The 2025 Yankees Will Win _ Games! (Answer Below…)

Today is a good day.

The Yankees open the 2025 season against the Milwaukee Brewers (nee Seattle Pilots) at 3:05pm in the Bronx, to embark on the 162-game trek with which we’ll certainly have a six-month love/hate relationship. Coming off an amazing 2024 which ended in soul crushing fashion, and after what seemed to be an extremely long winter, optimism always wins the day on Opening Day.

That said, I’m going to dampen your spirits: The 2025 season is not going to be good for the New York Yankees.

For starters – and again, many (most?) baseball fans vastly underrate this – randomness is a very large factor in a team’s success, and in 2024, the randomness gods were on the side of the Yankees. The starting pitching staff consistently yielded hard, airborne contact, and due to a combination of comical good fortune* and very good team defense**, the Yanks still finished in the top ten in run prevention.

(*Yankees starters yielded the highest fly ball rate in MLB, with the 4^th highest average exit velocity allowed, and 9^th highest hard-hit percentage – a low home run to fly ball rate and a low BABIP (i.e., good luck) is what minimized damage, not good pitching.

**Despite how the season ended, the Yankees were a very good defensive team last season. They posted the third best defensive runs above average in MLB, and despite the lasers hit off the starting pitchers, were still better than average at turning batted balls into outs.

Also in 2024, against the five best teams in MLB at putting the ball in play, the Yankees went 26 – 9.)

My prediction is that the Yankees starters (what’s left of them) don’t pitch with four leaf clovers in their back pockets this season, which by itself should knock three games off their 94-win total from last season.

Offensively in 2024, the team got career best seasons from two future Hall of Famers and a good year from Giancarlo Stanton. One of those future Hall of Famers is gone forever and Stanton is gone indefinitely.

Now let’s take a look at the significant roster changes, overall: Essentially, the team swapped out (with MBP’s net WAR predictions) …

Juan Soto for Cody Bellinger. That’s a -4 WAR net.
Clay Holmes for Devin Williams. That’s plus .5 WAR net.
Anthony Rizzo for Paul Goldschmidt. Plus 1.5 WAR net.
Alex Verdugo for Jasson Dominguez. Plus 1 WAR net.
Nestor Cortes for Max Fried. Plus 1.5 WAR net.
Gleyber Torres for Oswaldo Cabrera. Minus 3 WAR net.

Grand total (feel free to check my math): Minus 2.5 WAR total. Add that to the three games mentioned above and we’re five and a half wins lower than 2024’s total.

Now let’s talk about Gerrit Cole, Giancarlo Stanton and Clarke Schmidt being gone for the entire season, a long time, and who knows respectively – that’s probably 7.5 WAR that their replacements likely won’t produce half of, so let’s say minus four WAR there.

Rounding down, that brings the 2025 projected total to 84 wins, which is MBP’s official prediction for the team. And yes, we both know that means there will be no postseason in the Bronx in 2025.

It’s also likely that 84 wins from a team constructed without a third baseman, a bullpen filled with no names and injury prone arms, and a rotation with little depth, may be overachieving – and Aaron Boone, despite a long track record of overachieving, will be blamed.

Regardless, Opening Day is a great day. It’s only one of 162, but it’s the beginning of six months of better weather – and baseball.

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments or yell at me on BlueSky. (Reminder: BlueSky is the only social media MBP does – if you’re on other platforms, feel free to share this!)

What I’m reading: “Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend”.

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