The year that was: 2025 in trends | Baseball prospectus

Translated by José M. Hernández Lagunes

Throughout the season, this series followed month-by-month performance in the MLB. How has it all turned out now that the season is over?

Perform scoring

In 2025, teams scored 4.45 runs per game, the ninth lowest in the 30-team era (as of 1998, excluding 2020). The range went from 3.60 for the Pirates to 5.24 for the Yankees, with 17 teams finishing below the overall average.

But those races were not all the same. A total of 4.52 runs were scored per nine innings, but only 4.46 runs were scored in the first nine innings of games. That figure rose to 9.28 in overtime. And when the position players were on the mound — part of the first nine innings’ totals — they allowed 181 runs in 142 innings, or 11.48 per nine innings. That’s the second-worst performance by position players in the 30-team era (they allowed 11.49 runs per nine innings in 2019) and the third-worst performance after an extra inning in the zombie running back’s five full seasons. (And also the third best!)

So score in 2025…

…looks less impressive if you take out the zombie runners and put the players in a shooting position.

(It should be noted that in previous reports, through July of this year, I showed a graph of runs per 27 outs. Changing the denominator to games allows for a fair comparison between both sets of figures. Thanks to Ben Lindbergh for inspiring this review.)

Therefore, in terms of runs per game, 2025 ranked 20th in the era when 30 teams played real baseball with real pitchers, compared to 19th in total runs per game. The difference between the numbers is 0.15: 4.45 runs per game total, compared to 4.30 without zombie pitchers or position players.

Position players throw

Losing teams can only use a position player if they lose by eight or more runs; the limit before 2023 was six. Winning teams can only use a position player in the ninth inning and only if they win by ten or more points. There was no limit on their use until 2022. (There was and still is no limit on the use of position players in overtime.)

This has caused a decrease in the number of position pitchers over the past two years. But in 2025, despite the limitations, position player pitching was back in vogue.

How close! In 2025, there were 131 position players on the mound, down just one from the peak of 132 in 2022, the last year before the new restrictions were put in place.

And it’s not like these players were good. As mentioned, they allowed 181 runs in 142 innings. Opponents hit .419/.470/.687 against them. (That’s like the season of Sam Thompson 1894, when he hit .415/.466/.696 with the Phillies, for those who remember his play). Some were better than others, but overall they were bad pitchers, with crushing performances, and generally they made those outbursts worse.

Injuries

Derek Rhoads and I will bring you more information on this in the coming weeks, but here are the overall numbers. In our monthly reports we present injuries per match played, as monthly matches played vary from year to year, but here we can report the total number of injuries per season.

Please note that these are only injuries recorded since the start of the season, excluding injuries during spring training. We look at how often players got injured once the season started. And what you might conclude from that graph is that while injuries were below the 2021-2023 peaks, they are still at higher levels than 2018 and 2019.

But long-time fantasy team owners, as well as some normalthey know that a major rule change introduced during the pandemic affected the injured list. Before 2020, teams could call up as many players as they wanted from their 40-man roster in September. As of 2020, they are limited to a total of 28 players. The practical impact of the pre-2020 cap was that teams wouldn’t bother putting injured players on the injured list; They simply called up a replacement or had another player on the field rather than fighting for a place in a crowded dugout. In September 2018, 17 players were placed on the injured list, and 20 the following year. Since then, the average has been 114. (If you remember trying to convince the league commissioner to Christian Jelich and his broken kneecap in September 2019, even though he wasn’t on the injured list, you know what I’m talking about).

So for continuity, here are the DL positions, per game played, through August, before the limits change in September.

By this measure, 2025 was the healthiest season during our record period, although Braves and Astros fans differ.

running the bases

With the near-shot clock shutdown rule implemented before the 2023 season, stolen bases increased dramatically. But so did the base-stealing success rate, well above the breakeven point. This led many, including myself, to expect even more stolen bases in subsequent seasons, with less risk aversion, bringing the success rate back to the cost-benefit ratio of around 75%.

That’s what happened in 2024. It didn’t really work that way in 2025.

Last year everything went according to plan. There were 114 more stolen bases in 2024 than in 2023, and the success rate dropped slightly, from 80.2%, the best in history, to 79.0%, the second best in history.

But 2025, to paraphrase old beer ads, tasted worse and was more filling. Base stealers took the fashion, stealing 177 fewer bases than in 2024. And they were caught 28 more times than the year before, dropping the success rate from 79.0% to 77.7%. That 77.7% is still the third highest in history, but the total number of thefts, 3,440, barely surpassed the 3,421 stolen in 1999, well below the previous two years and the 3,585 in 1987, when there were four fewer teams than there are today. Maybe teams are more cautious. Perhaps pitchers and catchers have adapted to the shutdown rule. It will be interesting to see how this develops next year.

playtime

The shot clock significantly reduced playing time in 2023, but playing time gradually increased each month of the season. That’s why I expected longer matches in 2024. I was wrong. But this year I did well. The matches lasted (slightly) longer.

Nine-inning games in which the home team batted in the ninth inning lasted an average of 2:43, about two and a half minutes longer than in 2024 (but one minute faster than in 2023). Nine-inning games in which the home team failed to score in the ninth inning lasted 2:33, a few minutes slower than 2024, but two faster than 2023. There are many possible reasons for this and the changes are not major, but the games are certainly longer. Don’t be surprised if there are rule changes over the winter (I think it will be hill visits), especially if ABS challenges are expected to add time to next year’s races.

Damn torpedoes!

I think this is the last time I mention torpedo bats. As you may recall, these were the hottest topics in baseball after the Yankees defeated the Brewers 20-9, hitting nine home runs, including one on each of Néstor Cortés’ first three pitches. There were calls to ban the bats after New York won the series, beating Milwaukee 36-14 with 15 home runs. There was concern that the new bats (they weren’t new) would disrupt the game.

That was in March.

Here are at-bats per home run during the 30-team era. The scale is reversed, because the fewer at-bats per home run, the higher the success rate over the entire round.

Hitters hit home runs once every 29 at-bats in 2025, the fifth-highest rate in the 30-team era. But let’s focus on the last two seasons.

The red line represents the increase from 2024 to 2025, from 30.02 plate appearances per home run to 28.97. The black line starts at the same point, but ends at a slower rate: 29.06 plate appearances per home run. This percentage is obtained if we exclude the 67 MLB games played in March. The blue line, which ends at 29.03 plate appearances per home run, only excludes the Yankees’ performance in the series against the Brewers. These three games, which represented 0.06% of the team’s games in the 2025 season, accounted for nearly 6% of the increase in home runs per at-bat from 2024 to 2025.

The number of home runs has increased in 2025. As I mentioned, strikeouts per home run was the fifth highest in the 30-team era. But we’ve seen that a lot lately. The four highest figures were recorded in 2019 (24.6), 2017 (27.1), 2021 (27.2) and 2023 (28.0). So when we say that home runs were the fifth most frequent in the 30-team era in 2025, we also have to say that they were the fourth least frequent over the past eight seasons. Torpedo bats could hardly have done both. Most likely, they did virtually nothing.

Thanks to Derek Rhoads for the injury data.