Ah, the American League West, the division of Ryan and Rodriguez, Griffey Jr. and Trout, Henderson and Eckersley.
But enough of names, faces, and places of years past. Let’s instead focus on the present. More specifically, let’s look at where the AL West is headed and what we might expect from it as we barrel toward the 2025 season.
Since reaching franchise lows in the early 2010s, no team has known consistency like the Houston Astros. They’ve won their division seven times in the last eight years, made the ALCS six of those years, and won the World Series twice during that span. Houston’s 719 wins since that streak started are second-most in baseball, only trailing the titanic Dodgers.
The Astros are, in short, a known commodity. They’re also familiar: Jose Altuve, Alex Bregman, Justin Verlander, Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez, Ryan Pressly, and Framber Valdez. They are the Astros, the stars, the faces on pillar-sized posters.
The 2024 offseason brought the Grim Reaper to Houston’s core. Verlander left for the Giants, all but ensuring he’ll retire away from H-town. Bregman fled to Boston. Pressly was sent to the Chicago Cubs in a cash dump. Perhaps most shocking of all, the Astros shipped off Tucker to the Cubs before his walk year.
The Astros are no longer a known commodity heading into 2025. Now they’re something different, with the offseason signing of the always reliable Christian Walker and the trade of Isaac Paredes.
One of the new and arguably most important players of this new era of Houston baseball is Paredes. While donning the Tigers stripes, Paredes was a ho-hum hitter, touting a .592 OPS across 57 appearances. He was dealt to Tampa Bay in exchange for Austin Meadows. Once he joined the Rays, suddenly things changed. Paredes would nab a .740 OPS in 2022 despite a .205 batting average, and then increase both in 2023, sporting a .250 average with a .840 OPS. Paredes knocked 31 homers and 98 RBIs, earning an 18th-place finish in the AL MVP voting.
Tampa Bay’s way of doing business made Paredes expendable once the 2024 season went sideways. At the deadline, Paredes, his 16 homers, 55 RBIs, and .792 OPS, were shipped off to Wrigley Field to join a Cubs team trying to compete. Paredes posted an underwhelming .223/.325/.307 slash line with a .633 OPS while in Chicago. His run production decreased, his home-run rate halved, and soon Paredes was a pariah to his new team.
Like the Rays before them, the Cubs no longer needed Paredes. He was an expensive addition for a remodel that never took, and now Chicago wanted a new lease and a brighter star in Tucker. That, along with the impending exodus of Bregman and the coagulated state of the franchise, brought Paredes back south to Houston.
What isn’t as clear-cut is the type of player Paredes will be with his new team. See, the Astros need boppers. Despite ranking ninth in team OPS in 2024, the club ranked 11th in runs scored. They were just behind a Minnesota team that missed the playoffs and barely ahead of the disappointing Cubs team that Paredes was brought in to bolster. Couple that decline with the departures of Bregman and Tucker, two of the team’s best offensive players, and suddenly the Astros seemingly don’t have enough hitters.
Altuve and Alvarez are great, as is Walker. But Paredes is the X-factor. As the projected No. 2 hitter in the lineup, Paredes is responsible for keeping Altuve moving and getting on base for Alvarez and Walker. He’s the middleman, the go-between. If he fails at that task, the lineup needs reshuffling and the whole operation needs rethinking. Outside of Yainer Diaz, no one else is worth occupying a top-of-the-order spot. Jeremy Peña isn’t ready, Chas McCormick fell off a cliff, Mauricio Dubón is a utility player, and Jake Meyers is here because of his glove, not his bat.
Thankfully, Paredes has a strong record while playing at the stadium formerly known as Minute Maid Park. Paredes has two home runs, three RBIs, five walks, and a .914 OPS in his five games playing there. He sees the ball well under the Texan sun, needless to say. Greater than his vision, though, is his swing. Paredes has always been pull-happy, much more willing to drive the ball toward his side of the field than spray it across the greenery.
That’s partly what hampered Paredes in Chicago, where Wrigley’s left field porch is 355 feet, a far cry from Tropicana Field’s 315 feet. Daikin Park, however, shares the same left field dimension as the Trop thanks to the Crawford Boxes, measuring 315 feet. It’s the perfect place for Paredes to call home. Or, at least, it should be judging by his track record. The Astros are betting as much.
On the pitching side, Valdez, Hunter Brown, Ronel Blanco, and Spencer Arrighetti are all back. Who’s new is Hayden Wesneski, a former Yankees farmhand turned Cubs project. The right-hander’s had a solid career thus far, carrying a 3.93 ERA. No problem, right? Well, not so fast. While Wesneski’s played well, he’s primarily done so as a reliever, making 46 of his 68 career appearances out of the bullpen. That’s the role he knows best and where he’s flourished. As a reliever, Wesneski has a 3.56 ERA. As a starter, he has a mark of 4.21. For the Astros to feel safe, they’ll need Wesneski to land somewhere in the middle and hope his new habits bring better tidings.
Hope is all the Astros have when it comes to this rotation. Lance McCullers Jr. is only now facing live hitters and hasn’t pitched in a professional game since October of 2022. JP France might not be back until July after undergoing shoulder surgery. Luis García Jr. and Christian Javier are still working their way back from Tommy John surgery. Garcia, who figured to be back sometime this year, recently experienced further elbow soreness just last week. Wesneski isn’t a temporary solution or a stop-gap. There’s a real possibility that he’s a mainstay. Should that be the case, the Astros – for the sake of their entire franchise – need Wesneski at his best all season. Otherwise, none of this works.
The same goes for the bullpen. Pressly, for all his warts last season, is gone, as are Héctor Neris and Caleb Ferguson. All that remains is a stars and scrubs bullpen. Josh Hader and Bryan Abreu, despite a down 2024, headline the former while names like Rafael Montero, Steven Okert, and Logan VanWey account for the latter. Sandwiched between them are the untested unknowns – Tayler Scott, Luis Contreras, and Bryan King. Scott is the only one of the three with more than a year of service time, but that time is scattered between his debut, a two-year stint in Japan, and his return to MLB in 2022.
All told, this is a decidedly different Astros team than years past. Are there reasons to still believe? Of course. The Astros overcame a 12-24 start in 2024 to win the AL West and make the playoffs. Reinvention isn’t new for this team. What is new is the degree of difficulty. It’s a tall ask and begs a question: How much can the Astros lose and still win?
Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the disappointments. Such was the case for the 2024 Texas Rangers.
After winning the 2023 World Series, Texas felt like the place to be. They had the stars, the prospects, the manager – perhaps the best in baseball – and the allure. But then came 2024, a season snakebitten from the start when promising third baseman Josh Jung fractured his wrist four games into the campaign. From there, the hits kept coming.
In May alone, the Rangers lost frontline starters Nathan Eovaldi and Jon Gray, top prospect Wyatt Langford, and then 21-year-old star Evan Carter to the injured list. Starter Max Scherzer joined the list in July, Tyler Mahle in August, and finally, franchise pillar Corey Seager in mid-September. Bad luck followed the Rangers onto the field as several 2023 contributors faltered in 2024. Marcus Semien finished with a .699 OPS, his worst in a 162-game season since 2014. Catcher Jonah Heim stumbled to a .602 OPS. Slugger Adolis García posted a .684 OPS. And that’s just the position players.
By season’s end, the Rangers were 78-84, third in the AL West, and eight games back of a wildcard spot. The Tampa Bay Rays, who sold at the trade deadline, were closer to the playoffs than the World Series-winning Rangers.
The good news for Texas is it’s no longer 2024. They have a clean slate, a fresh start. Their stars are healthy, including ace extraordinaire Jacob deGrom, and anything feels possible again.
The underperformers in 2024 were felt so keenly because of who they’d been previously. Semien was coming off two third-place finishes in AL MVP voting in the last three seasons. Heim was an All-Star and a Gold Glover in 2023. Garcia had 100+ RBIs in back-to-back seasons. This wasn’t a case of regression back to the mean, it was a case of stars playing like scrubs. There’s reason to believe that will change in 2024. Semien, Heim, and Garcia are too good to flounder again.
But even if they should fail, the Rangers have support. Langford was one of the few hitters to exit 2024 unblemished and will look to take another step forward after hitting .253/.325/.415 with 16 home runs, 74 RBIs, and a .740 OPS as a rookie. Should he develop further, the Rangers have a primetime, middle-of-the-order bat.
Also helping in that matter are offseason acquisitions Joc Pederson and Jake Burger. Pederson is an especially nice addition. Over the last four seasons, he’s hit .255/.350/.467 with 79 home runs, 246 RBIs, a .818 OPS, and a 125 wRC+. Few are better at what Pederson does, and at 32, there’s no reason to believe that’ll change. The same goes for Burger, whose floor over these last two seasons is a .250 average with around 30 home runs and 80+ RBIs. And that’s while playing for the 61-101 White Sox in 2023 and the 62-100 Miami Marlins in 2024. Playing for an offense that lets Burger be a steady earner rather than a breadwinner might do him wonders. It also can’t be overstated what a healthy, good Carter does for this team.
Even pitching-wise, the Rangers feel relatively safe. Eovaldi is like the Pederson of his position – never flashy but always reliable. Mahle, slotting in after Eovaldi, is similarly sturdy, pitching to a 3.90 ERA from 2020 to 2023. Then, there’s the youngins Jack Leiter and Kumar Rocker. The two former first-rounders come with immense upside. The Rangers will reap the rewards if just one realizes a fraction of it. Finally, there’s deGrom, a two-time Cy Young winner and four-time All-Star.
This is a good team. In the best-case scenario, it’s a great team anchored by Seager and deGrom. Banking on good health for both players is a shaky bet, though. Seager has played 130+ games just once over the last four years. He had surgery for a sports hernia toward the end of the 2024 season. Then there’s deGrom, whose health was a concern before getting Tommy John surgery in 2023. The last time deGrom made 20 starts in a season was 2019.
That’s what prevents the Rangers from being a lock in the West. There’s almost too much that can go wrong. What if Seager and deGrom get hurt? What if those three offensive cornerstones can’t rebound? There’s a reality where this team goes 94-68 and runs away with the division. Then, there’s another where they go 80-82 and finish five games out of a playoff spot. They’re as volatile as it gets.
The Seattle Mariners were right there in 2024. Well, sort of. They weren’t on the doorstep of the ALDS, ALCS, or the World Series, but they were one game shy of making the playoffs. For a Seattle franchise that recently endured a 20-year postseason drought, last year’s denial is all the more painful.
So, what’d the Mariners do knowing they were that close? How did they try to take that next step? Well, the short answer is that they didn’t.
This offseason, the Mariners spent $11.25 million in free agency. A small chunk of it went to Donovan Solano and his .760 OPS. The rest went toward re-signing Jorge Polanco, a one-time All-Star coming off the worst season of his career. That’s not an understatement, by the way. Polanco hit .213/.296/.355 with a .691 OPS in 118 games. The last time Polanco had an OPS near that number in a 162-game season was in 2015 as a 21-year-old. Yet for some reason, Seattle felt compelled to shell out what little money it could toward him.
Seattle also declined to pursue meaningful additions in the trade market. The swaps they did make were insignificant, headlined by Austin Shenton, Miles Mastrobuoni, Blake Hunt, Will Klein, and Casey Legumina. Shenton has only played 19 MLB games. Mastrobuoni has a .542 career OPS in his 118 games played. Hunt has spent seven seasons in the minors. Klein sports an 11.05 ERA in eight professional appearances. Legumina owns a slightly better but not encouraging 6.95 ERA in 17 games.
So, what we’re left with after this offseason is an unchanged Seattle team. The front office is just running back the same team that sat on the doorstep and stayed there through no fault but their own.
The same factors to like about the 2024 Mariners are still here. Their starting pitching staff remains arguably the best in baseball and might only improve with time. Logan Gilbert and George Kirby – who’ll miss the first chunk of the season due to right shoulder inflammation – are 27. Bryce Miller is 26, and Bryan Woo and Emerson Hancock are only 25. Luis Castillio is somehow the gray-haired man of the group and he’s only just turned 32. Age isn’t the only thing they have in common. They’re also elite, top-rate arms. For context, Castillo had the worst ERA among all six starters. That ERA was 3.64, the 29th-best among all starters last season.
While many teams are searching for starting pitchers, Seattle has so many that they can’t fit all of them into a five-man rotation.
Seattle’s 2024 bullpen wasn’t as good as their rotation, but it was still a solid unit. The Mariners ranked ninth in bullpen ERA last season, fifth in BABIP, and fourth in K/9. The good news is that outside of Austin Voth, the arms responsible for those numbers – Andrés Muñoz, Trent Thornton, Taylor Saucedo, Collin Snider – are back in 2025.
That’s perhaps the biggest reason to believe in this Mariners team. Seattle didn’t change anything on the pitching side because they didn’t need to. The problem remains the offense.
Seattle’s offense was horrific last season, and judging by their lack of offseason moves, it might be abysmal again in 2025. In 2024, the Mariners offense was 21st in runs scored, 22nd in OPS and 27th in total bases. The teams hovering around them in these metrics include the Los Angeles Angels, Chicago White Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Washington Nationals.
Three of the nine hitters projected to comprise Seattle’s Opening Day lineup finished 2024 with a sub-.700 OPS marks. They include J.P. Crawford, Polanco, and Rowdy Tellez. The latter will be an underwhelming DH, and it’s not like the Mariners have any alternatives. Mastrobuoni hasn’t ever hit outside of 2022 with the Cubs. Backup catcher Mitch Garver hit career lows in 2024. Dylan Moore’s glove is too good to waste at DH. The only viable option is Solano, who hit .352/.412/.489 with a .901 OPS last season while serving as DH for San Diego. Solano, though, is 37, and this offense isn’t near that of San Diego’s.
The bright spots should be Julio Rodríguez, Randy Arozarena, and Cal Raleigh, but they’re coming off the worst offensive years of their careers. Rodriguez hit .273/.325/.409 with a .734 OPS. Arozarena hit .219/.332/.388 with a .720 OPS. Raleigh hit .220/.312/.436 with a .748 OPS. Those numbers, even if they are career-worsts in some respects, aren’t damning. Raleigh finished 12th in AL MVP voting. Rodriguez’s worst performance is still solid. They aren’t the problem. The problem is as good as they can be, they find themselves in an impossible, unfair situation.
All told, it leaves the Mariners in a confusing place. They know they have one of the best pitching staffs in baseball, let alone the AL. But they also know that it’s not enough. Their pitching had the second and third-best ERAs in baseball in 2022 and 2023. It still didn’t lead to a postseason run.
The Athletics
There’s a tragedy at play with the Athletics.
During the club’s final years in Oakland, there was no swan song. No last dance, curtain call, or cathartic send-off. Instead, the A’s spent their final three years in the Bay Area going 179-307, finishing fifth in the AL West twice and most recently in fourth.
While the A’s slowly suffered at their last stop, they’ve been building something. Acquiring prospects, drafting players with potential, and finding bargains that few other teams could. Each has given the A’s something they haven’t had since 2019: a core worth building around.
This offseason, the A’s spent $82 million in free agency – $67 million went toward Luis Severino, another $10 million to José Leclerc, and the rest between Gio Urshela, T.J. McFarland, and Luis Urías. That’s not the start and end of their makeover, however. The A’s also shelled out $125 million extending their best players. Lawrence Butler received a $65.5 million, 7-year contract. Brent Rooker earned a five-year, $60 million contract.
It’s the type of transformation other fans dream of. But for fans in Oakland, it’s the stuff of nightmares. They’ve pleaded for this type of attention for years, only for it to arrive after being abandoned.
Much like the club, Rooker’s slowly rebuilt himself over these past seasons. The A’s grabbed him after he was cut by the Royals, and he rewarded their faith almost immediately. Rooker hit .308/.471/.436 in his first Spring Training in the green and gold, cracked the Opening Day roster, and from there, took off. Over these last two seasons, Rooker’s hit .272/.348/.528 with an .876 OPS and a 146 wRC+. Among all hitters, he ranks 10th in wRC+, 14th in OPS, and 14th in Offensive Runs Above Average. It’s as a run producer, though, where Rooker really shines. His 69 home runs are the ninth-most over these last two years and his 181 RBIs are 27th. If he didn’t play for an A’s team in the middle of a rebuild, his numbers might look even better.
That’s partly what makes the 2025 A’s an exciting proposition. They’re no longer in a rebuild and Rooker doesn’t have to do everything himself. Butler broke out last season, hitting .300 with a .898 OPS over his last 61 games. Shea Langeliers continues to be an underrated catcher. JJ Bleday was sixth in the league in doubles. Veterans like Urshela and Seth Brown deepen the lineup while youngsters like Jacob Wilson, Max Muncy, and Tyler Soderstrom only add to its potential.
Much of the same applies to the rotation. It’s a nice mix of veteran stability and inexperienced arms looking to take the next step. Severino falls more into the former category with Springs, while Osvaldo Bido and Joey Estes belong in the latter. The combination of the two should put the A’s in a better position than where they were last year as the 26th-ranked rotation in ERA.
If the new band-aids don’t take, the A’s bullpen can shield them. Though Leclerc is the only addition to the group, not much needed changing this offseason. The unit finished 13th in ERA in 2024 and still sports its studs, Mason Miller chief among them, with McFarland and Tyler Ferguson being steady options.
This is a good Athletics team. Good enough to win the West? Probably not. That’ll take another year of steady player development. Good enough to get out of the cellar? Almost assuredly.
At first glance, the Angels are a middling-to-bad team. Their lineup is uninspiring, their starting pitching staff is a shade worse than that, and their bullpen falls somewhere in between. The Angels are just the Angels, a team trying to support a superstar at the cost of their own well-being and a franchise mired in ineptitude from the top to the bottom.
The organization somehow couldn’t build a playoff-caliber threat while Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani wore their cap. Oh, and then there are the players, some of whom underperform through no fault of their own – either rushed to the big leagues too quickly, never given the development they need, or never on the field long enough to do anything.
There’s a certain sense of understanding when examining the construction of this roster. None that excuses its faults, but enough to see where it’s coming from. See, the Angels want to give Trout his chance. They want to dance with the player who brought them here. It’s why they’ve repeatedly tried to find a Robin for their Batman, whether it be Albert Pujols, Josh Hamilton, Justin Upton, Ohtani, or Anthony Rendon.
It’s admirable. The problem is that their time is up and their refusal to admit it to themselves cost them their future. During the 2023 MLB trade deadline, the Angels were 56-52 and three games back in the Wild Card. They were in the race, but not really. Trout was out with a fractured left hamate bone and wouldn’t return until later that month while their third-best position player was Taylor Ward or Hunter Renfroe. Ward had 1.4 fWAR through 97 games while Renfroe’s mark was 1.1 in 100 games. Additionally, the Angels ranked 19th in team ERA and 23rd in FIP. They were a team going nowhere.
Instead of trading Ohtani, resetting the farm system, and building toward a better tomorrow, the Angels held onto the past. They believed they could fix things and traded for Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, C.J. Cron, and Randal Grichuk to prove it was possible. Giolito made six starts before being released, Cron posted a .519 OPS, and Grichuk a .677 mark. They’d finish the season 73-89 then watch during the offseason as Ohtani moved across town to join the team the Angels want to be but never can become.
Trout is 33, soon-to-be-34. Zach Neto and Ward are the best position players behind him. Then, on the pitching front, their ace is Yusei Kikuchi – another free agency addition brought in to try and resuscitate a weak roster.
This isn’t sustainable or healthy. It’s a team running on fumes. And worse, the player they’re doing all this for isn’t even a safe bet. The last time Trout played over 130 games in a season was 2019. That was Juan Soto’s second season. He’s been traded twice and signed the most expensive contract in MLB history before Trout could play something close to a full complement of games.
On the bright side, the Angels have young players of interest. Neto led the team in fWAR without Ohtani and Trout, Logan O’Hoppe was third, and Nolan Schanuel was sixth. Each finished with a wRC+ above 100, and O’Hoppe was the oldest amongst the group at 24. They have something with those young bats and with pitchers like José Soriano and Ben Joyce. Yet everyone, the newcomers and veterans alike, are working in service of a dream that’s never to come.
