Grading My 2025 Breakout Picks

Last spring, I picked 5 pitchers I like, 5 hitters I like, and 5 players I dislike. Now it's time to look back at those picks and see where I went right, and where I went oh so very wrong. We will start with the 5 pitchers that I liked heading into 2025. Grant Holmes was a 10 year minor league journeyman who finally reached the big leagues, appearing mostly out of the bullpen for the 2024 Braves. Heading into 2025, I recognized that he might win a job in the starting rotation out of necessity, and that proved to be the case as he started 21 games before an elbow injury ended his season at the end of July. Considering his lack of track record, a 3.99 ERA in 115 innings is a pretty solid outcome here in my opinion. He did struggle with walks, but also struck out more than his fair share, including 15 Colorado Rockies in a mid-June outing. I use a thumbs up or thumbs down system to grade these picks, with an option for 2 thumbs up or 2 thumbs down as well as a neutral grade, I think this is 1 thumbs up. He exceeded preseason expectations, even if he couldn't finish out the season. My Bobby Miller pick was wrong, but my Bobby Miller thesis was in some ways correct. Even entering spring training with Snell, Glasnow, Yamamoto, Sasaki, Otani, Kershaw, May, Gonsolin, etc, rotation attrition meant that Bobby Miller, who was maybe 2024's worst pitcher, got a chance to start as early as April 16th, not long after getting bonked on the head. Unfortunately, he was terrible, and ended up banished to AAA for the rest of the year, minus one bullpen cameo. No bounce back to his dominant 2023 rookie level here, his career has taken quite the downturn. This is textbook 2 thumbs down for me. Just a disaster. A big disaster. We're talking Cat5 Hurricane, F5 Tornado, 9.0 on the Richter scale. Disaster. I said Chris Bubich was the pick I was most sure about, and the only source of disappointment with his season is that he was unable to finish it. Still, after never quite establishing himself as a good starter in the early stages of his career, he returned from Tommy John last year, and became one of the best relievers in the second half. Joining the rotation again in 2025, he was a first-time all-star, and pitched to a 2.55 ERA in 20 starts. A shoulder injury shortened his season, but he was just so darn good, as his new slider-centric approach complimented his changeup beautifully. I think this is 2 thumbs up. You'll see later on that the injury stuff can cut both ways, but I'm not gonna let it prevent a great pick from being recognized as such. Great job, Chris Bubich. Speaking of injuries, Max Scherzer, who was only to toss 43 innings in 2024, only pitched 85 in 2025. He left his first start of the season early with a thumb injury that sidelined him for nearly 3 months of big league action. Upon return, he appeared to find his form, pitching to a 3.47 ERA in his next 10 outings, but ultimately bringing that season ERA above 5 with a poor stretch to end the season. Not exactly what the Blue Jays had in mind when Scherzer signed with them on a 1-year $15 million deal. This was an interesting pick, because on one hand, he's a future Hall of Famer, and on the other, it contradicts the aging curve, but it was a tough luck age 40 season for Mad Max. And thus, will be graded accordingly. Going 2 thumbs down here. He fell short of both the volume and production I and others were anticipating. Try not to get too excited, but it's about to get extremely nuanced with my annual reliever pick in Robert Garcia. He joined the Rangers via trade over the offseason, and although he dropped his ERA from 4.22 with Washington to 2.95 with Texas, that was the result of FIP regression to the mean. His strikeout rate, walk rate, and home run rate were actually all worse compared to last year. He did eventually win the closing spot as predicted, collecting his first 9 career saves, but lost it after back to back blown saves in early August. Despite the solid ERA, his WPA was actually negative, and that's a stat I care about when it comes to relievers. This is actually a neutral grade. A sub 3 ERA is good, but Robert Garcia couldn't get it done when it mattered most. So that's a minus 1 aggregate for the 5 pitchers I liked. Now it's on to the 5 hitters I liked for 2025. Holy moly Joe Adele, how about it? After 5 seasons of negative 1.2 war, how about plus 1.2? After 5 seasons of 79 OPS+, how about 111? After 38 homers in 308 games, how about 37 in 152? That's really the headline here. Joe Adele, an extremely hyped prospect, was dreadful from 2020 to 2024, but he finally showed us something in 2025. It wasn't perfect by any means, the on base was below 300, the defense and center was poor, but compared to everything he had done in his career up to this year, this is a pick I can be proud of. Two thumbs up for Joe Adele, and two thumbs up for me. Let's keep the good times rolling. Because next up is Jonathan Aranda, and he was great too. Among big leaguers with at least 400 played appearances, he was 2nd in batting average and 6th in on base percentage. After 3 seasons with brief appearances in the bigs, a few weeks here, a few weeks there, he established himself as an everyday player and made the AL All-Star team. A fractured left wrist took away 2 months of his season, but this is still a large enough sample of success to make this a fairly easy pick to grade. And that grade is plus 2. Can I get some plus 2s in the chat? A breakout season for Jonathan Aranda of the Rays. Now here's a tough pick to grade. Nick Gonzalez homered on opening day. That's good. But he hobbled around the bases on a then fractured ankle. That's bad. He returned to the team in June and just didn't have it the rest of the way. I was hoping for a power breakthrough, but he hit his last homer on July 28th before closing the season on a 52-game homer list streak. The Pirates, it seems, still haven't drafted and developed an above-average hitter. I guess it's minus 2. He had a 661 OPS after all. I just want to know how this season would have gone if he didn't immediately break his ankle hitting a home run. Was Jung-Hoo I think so. His war was above 2. His OPS plus was above 100. He was an above-average player to follow up his short, disappointing big league debut in 2024. That said, his performance was essentially right in line with preseason projections. And these grades are handed out according to performance above or below expectations. Expectations sourced from fans, projection systems, fantasy experts, Vegas odds, and most important of all, my own gut feeling. He's the most hyped Korean position player of a generation, and on a 7-figure deal after all, the expectations aren't exactly low. As for my conclusion, this is a neutral grade. That's not a bad thing. He met expectations, I just don't think he exceeded them. We can continue the expectations conversation with Augustin Ramirez, who wasn't a consensus top 100 prospect coming into this season. He certainly exceeded expectations in terms of big league playing time, appearing in 136 games, and as a result, clubbed 21 homers for the Marlins, far higher than his projected total of 8, and second among MLB rookies behind Nick Kurtz. Sure, he was technically a below-average hitter by OPS plus, though closer to average for a catcher. And sure, his defense at catcher was so bad that he graded out as replacement level, but it's called 5 hitters I like after all. And I think this is a plus 1. One thumbs up. He was in the running for rookie of the year early on. A flawed, but ultimately talented player. The hitter picks are done. They gave us an aggregate of plus 3. Very solid performance in this category, but now it's time to shift this thing into reverse. Here are the 5 players I disliked coming into 2025, meaning if they had bad seasons, I get good grades. Code Foolish on SeatGeek will get you $20 off your first order. SeatGeek is a search engine of sorts for tickets to all sorts of events. Obviously, it's playoff time, so if you want to go see some playoff baseball in action, this is the place to do it. But not just that. You like your football. You like your upcoming basketball. You like your concerts. You like your stand-up comedy. Whatever live event it is, you can probably find tickets on SeatGeek and save $20 with Code Foolish at checkout. And we'll start with a hitter I disliked. Mark Vientos broke out for the Mets in 2024 with an excellent regular season and even better postseason, but the whiffs and plate discipline suffered in the second half, so I faded him this year. At the All-Star break, he had a 640 OPS. He was actually making more contact, but at the expense of his power. A Monster August brought him back into play, but he found himself out of the lineup for two out of the three Mets do-or-die final regular season games. When a guy drops from a 134 OPS plus to a 97, or from 3 war to about replacement level between his age 24 and 25 seasons, I think that's two thumbs up. But I wouldn't be surprised if he gets his career back on track in the long term. Jose Altuve is an interesting one. His batting average fell 30 points, his OPS plus dropped from 124 to 112, but the important context here is that he's aging. He turned 35 in May. And by going against Altuve, putting him as a player I disliked rather than ranking him in the Foolish 50, I was predicting ungraceful decline, and instead he gave us graceful decline. Was he worse than he was the previous year? Sure. Was he way worse? Nope. At least not with the bat. Where he fits defensively is a little bit messier. This is one thumbs down. I was wrong. But I was just regular wrong. Not insanely wrong. Here's where I went insanely wrong. Babip's strand rate and homerun-to-fly ball rate told me that Hunter Green got lucky in 2024, but I really should have just trusted the pitch data that said this guy is a monster because he was a monster. A midseason groin strain may have interrupted his Cy Young candidacy, but he was so electric in his 19 starts that there's really only one conclusion to reach here. And that's that I deserve two thumbs down for this one. It was so bad that even the Red's Twitter account was dunking on me by early April. There's just no recovering from that. I'm no GM, but when you sign a guy to a one-year $21 million deal, you generally don't want to DFA him before the season ends, and that's exactly what the Red Sox did to Walker Bueller, who had an ERA well over 5 and a FIP nearing 6 for Boston, failing to capitalize on the promise of his strong World Series performance a year ago with the Dodgers. I basically just said, this guy doesn't have the stuff anymore, and he didn't. Andrew Bailey did not have the answers. This is plus two. Two thumbs up. A couple decent outings with the Phillies can't salvage it. You know what? Kate Smith was a gutsy pick. It was a wrong pick, but it took chutzpah, because he had the best FIP in MLB as a rookie in 2024. So, what happened in 2025? Well, his ERA went up a run, but that FIP was still sub 2. He still struck out 35% of batters faced. And, to twist the knife even further, he took over the closer role after Emmanuel Classé's gambling investigation began. I thought the Guardians bullpen was overtaxed last year, yet Kate Smith just kept on cruising. You could argue minus one because of high expectations, but let's be real, it's minus two. Kate Smith has firmly cemented himself as one of the top relievers in the league. Before the final tally, a new segment, the never-wrong, sometimes early award for a player who was picked last year and didn't make it happen, but balled out this year. And this year, it's Mikel Garcia, the all-star third baseman for the Royals. When I picked him for 2024, he had a 614 OPS. This year, he had an 800 OPS, which combined with his glove and base running, produced a 5-war season. So, there you go. I wasn't wrong about Mikel Garcia. I was just early. Our final tally is minus one from the pitchers I liked, plus three from the hitters I liked, and minus one from the players I disliked. That is an aggregate score of plus one. That means I did worse than last year's picks. I had some hits, but when I missed, I tended to miss big. Thank you for watching. Hey, let's do this again next spring, alright? Just me and you. Just me and you, pal. Just me and you.