But the Giants, Astros, Nationals, and Rangers were all also at the fifty-year mark as well, and even the Angels took over four decades to make it to the top when they made it back in 2002. That’s a lot of heavy hitters that just aren’t around any more, making it more shocking that we still see years like this one. 

The 2025 Orioles and Braves: What Happens After the Rebuild?

I’ve wanted to revisit some ideas about big rebuilds and what comes next, so I started looking into it around the All-Star Break. However, the process sort of spiraled into something bigger, and as it went on, I realized that the first half of the article was a little more timely than the back-half. So rather than finish the whole thing and then start making decisions on publishing and where to divide it, I made the call to just preemptively split it up and publish the first part before it got too out-of-date, while still working on the back-half. As a result, I can’t really promise when Part 2 will be coming just yet, but it will hopefully be soon.

Built with Kit

Over the last few seasons, I’ve been maintaining something of a series where I look at rebuilding teams. The main focus initially was comparing the complete teardown and rebuild of the circa-2020 Orioles with the one pulled off by the early-2010s Astros, since there were a lot of similarities in the two (including a shared lineage of personnel). A few other rebuilds also got mentioned over the course of those articles, but I eventually got around to a piece centered around the Braves’ retooling as a contrasting method. Ever since then, I’ve had a sort of mental connection between all of them.

The last piece in that series came over two years, right at the start of the 2023 season, and that looked like the end of things. The Orioles would roar out to a division title (their first since 2014) and 101 wins (their first 100-win season since 1980). The only team ahead of them was that Braves team, who won 104 games and looked to be moving into the peak years of their dynasty following their 2021 title.*

*Also, all stats in this piece are going to be from Baseball-Reference or Fangraphs.

If that had been the end, it would have been a satisfying conclusion to a long process. The Orioles’ rebuild finally paid off, the Braves’ kicked into high gear, the end. 2024 didn’t go quite as smoothly for either team, as both fell to second in their division and around the 90 win mark. But hey, there’s always some randomness over 162 games and following up a 100-win season can be hard. The important thing was that they made it back to the playoffs. And sure, those playoff runs ended poorly, but again, that happens sometimes. Both of them would be well equipped to try and come back the next year in 2025…

You almost certainly know how that’s gone so far. Those 2024 swoons look less like bad-luck blips and more like omens for what was to come. At the 2025 All-Star Break, the two had near-identical records (43-52 for Baltimore, 42-53 for Atlanta) and were both around a dozen games out of the division, with only the faintest hopes of a second-half comeback. It’s difficult to decide which one is the bigger disappointment. 

Predicting Today's Future Hall of Fame Closers, 2025 Edition

Before we get too far into the regular season, I’m going to add one more special edition update to this year’s Future Hall of Fame Series. However, if you missed the first few pieces in this series, you can start catching up on the Hitters here, and the Starting Pitchers here.

Built with Kit

As I’ve said in the past, I don’t think it’s usually worth it to update my Future Hall of Fame predictions for closers every single season, in the way that I do for starters or position players. However, Billy Wagner’s induction this year seemed like a good excuse to revisit the topic; Wagner marks only the ninth closer in Cooperstown, and with such a small sample to build our Hall standards, I figured it was worth checking to see if things had shifted at all.

It also helps that I think Wagner will probably be the last closer added to the Hall of Fame for at least the foreseeable future. Now that he’s off the ballot, who’s the best reliever who isn’t already elected? Finding “the best X who isn’t already in” is usually a good way to determine a candidate who might start attracting new voters and building momentum for their case.

In fact, that’s actually what happened with Wagner himself; his first big jump in Hall polling came in 2020, which just so happened to come immediately on the heels of Trevor Hoffman, Mariano Rivera, and Lee Smith all being elected between 2018 and 2019. With all of those three out of the way, Wagner gained a few favorable comps in Cooperstown (mostly Smith and Hoffman), but perhaps more importantly, there was no obvious player that would make anyone say “Why should we put Wagner in the Hall if [this guy] isn’t in?”

So with Wagner no longer eligible, who takes up the mantle of “Best Closer Who Isn’t in the Hall of Fame”? It’s not totally clear, and any uncertainty in that answer is going to split momentum in a way that wouldn’t happen if there was a single obvious choice. But just about every potential choice has an additional big asterisk standing in their way on top of that.