‘They didn’t take no for an answer’: Inside the return of EA Sports College Football
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Michael Rothstein, ESPN Staff Writer
ORLANDO, Fla. — Daryl Holt shopped at a Books-A-Million near Auburn, Alabama, around Thanksgiving in 2019 when his clothes caught the attention of the person standing behind the counter. The EA Sports logo Holt wore led to the question he always received when wearing his company’s gear publicly.
When is the college football video game coming back?
Holt smiled. It had always been a desire to bring back the college football video game, but at that moment Holt knew something no one else outside the EA Sports offices in Central Florida did. When he returned from his trip, he had another conversation ready to potentially solve concerns and bring back one of the most resonant titles in the company’s catalog.
“I think I even said, ‘I don’t know, but maybe sooner than you think,'” Holt said. “And it kind of gave me that little extra push that I know that there were people that wanted this game to come back as much as I did, more so than I did.”
Holt, now the senior vice president and group general manager of EA Sports, understood the concerns and questions his bosses might have when he pitched the potential return of EA Sports College Football in December 2019. He was ready for all of them when he stepped into a half-hour meeting with EA Sports president Cam Weber’s offices at the company’s former facility in Maitland, Florida.
Holt reframed how the company looked at the college football game — one which EA Sports stopped making in 2013 in part due to a lawsuit from former UCLA basketball player Ed O’Bannon surrounding name, image and likeness rights. NIL was still an unknown. So were logistics of reviving a franchise dormant for, at that point, more than six years. At one point during the meeting — Holt wouldn’t say how other than it was a creative solution the company ended up not needing — Holt knew he had done it. Unofficially, EA was going to bring back college football.
It would be over a year, in February 2021, before EA Sports publicly announced the eventual return of the game. By then, EA Sports started assembling — and in some cases reuniting — the development staff. It took another three years to bring the game to market this upcoming July 19.
What happened between? Building a game from scratch, inventing technologies, reining in overambition and creating a foundational game for a returned year-to-year franchise. They collected assets from all 134 schools, packing in as much as they could. They navigated having — and paying — actual college football players in the game thanks to current NIL rules. They added components of NIL in the game along with the transfer portal.
If they needed a reminder of their mission, they didn’t need to look far. On the wall of the college football development cluster at the EA Sports offices is a long banner with former Michigan quarterback Denard Robinson and the EA Sports NCAA Football 14 cover. It’s the last time the game was produced. They walk by it every day.
It led to a motivational mantra which kept focus and the need for authenticity in their aims.
“Every school is somebody’s favorite school,” Holt said. “Became kind of a rallying cry for us as a dev team.”
TICKET STUBS LINE the back of Ben Haumiller’s office on the third floor of EA Sports’ Orlando headquarters. There’s Florida State gear everywhere, too. Years ago, Haumiller was a college student at Florida State. He played in EA Sports’ competition to find the best college football video game player in America.
He lost in the tournament in 1999, but it led to a job as a quality verification tester with the company and eventually as a designer and producer on the old version of NCAA Football. The game went away after the O’Bannon lawsuit, and Haumiller transferred to different areas of the company. Like many of his colleagues, Haumiller hoped for College Football’s return.
EA Sports licensed a small number of schools as part of a college storyline in single-player mode for Madden ’18 and Madden ’20. Haumiller said putting college teams into the company’s popular NFL franchise was a way to get universities comfortable with EA Sports again.
Then Holt made his pitch. The game was greenlit and hiring began.
“The opportunity came to come back on the development side,” Haumiller said. “So I made that jump and came back to help get us on solid footing and where we go on this rebirth.”
It was the game Haumiller, now the principal game designer for College Football, always wanted to work on.
Rob Jones, the senior production director of College Football, was Holt’s first hire. A devout Michigan fan with memorabilia all over his office, Jones returned to EA in 2020 from 2K Sports, where he worked as a producer on the NBA 2K series for most of the 2000s and 2010s and helped launch the company’s College Hoops series as the game’s first producer. Together, he and Holt started building the college football team.
Holt said it was the easiest team he’s built in his time at EA Sports because there were existing employees across the company and new hires who wanted to bring back college football. There was reverence for the game inside and outside the building. The dedication and passion were clear to Holt early on. Every conversation of the game became a debate of what might work best.
The passion for colleges is clear throughout the college football cubicles, where almost all have some marker of college football fandom.
With the team largely built, they needed to figure out how to make a game centered around authenticity. That meant everything: stadiums, rosters, mascots and crowds.
The team created a pageantry database, which became a rolling list of traditions and idiosyncrasies for all 134 FBS programs. They asked schools for help, added what they knew from their own college football fandoms and even scoured fan forums to find things they may have missed — or to learn that a school no longer did tradition X or hand signal Y.
Production director Christian McLeod said every school had to have something. Not every tradition or chant or hand signal ended up in this year’s game, but they wanted something for everyone.
“We want to make sure that, again, everybody’s team is somebody’s favorite,” McLeod said. “Texas and Texas State need to feel the same when you’re playing as them if you’re a fan of that school.”
Building this took time. In all, EA Sports received tens of thousands of assets from schools in addition to their own work. They asked for and compiled touchdown celebrations for each team and stadium, how players celebrate after turnovers, how teams run out of tunnels, crowd hand signals, chants on key downs and details for stadiums, mascots, cheerleaders and uniforms.
Once received and researched, they had to figure out how to build them.
THERE WERE SOME helpful things for the team at the start. Some stadiums — including Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta for the SEC championship and USC’s home field, the Los Angeles Coliseum, from when the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams played games there — could be taken from Madden and repainted for whatever uses necessary.
But the majority of the almost 150 stadiums in the game had to be built from scratch. Even though the Frostbite engine is the same as Madden, what the college football team needed to do was much different — one of the many reasons EA Sports insists it won’t look or feel the same as the Madden series.
At one point, developers went to Holt and said they weren’t sure if they could get every stadium done in an authentic manner. It was a lot of space and capability. Both Holt and the development team knew the answer — 50 wasn’t going to cut it. They needed all 134.
As the team started construction, they began to look at innovative ways to solve problems and tech they could borrow from other EA games or create themselves. McLeod said they realized they needed a new lighting system in the game to create the scale they needed — Global Illumination Based on Surfels, or what they commonly call GIBS. GIBS is a dynamic, real-time lighting system that helps create different atmospheres in the stadium for a noon game, a 3:30 game or a night game, including how light might refract off helmets.
With GIBS in place, the team created a Stadium Toolkit, which McLeod said allowed designers and developers to almost go brick by brick, section by section to recreate stadiums to make sure the color schemes were correct down to the individual railings, tunnels and walls. It almost, McLeod said, became like a virtual Lego set putting it all together.
While there were some pieces from NCAA Football 14 they could use, those stadiums and mascots were built on a different engine for a different console. Not much would translate, so they had to start from the beginning.
Building an empty stadium took about a week depending on the venue, with Syracuse’s JMA Wireless Dome among the trickiest because it was indoors and cavernous, so lighting had to be set up a bit differently than other schools. McLeod called it “the perfect storm of stadiums.”
Understanding the crowd’s importance to college football, McLeod said he knew they had to “make sure that crowd looks amazing.” Are the bands in the right place? The visitor sections? The patterns some schools have within their crowds — think Tennessee’s Checkerboard and Penn State’s White Out games. The design team entered the empty virtual stadium and tagged where everything would be, a process taking multiple weeks.
There were some concessions needed to make sure the game still performed well, which is where the JMA Wireless Dome and its unique architecture helped. As the team tested everything from equipment pieces to plays, they put it in the Dome to check for performance and make sure the frame rates didn’t slow down.
There were small things in stadiums which held import, too. For McLeod, a diehard Michigan State fan, it came from Arkansas State, where there is a waterfall in the stadium and when the Red Wolves score a touchdown, fountains go off.
“That was one of those things that was a stretch goal for us to get in,” McLeod said. “And to see it actually manifest itself in the product. I’m so proud of the team to see that.”
MASCOTS — NOT ALL will make this year’s game — were another struggle point. One of the hardest things for the development team to create were four-legged friends like Texas’ Bevo (a longhorn steer) or Colorado’s Ralphie (a buffalo).
They had to develop new animation rigs different from those for players, coaches or fans because of four legs versus two.
McLeod said they created four different rigs for dogs, one for cows and one for Ralphie. Bevo was one of the first the team built because it proved they could do it.
Ralphie took the longest, about a month from start to finish, McLeod said.
“It’s the actual animation,” McLeod said. “It’s to make sure that Ralphie runs fluidly. We call them quadrupeds, right? A human on two legs has a totally different mocap rig or animation rig than an animal on four.”
Then there’s leg spans and strides and weight within the movement. McLeod said they knew that when they started. Like the stadiums, McLeod said shipping a game without Ralphie and Bevo “was not acceptable to us.”
While part of the team built out stadiums and mascots, another focused on game play with the same intent as everyone else — College Football would not look or play like Madden.
So playbooks matter. Game speed matters. Jones said they had to push the boundaries of what was possible. They had to have 134 specific playbooks, received help from their access to Pro Football Focus and had conversations with those within the game to help understand what styles teams run.
There were base plays and concepts they could use, but the key was playbook individuality. They wanted players to feel like they were playing as Tennessee or Michigan.
THE MOST SURPRISING thing came not from something they created or a hurdle they faced, but rather from what happened after they announced the name, image and likeness plan for athletes. Any athlete opting into the game who ends up being used in one of the 85 roster spots per team will receive a free copy of EA Sports College Football along with $600 with the option of remaining in the game yearly as long as the player has eligibility. There are also separate NIL deals made with athletes who could serve as ambassadors or cover athletes like Michigan’s Donovan Edwards, Colorado’s Travis Hunter and Texas’ Quinn Ewers.
I attended the cover shoot for EA Sports NCAA Football 25 at the Cotton Bowl in March. Here are @TravisHunterJr, @QuinnEwers and @DEdwards__ in the stadium tunnel during the shoot. pic.twitter.com/dlRGlTV9vP
— Adam Rittenberg (@ESPNRittenberg) May 16, 2024
EA Sports thought they’d get 7,000 or 8,000 players the first week. Eight days in, 10,000 players had agreed to be in the game. At present, more than 13,000 players have opted in.
“We were pleasantly surprised,” Jones said. “By the enthusiasm with which people were coming in.”
Not all of them will end up making it into the game due to the 85-person roster limit, but it’s still a large undertaking.
EA staffers created a system they call “Generic Plus,” developed by the art department. It takes about two to three hours to construct a player’s face in the game. EA does this by taking a reference photo of a player — think a passport photo or team headshot — and machine learning then creates an image of what the player looks like.
EA staffers then go in and make tweaks on what the machine missed or didn’t accurately portray, from hair to eyebrows to eyes, which could take 10 to 15 minutes. McLeod said if animators had to do the entire process, it might take a day per player, which was not an option.
“It was just a brand new way,” McLeod said.
Holt said the player raters for Madden have assisted with the ratings for college football players, but declined to go into specific detail.
When a player is in the game, there will be multiple uniform options. Each team will have at least a home and away jersey and, if an alternate jersey exists, at least one alternate. Some schools will have more than that and McLeod said after launch, they could end up adding more jersey options. Like everything else, uniform specifications came from a combination of school information and the research of EA’s staff.
WHILE THE GAME was being created on-site, EA Sports had to get announcer tracks recorded, featuring multiple broadcast teams including one led by ESPN’S Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit. Fowler said on Instagram he taped more than 115 hours of commentary over a two-year process.
Some of the sessions were done separately. Some were done together with the broadcast crews. Almost all had someone from EA on Zoom helping the process. Fowler said on Instagram he did calls of everything from touchdowns for every team — which took an hour to go through every team in the game — to a team punting on second down.
Jones said there was a baseline of calls they needed from both crews and a list of situations they needed. Both sets of commentary teams had to cover the entire game.
“It was a lot of writing scripts, but then eventually what starts happening is in order to get the best performance out of them, you have to let ’em ad-lib,” Jones said. “You kind of need to let them know what the situation is so that you can actually get the right amount of back-and-forth between them.”
As they maneuvered through the two-year process, the commentary became more comfortable and what you’d typically see from the crews during real games. The toughest thing, Jones said, was working around the broadcaster’s commitments.
In all, there are hundreds of hours of sound in the game. Different sounds will be triggered by events, Jones said, put in place by one of his team’s software engineers, Rick Mancuso, to make it all flow seamlessly. Mancuso was also in charge of adding the small sounds for schools in the game, like a “Let’s Go Blue” chant at Michigan.
THERE IS CLEAR excitement throughout the EA Sports College Football team. You hear it in the way they talk about the game and how they all stress the same thing: Authenticity is the foundation.
This isn’t a one-off. What they build for this year they’ll be able to add to and tweak in iterations to come.
They know they couldn’t get everything they wanted in this version. A combination of time and capacity wouldn’t allow it. There’s already a list — some from the pageantry database, some from ideas they couldn’t quite reach — of what they’d like to add in next year’s game.
They also recognize this: Four years after Holt went into Weber’s office and three years after announcing the game, college football is back. And here to stay.
“I would definitely put it, in terms of my 20 years with EA Sports, as one of those big achievement moments,” Holt said. “In terms of saying how do we not let scale or let a problem deter, derail or stop us.
“That’s the key for this team is they didn’t take no for an answer.”
Hard-throwing rookie Jacob Misiorowski is a National League All-Star replacement, giving the Milwaukee Brewers right-hander a chance to break Paul Skenes‘ record for the fewest big league appearances before playing in the Midsummer Classic.
Misiorowski was named Friday night to replace Chicago Cubs lefty Matthew Boyd, who will be unavailable for the All-Star Game on Tuesday night in Atlanta because he is scheduled to start Saturday at the New York Yankees.
The 23-year-old Misiorowski has made just five starts for the Brewers, going 4-1 with a 2.81 ERA while averaging 99.3 mph on his fastball, with 89 pitches that have reached 100 mph.
If he pitches at Truist Park, Misiorowski will make it consecutive years for a player to set the mark for fewest big league games before an All-Star showing.
Skenes, the Pittsburgh Pirates right-hander getting ready for his second All-Star appearance, had made 11 starts in the majors when he was chosen as the NL starter for last year’s All-Star Game at Texas. He pitched a scoreless inning.
“I’m speechless,” said a teary-eyed Misiorowski, who said he was given the news a few minutes before the Brewers’ 8-3 victory over Washington. “It’s awesome. It’s very unexpected and it’s an honor.”
Misiorowski is the 30th first-time All-Star and 16th replacement this year. There are now 80 total All-Stars.
“He’s impressive. He’s got some of the best stuff in the game right now, even though he’s a young pitcher,” said Yankees slugger Aaron Judge, who is a starting AL outfielder for his seventh All-Star nod. “He’s going to be a special pitcher in this game for a long time so I think he deserved it and it’s going be pretty cool for him and his family.”
Carlos Rodón, Carlos Estévez and Casey Mize were named replacement pitchers on the AL roster.
The New York Yankees‘ Rodón, an All-Star for the third time in five seasons, will replace teammate Max Fried for Tuesday’s game in Atlanta. Fried will be unavailable because he is scheduled to start Saturday against the Chicago Cubs.
In his final start before the All-Star game, Rodón allowed four hits and struck out eight in eight innings in an 11-0 victory over the Cubs.
“This one’s a little special for me,” said Rodón, an All-Star in 2021 and ’22 who was 3-8 in his first season with the Yankees two years ago before rebounding. “I wasn’t good when I first got here, and I just wanted to prove that I wasn’t to going to give up and just put my best foot forward and try to win as many games as I can.”
The Kansas City Royals‘ Estévez replaces Texas’ Jacob deGrom, who is scheduled to start at Houston on Saturday night. Estévez was a 2023 All-Star when he was with the Los Angeles Angels.
Mize takes the spot held by Boston‘s Garrett Crochet, who is scheduled to start Saturday against Tampa Bay. Mize gives the Tigers six All-Stars, most of any team and tied for the franchise record.
Royals third baseman Maikel Garcia will replace Tampa Bay‘s Brandon Lowe, who went on the injured list with left oblique tightness. The additions of Estévez and Garcia give the Royals four All-Stars, matching their 2024 total.
The Seattle Mariners announced center fielder Julio Rodríguez will not participate, and he was replaced by teammate Randy Arozarena. Rodríguez had been voted onto the AL roster via the players’ ballot. The Mariners, who have five All-Stars, said Rodríguez will use the break to “recuperate, rest and prepare for the second half.”
Arozarena is an All-Star for the second time. He started in left field for the AL two years ago, when he was with Tampa Bay. Arozarena was the runner-up to Vladimir Guerrero Jr. in the 2023 Home Run Derby.
Rays right-hander Drew Rasmussen, a first-time All-Star, is replacing Angels left-hander Yusei Kikuchi, who is scheduled to start Saturday night at Arizona. Rasmussen is 7-5 with a 2.82 ERA in 18 starts.
San Diego added a third NL All-Star reliever in lefty Adrián Morejón, who replaces Philadelphia starter Zack Wheeler. The Phillies’ right-hander is scheduled to start at San Diego on Saturday night. Morejón entered the weekend with a 1.71 ERA in 45 appearances.
DETROIT — Cal Raleigh hit his 37th and 38th home runs in Seattle‘s 12-3 victory over Detroit on Friday night to move within one of Barry Bonds’ 2001 major league record for homers before the All-Star break.
Raleigh hit a solo homer off former teammate Tyler Holton in the eighth to tie the American League record of 37 before the All-Star break set by Reggie Jackson in 1969 and matched by Chris Davis in 2013.
“[Holton] and I are really good friends, and I’ve caught a lot of his pitches,” said Raleigh, who was in the lineup as the designated hitter instead of at catcher. “I don’t think that helped much, but I’m sure he’s not very happy with me.”
Raleigh hit a grand slam off Brant Hurter in the ninth.
“I didn’t even know it was a record until just now,” Raleigh said. “I don’t have words for it, I guess. I’m just very grateful and thankful.”
It was Raleigh’s eighth multihomer game this season, tying Jackson (also in 1969) for the most such games before the All-Star break in MLB history, according to ESPN Research. He also tied Ken Griffey Jr. for the most multihomer games in Mariners franchise history.
Seattle has two games left in Detroit before the break.
“Cal Raleigh … this is just unbelievable,” Mariners manager Dan Wilson said. “He’s already set the AL record and now he’s only one short of Barry. There are two games, so who knows?”
Raleigh hit 10 homers in March and April, 12 in May, 11 in June and has five in July.
“This is a very boring comment, but baseball is all about consistency,” Wilson said. “This hasn’t been one hot streak, he’s doing this month after month. That says everything.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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David Schoenfield
We’re past due to hand out some midseason grades, so let’s hand out some midseason grades.
As we pass the 90-game mark in the 2025 MLB season, my team of the first half isn’t the well-rounded Detroit Tigers, who do get our highest grade for owning MLB’s best record, or the explosive Chicago Cubs or Shohei Ohtani‘s Los Angeles Dodgers, but a team most baseball fans love to hate: the Houston Astros. They lost their two best players from last season and their best hitter has been injured — and they’re playing their best baseball since they won the 2022 World Series.
Let’s get to the grades. As always, we’re grading off preseason expectations, factoring in win-loss record and quality of performance, while looking at other positive performances and injuries.
Jump to a team:
AL East: BAL | BOS | NYY | TB | TOR
AL Central: CHW | CLE | DET | KC | MIN
AL West: ATH | HOU | LAA | SEA | TEX
NL East: ATL | MIA | NYM | PHI | WSH
NL Central: CHC | CIN | MIL | PIT | STL
NL West: ARI | COL | LAD | SD | SF
Tarik Skubal is obviously the headline act, but the Tigers are winning with impressive depth across the entire roster.
Javier Baez is putting together a remarkable comeback season after a couple of abysmal years and will become the first player to start an All-Star Game at both shortstop and in the outfield. Former No. 1 overall picks Casey Mize and Spencer Torkelson have put together their own comeback stories, while Riley Greene has matured into one of the game’s top power hitters.
Given their deep well of prospects and contributors at the MLB level, no team is better positioned than the Tigers to add significant help at the trade deadline.
I heard someone refer to them as the Zombie Astros, which feels apropos. Alex Bregman left as a free agent, they traded Kyle Tucker, Yordan Alvarez has been injured and has just three home runs, and the Jose Altuve experiment in left field predictably fizzled.
But here they are, fighting for the best record in the majors and holding a comfortable lead in the AL West. They’re getting star turns from Hunter Brown, Framber Valdez and Jeremy Pena, while the risky decision to start Cam Smith in the majors with very little minor league experience has paid off, as he has now become their cleanup hitter.
If we ignore the COVID-19 season, the Astros look on their way to an eighth straight division title.
This could be at least a half-grade higher based on everything that has gone right: Pete Crow-Armstrong‘s attention-grabbing breakout, Tucker doing everything expected after the big trade, Seiya Suzuki‘s monster power numbers and Matthew Boyd‘s All-Star turn in the rotation. The Cubs are on pace for their most wins since their World Series title season in 2016.
There have been a few hiccups, however, especially in the rotation with Justin Steele‘s season-ending injury and Ben Brown‘s inconsistency, plus rookie third baseman Matt Shaw has scuffled, and the bench has been weak aside from their backup catchers.
Still, this is a powerhouse lineup, and the Cubs will seek to improve their rotation at the deadline.
They just keep winning of late, going from 25-27 and seven games behind the Yankees on May 25 to taking over first place from the slumping Bronx Bombers, a remarkable turnaround over just 36 games. They went 27-9 over a 36-game stretch ending with their eighth win in a row on Sunday.
George Springer‘s recent surge has been fun to watch, a reminder of how good he was at his peak, and Addison Barger has been mashing over the past two months.
Some of the stats don’t add up to the Blue Jays being this good — they’ve barely outscored their opponents — but there might be more offense in the tank from the likes of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and a healthy Anthony Santander, and the bullpen, a soft spot, is the easiest area to upgrade.
Their success is best summed up by the fact that Freddy Peralta is their lone All-Star, but they have a whole bunch of players who have contributed between 1 and 2 WAR.
Brandon Woodruff looked good Sunday in his first start in nearly two years, so that could be a huge boost for the second half.
I’m curious to see how Jackson Chourio performs as well. While his counting stats — extra-base hits, RBIs — are fine, his triple-slash line remains below last season, especially his OBP. He had a huge second half in 2024 (.310/.363/.552), and if he does that again, the Brewers could find themselves back in the postseason for the seventh time in eight seasons.
The Rays started off slow, with a losing record through the end of April, but then went 33-22 in May and June to claw back into the AL East race — as the Rays usually do, last year being the recent exception.
Two key performers have been All-Star third baseman Junior Caminero, who has a chance to become just the third player to hit 40 home runs in his age-21 season, and All-Star first baseman Jonathan Aranda.
Due to the league wanting the Rays to play more home games early in the season, the July and August slate will be very road-heavy, so we’ll see how the Rays adapt to a difficult two-month stretch, especially since their pitching isn’t quite as deep as it has been in other seasons.
No, they’re not going to be the greatest team of all time. But they might win 100 games — even though Blake Snell and Roki Sasaki, their huge offseason acquisitions, have combined for just two wins in 10 starts.
The lineup, of course, has been terrific, with Ohtani leading the NL in several categories and Will Smith leading the batting race. By wRC+, it’s been the best offense in Dodgers history.
If they can get some combo of Snell, Sasaki and Tyler Glasnow healthy, plus Ohtani eventually ramped up to a bigger workload on the mound, the Dodgers still loom as World Series favorites.
They are on pace for 95 wins, mainly on the strength of Zack Wheeler, Ranger Suarez and Cristopher Sanchez, who are a combined 23-7 with 11.8 WAR. Jesus Luzardo‘s ERA is bloated due to that two-start stretch when he allowed 20 runs, but he has otherwise been solid as well.
But, overall, it hasn’t always been the smoothest of treks. The bullpen has imploded a few times and the offense has lacked power aside from Kyle Schwarber. Bryce Harper is back after missing three weeks, and they need to get his bat going. Look for some bullpen additions at the trade deadline — and perhaps an outfielder as well.
The Cardinals have been a minor surprise — perhaps even to the Cardinals themselves. St. Louis was viewing this as a rebuilding year of sorts — not that the Cardinals ever hit rock bottom and start completely over. They had a hot May, winning 12 of 13 at one point, but the offense has been fading of late, with those three straight shutout losses to Pittsburgh and six shutout losses since June 25.
The starting rotation doesn’t generate a lot of swing and miss, with both Erick Fedde and Miles Mikolas seeing their ERAs starting to climb. Brendan Donovan is the team’s only All-Star rep, and that kind of sums up this team: solid but without any star power. That might foretell a second-half fade.
All-Star starting pitchers Logan Webb and Robbie Ray, plus a dominant bullpen, have led the way, although after starting 12-4, the Giants have basically been a .500 team for close to three months now. Rafael Devers hasn’t yet ignited the offense since coming over from Boston, and the Giants have lost four 1-0 games.
These final three games at home against the Dodgers before the All-Star break will be a crucial series, as Los Angeles has slowly pulled away in the NL West.
This was an “A-plus” through June 12, when the Mets were 45-24 and owned the best record in baseball, even though Juan Soto hadn’t gotten hot. Soto finally got going in June, but the pitching collapsed, and the Mets went through a disastrous 1-10 stretch.
The rotation injuries have piled up, exacerbating the lack of bullpen depth. Recent games have been started by Justin Hagenman (who had a 6.21 ERA in Triple-A), journeyman reliever Chris Devenski, Paul Blackburn (7.71 ERA) and Frankie Montas, who has had to start even though he’s clearly not throwing the ball well. The Mets need to get the rotation healthy, but also could use more offense from Mark Vientos and their catchers (Francisco Alvarez was demoted to Triple-A).
At times it has felt like Cal Raleigh has been a one-man team with his record-breaking first half. But he will be joined on the All-Star squad by starting pitcher Bryan Woo, closer Andres Munoz and center fielder Julio Rodriguez, who made it on the strength of his defense, as his offense has been a disappointment.
The offense has been one of the best in the majors on the road, but the rotation has been nowhere near as effective as the past couple of seasons, with George Kirby, Logan Gilbert and Bryce Miller all missing time with injuries. They just shut out the Pirates three games in a row, so maybe that will get the rotation on a roll.
They’re just out of the wild-card picture while hanging around .500, so we give them a decent grade since that exceeds preseason expectations. It feels like a little bit of a mirage given their run differential — their record in one-run games (good) versus their record in blowout games (not good) — and various holes across the lineup and pitching staff.
But they’ve done two things to keep them in the race. One, they hit a lot of home runs. Two, they’re the only team in the majors to use just five starting pitchers. The rotation hasn’t been stellar, but it’s been stable.
The Padres are probably fortunate to be where they are, given some of their issues. As expected, the offensive depth has been a problem.
Not as expected, Dylan Cease has struggled while Michael King‘s injury after a strong start has left them without last year’s dynamic 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation (although Nick Pivetta has been one of the best signings of the offseason). Yu Darvish just made his season debut Monday, so hopefully he’ll provide a lift.
The Padres haven’t played well against the better teams, including a 2-5 record against the Dodgers, but they did clean up against the Athletics, Rockies and Pirates, going 16-2 against those three teams.
For now, the Reds are stuck in neutral. Leave out 2022, when they lost 100 games, and it’s otherwise been a string of .500-ish seasons: 31-29 in 2020, 83-79 in 2021, 82-80 in 2023, 77-85 in 2024 and now a similar record so far in 2025.
The hope was that Terry Francona would be a difference-maker. Maybe that will play out down the stretch, but the best hope is to get the rotation clicking on all cylinders at the same time. That means Andrew Abbott continuing his breakout performance, plus getting Hunter Greene healthy again and rookie Chase Burns to live up to the hype after a couple of shaky outings following an impressive MLB debut.
Throw in Nick Lodolo and solid Nick Martinez and Brady Singer, and this group can be good enough to pitch the Reds to their first full-season playoff appearance since 2013.
The Yankees have hit their annual midseason swoon — which has been subject to much intense analysis from their disgruntled fans — and that opening weekend sweep of the Brewers, when the Yankees’ torpedo bats were the big story in baseball, now seems long ago.
Going from seven up to three back in such a short time is a disaster — but not disastrous. Nonetheless, the Yankees will have to do some hard-core self-evaluation heading to the trade deadline.
The offense wasn’t going to be as good as it was in April, when Paul Goldschmidt, Trent Grisham and Ben Rice were all playing over their heads. So, do they need a hitter? Or with Clarke Schmidt now likely joining Gerrit Cole as a Tommy John casualty, do they need a starting pitcher? Or both?
From the book of “things we didn’t expect,” page 547: The Marlins are averaging more runs per game than the Orioles, Padres, Braves and Rangers, to name a few teams. They’re averaging almost as many runs per game as the Mets, and last time we checked, the Marlins weren’t the team to give Soto $765 million.
An eight-game winning streak at the end of June has the Marlins going toe-to-toe with the Braves for third place in the NL East even though the starting rotation has been a mess, with Sandy Alcantara on track to become just the fourth qualified pitcher with an ERA over 7.00.
Heading into the season, I thought that if any team was going to challenge the Dodgers in the NL West, it would be the Diamondbacks. The offense has once again been one of the best in the majors, but the pitching issues have been painful.
After the aggressive move to sign Corbin Burnes, he went down with Tommy John surgery after 11 starts. Meanwhile, Zac Gallen, Eduardo Rodriguez and Brandon Pfaadt each have an ERA on the wrong side of 5.00. Rodriguez was better in June before a shellacking on July 4, while Gallen remains homer-prone, so it’s hard to tell if improvement is on the horizon. Their playoff odds are hovering just under 20%, so there’s a chance, but they need to get red-hot like they did last July and August.
It feels like it has been more soap opera than baseball season in Boston, with the Devers drama finally ending with the shocking trade with the Giants.
If you give added weight that this is the Red Sox, a team that should be operating with the big boys in both budget and aspirations and instead seemed to only want to dump Devers’ contract, then feel free to lower this grade a couple of notches, even if the Red Sox are close in the wild-card standings.
On the field, the heralded rookie trio of Kristian Campbell, Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer hasn’t exactly clicked, with Campbell returning to the minors after posting a .902 OPS in April. A big test will come out of the All-Star break, when they play the Cubs, Phillies, Dodgers, Twins and Astros in a tough 15-game stretch.
After last season’s surprise playoff appearance, it’s been a frustrating 2025 — although I’m not sure this result is necessarily a surprise.
There were concerns about the offense heading into the season and those concerns have proven correct. They were getting no production from their outfield, so they rushed Jac Caglianone to the majors to much hype, but he has struggled and might need a reset back in Triple-A. Even Bobby Witt Jr., as good as he has been (on pace for 7.5 WAR), has seen his OPS drop 140 points.
On the bright side, Kris Bubic emerged as an All-Star starter and Noah Cameron has filled in nicely for the injured Cole Ragans, so maybe they trade a starter for some offense.
Coming off a catastrophic 2024 season, nobody was expecting anything from the White Sox. Indeed, another 121-loss season loomed as a possibility. While they’re on pace to lose 100 again, they’ve at least played more competitive baseball thanks to their pitching.
Rookie starters Shane Smith and Sean Burke have shown promise, while rookie position players Kyle Teel, Edgar Quero and now Colson Montgomery are getting their initial taste of the majors.
There has been the mix of calamity: Luis Robert Jr. has been unproductive and is probably now untradable, and former No. 3 overall pick Andrew Vaughn hit .189 and was traded to the Brewers.
The Twins are one organization that might like a do-over of the past five seasons. It feels like they’ve had the most talent in the division, but all they’ve done is squeeze out one soft division title in 2023. Now, the Tigers have passed them in talent and other factors, such as payroll flexibility.
There’s still time for the Twins to turn things around in 2025, but outside of that wonderful 13-game winning streak, they haven’t played winning baseball.
Overall, it’s been yet another bad season, despite Paul Skenes‘ brilliance. Really, do we talk enough about him? Yes, we do talk about him, but he has a 1.95 ERA through his first 42 career starts. Incredible.
Here’s an amazing thing about baseball. The Pirates are not a good team, but they recently put together one of the best six-game stretches in history. That’s not stretching the description. First, they swept the Mets — a good team — by scores of 9-1, 9-2 and 12-1. Then they swept the Cardinals — a good team — with three shutouts, 7-0, 1-0 and 5-0. They became the first team since at least 1901 to score 43 runs or more and allow four runs or fewer in a six-game stretch. And then they promptly got shut out three games in a row, making them the first to win three straight shutouts and then lose three straight shutouts.
Eighteen of our 28 voters picked them to win the AL West before the season, but it’s looking more and more like the 2023 World Series might be a stone-cold fluke in the middle of a string of losing seasons. That year, nearly everyone in the lineup had a career year at the plate, and the pitching got hot at the right time.
This year’s Rangers, though, have struggled to score runs, and while some have pointed to the offensive environment at Globe Life Field, they’re near the bottom in road OPS as well. It’s been fun seeing Jacob deGrom back at a dominating level, and Nathan Eovaldi should have been an All-Star.
Put it this way: If the Rangers can somehow squeeze into the postseason, you don’t want to face the Rangers in a short series. Indeed, if any team looms as an October upset special, it might be the Rangers.
The Nationals received superlative first-half performances from James Wood and MacKenzie Gore, while CJ Abrams is on the way to his best season. But there remains a lack of overall organizational progress, which finally led to the firings on Sunday of longtime GM Mike Rizzo and longtime manager Dave Martinez. A 7-19 record in June sealed their fate, as the rotation has been bad and the bullpen arguably the worst in baseball.
Until the Nationals figure out how to improve their pitching — or, better yet, find an owner who wants to win — they will be stuck going nowhere.
That fell apart in a hurry. Sunday’s loss was Cleveland’s 10th in a row, a stretch that remarkably included five shutouts. Indeed, the Guardians have now been shut out 11 times; the franchise record in the post-dead-ball-era (since 1920) is 20 shutouts in 1968.
There’s nothing worse than watching a team that can’t score runs, so that tells you how exciting the Guardians have been. Last year, the Guardians hit exceptionally well with runners in scoring position, keeping afloat what was otherwise a mediocre offense. That hasn’t happened in 2025 (trading Josh Naylor didn’t help either). Throw in some predictable regression from the bullpen, and this season looks lost.
We can’t give this a complete failing grade due to the emergence of All-Star shortstop Jacob Wilson (the Athletics’ first All-Star starter since Josh Donaldson in 2014) and slugging first baseman Nick Kurtz, who have a chance to finish 1-2 in the Rookie of the Year voting. Plus, we have Denzel Clarke‘s circus catches in center field.
But otherwise? Ugh. The Sacramento gamble already looks like a disaster, three months into a three-year stay. The team is drawing well below Sutter Health Park’s 14,000-seat capacity, with many recent games drawing under 10,000 fans. Luis Severino bashed the small crowds and the lack of air-conditioning.
The A’s had a groundbreaking ceremony for their new park in Vegas, renting heavy construction equipment as background props. Maybe they should have spent that money on more pitching help.
Based on preseason expectations, the Braves have clearly been the biggest disappointment in the National League — fighting the Orioles for most disappointing overall.
What’s gone wrong? They haven’t scored runs, as the offense continues its remarkable fade from a record-setting performance just two seasons ago. The collapses of Michael Harris II and Ozzie Albies lead the way, with lack of production at shortstop and left field playing a big role as well. Closer Raisel Iglesias has struggled, and the team is 11-22 in one-run games. Spencer Strider hasn’t yet reached his pre-injury level and Reynaldo Lopez made just one start before going down.
The Braves haven’t missed the playoffs since 2017, but that run is clearly in jeopardy.
The Orioles have a similar record to the Braves but have played much worse, including losses of 24-2, 19-5, 15-3 and two separate 9-0 shutouts.
They will spend the trade deadline dealing away as many of their impending free agents as possible, and then do a lot of soul-searching heading into the offseason. After making the playoffs in 2023 and 2024, will this season just be a blip? While the pitching struggles aren’t necessarily a big surprise, what has happened to the offense? Are some of their young players prospects or suspects?
After two months of Cleveland Spiders-level baseball, it would be easy to make fun of the Rockies. Especially since they recently announced Walker Monfort — son of the owner — was promoted to executive VP and will replace outgoing president and COO Greg Feasel.
On the other hand, the Rockies are doing something right: They just drew 121,000 for a three-game series against the White Sox.
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