2025 American League midseason grades: Tigers, surging Astros earn ‘A,’ why the Yankees don’t get top marks

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The All-Star break is a little more than two weeks away but the actual midpoint of the season is coming up soon. All 30 teams either have already played their 81st game or will do so in the coming days. With the halfway mark upon us, it’s time to hand out some team grades based on what’s unfolded thus far.

This is no way predictive and the grades assigned aren’t meant to suggest that a given team will continue playing as they have thus far. Broadly speaking, these grades reflect performance to date in the context of preseason expectations. Exceed expectations, and you’ll get high marks. Fall well short of them, and you’ll get branded with a D or F. You know how this works. 

With the necessary throat-clearing out of the way, here now are our midseason grades for the American League.

Boy that 1-20 stretch from May 14 to June 4 really took the starch out of their season, eh? The A’s have largely played .500 baseball outside that wretched 21-game run, but those 21 games count, and don’t-call-us-Oakland is again in the AL West cellar. They’re not even selling out Sutter Health Park, which seats a little more than 10,000 (plus room for more on the lawn). Average attendance is about 9,700 a game. The A’s have some good and fun players. Lawrence Butler, Brent Rooker, Tyler Soderstrom, and Jacob Wilson is a nice offensive core. The pitching has been so bad though, particularly in Sacramento. The ball is flying in that Triple-A park.

Have the Orioles played better since firing manager Brandon Hyde on May 17? Yes. Are they still very far short of preseason expectations? Also yes. We needn’t overthink this. The O’s, even with their play improving in recent weeks, have been arguably the most disappointing team in baseball this season. Expected to be among the World Series favorites, they’re instead facing an uphill climb just to get the third wild-card spot. Everyone deserves blame. The pitching, the offense, the front office, ownership. This season is an organizational failure top to bottom.

The Red Sox have played their best baseball of the season over the last three weeks and they’re just now putting themselves on solid footing in the wild-card race. This team was expected to contend for the AL East title, and it still might, but the first half of 2025 has looked a lot like the last few years. Shaky rotation, performing below expectations, and a split with a star player that felt entirely unnecessary. I suspect the Red Sox will have a much better second half of the season. The first half though, it was pretty mediocre, and the Rafael Devers trade was a little extra salt in the wound.

Oh, they’re terrible, but they’re a regular bad team this year rather than historically awful, which qualifies as exceeding expectations. You can see the makings of the next relevant White Sox team beginning to take shape. Miguel Vargas is breaking out, Shane Smith has emerged as a legitimate big-league starter, and youngsters like Chase Meidroth and Kyle Teel (both part of the Garrett Crochet trade) look like keepers. We’re grading against expectations here and there was some thought this year’s White Sox would be worse than last year’s 121-loss squad, but that isn’t the case. Better than expected on the field plus young players establishing themselves is “B” material for me.

Your Guardians grade will depend on how you viewed them coming into the season. Did you expect a repeat of last year’s 92-win showing? Or did you consider them more of an 84-win roster propped up by one of the best bullpens ever? I fell into the latter camp. Good team with a superstar (José Ramírez) and quality pitching, but not a truly great team. They’ve hovered around .500 all year and every hot streak is followed by a slump that brings them back to Earth. I think a “C” is fair for their season to date. The Guardians are capable of making this grade look foolish in the second half.

The Tigers have been the American League’s best team since Opening Day. They’re one of the highest-scoring teams in the league, they’re among the best at preventing runs, and there are no glaring weaknesses on the roster. Jackson Jobe was just lost to Tommy John surgery and Jack Flaherty has an ERA near 6 since May 1, so the Tigers would be wise to upgrade their rotation at the trade deadline, but that’s a topic for another time. To date, the Tigers have been the best team in the league. Easy “A” here.

Ho hum, the Astros are once again pacing the AL West while the rest of the American League does the Jesse Pinkman “they can’t keep getting away with this!” meme. The Astros are atop the division even though Yordan Alvarez has not played since May 2 because of a hand injury, Jose Altuve did not get going at the plate until mid-May, and the rotation behind Hunter Brown and Framber Valdez is a bit dicey. The bullpen, particularly Josh Hader, has been electric. They’re making every lead stand up. The Astros went from 106 wins in 2022 to 90 wins in 2023 to 88 wins in 2024, and there was some thought this would be the year it all came crashing down, but nope. They are again leading the division.

All things considered, the Royals have done good work keeping themselves in the race despite fielding the lowest scoring offense in the league. Even the great Bobby Witt Jr. has been south of expectations. He’s been more All-Star level than MVP level. The Royals have hung around .500 all year and they’ve done it in perhaps the most aggravating way possible for their fan base. They’re either molten hot or ice cold. The streakiest team in the league so far. After last year, the hope was the Royals would take another step forward and solidify themselves as a contender. They’ve struggled to do that so far.

Give them credit. The Angels hardly earned the benefit of the doubt the last few years and it was easy to write them off even before this season began, but they’ve stayed around .500 and are at least relevant in the wild-card race at the midway point. They’re second in the league in home runs, Yusei Kikuchi and José Soriano are a solid 1-2 rotation punch, and the bullpen has been lights-out since about the middle of May. The Angels are better than expected, which in their case means .500-ish rather than one of the league’s worst teams.

It hasn’t been pretty outside of last month’s 13-game winning streak, even though Byron Buxton has looked like the best player in baseball the last few weeks. The 13-game winning streak counts though. Plenty of postseason teams get there because one extended hot streak kept them in the game. The Twins are hanging around the wild-card race and are positioned to make a run in the second half, albeit without ace Pablo López. He’ll be sidelined a while longer with a teres major strain. It feels like the Twins should be better than they are. I think this is a textbook “C” team halfway through the season.

Other than that weeklong stretch where they forgot how to score, the Yankees have been the best American League team other than the Tigers this year. Halfway through the season, they’ve batted close to 1.000 on their Plan B moves after Juan Soto left (Cody Bellinger, Max Fried, Paul Goldschmidt, etc.), and they continue to pace the AL East despite Gerrit Cole and reigning Rookie of the Year Luis Gil throwing a combined zero pitches due to injury. The Yankees left a few too many wins on the table in April because the bullpen was unreliable, otherwise they’d be an “A.”

The Mariners are the baseball equivalent of Lucy holding the football. Just when you think they’re putting it together, they pull it away. They were 29-21 and 3 ½ games up in the AL West on May 23, but they’ve since crashed back to around .500 and have seen the Astros zoom by them in the division. Cal Raleigh is having an MVP-caliber season that very well might go down as the best power-hitting season by a catcher ever, but he doesn’t have enough help offensively, and the rotation injuries have taken a toll.

Since May 1, the Rays have been one of the most dominant teams in the sport both offensively and on the mound. Elite offense and elite run prevention have them firmly in a wild-card spot and breathing down the Yankees’ neck in the AL East. The schedule has been extremely favorable for the Rays and will be a thing to watch in the second half. Tampa has played 50 of their 80 games at home, so 51 of their final 82 games will be on the road. That’s nearly two-thirds of their remaining schedule. We’re not looking ahead here though. Thanks to their dominance since May 1, the Rays are near the top of the league standings. A firm “A,” this is.

There was some thought the Rangers were the best team in the watered-down American League coming into 2025. That has not been the case. The run prevention has been elite and top to bottom the pitching staff has been awesome, but they’re also one of the lowest-scoring teams in the league. They’re the bizarro Rangers. For the last 30 years or so this franchise was offense-first and only occasionally did they cobble together a solid pitching staff. This year, they can keep runs off the board but can’t score. Texas has been a .500-ish team most of the season, so a “C” it is. Below expectations but not awful.

Tough team to grade. If you’d have told me before the season that Andrés Giménez and Anthony Santander would be this bad offensively, I would have assumed the Blue Jays were on another 74-win pace. Instead, they’ve been among the league’s best teams over the last month or so, and played their way into a wild-card spot and back in the division race. They’re better than I think even their fans expected halfway through the season.

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