The Underperforming and Overachieving Pitching Staffs of 2025

Last week, I took a peek at which offenses have exceeded (or missed) expectations this year. I did that by taking every player’s preseason projection and actual playing time to create a projected wOBA for the entire offense. I compared that to what has actually happened. The difference? That’s what we’re looking for, how much a team has surprised to the good or bad in 2025.

I couldn’t leave it at just one phase of the game, though. Pitching can be measured the same way (ish, see methodological notes below if you’re interested in the nitty gritty). I didn’t want to compare ERA (too noisy) or FIP (too regressed, aka not noisy enough). I settled on wOBA as a good representation of how well a pitching staff is doing overall. It’s a middle point between the two other options, so we are neither ignoring what happens on balls in play, nor caring too much about sequencing. Here, for example, are the Texas Rangers, the biggest overachievers of the season:

Right away, you can see why they’ve beaten expectations by so much. Four-fifths of their starting rotation, four of the five pitchers who have faced the most batters, have performed meaningfully better than their preseason projections. The fifth is Jacob deGrom, who had one of the best projections in baseball coming into the season and has hit it on the nose. Even their most-used bullpen arms have been pleasant surprises. That’s how you allow the fewest runs in baseball by a mile, apparently.

A methodological note here: I couldn’t make the wOBA translation quite as easily for pitchers as for hitters because we don’t have direct pitching wOBA projections. We also don’t have all the inputs, as our projections don’t have doubles and triples allowed, only hits and homers. I approximated wOBA by approximating other extra-base hits based on home runs allowed. For consistency, I used the same calculations for in-season wOBA; I didn’t want my results to be biased by using two different measurement calculations. Since I was already doing that, I used 2025 wOBA weights for both and put them on the same scale. When only one projection system was available, I used that one. If neither had projected a pitcher, I removed their innings.

That’s how I measured it, and as you can see from the Rangers’ results, the misses relative to projected wOBA are much larger for pitchers than hitters. That makes sense to me, as someone who has spent a good deal of time making projections. It’s just much tougher to predict pitching; more of what happens is out of a pitcher’s control because hitters exert so much influence over power on contact. Take a look at how variable pitching performance has been this year across the league compared to the preseason projections:

The largest miss in pitching projections is nearly twice as large as in hitting projections, with a few standouts on both sides. The Rangers pitching staff has been the best in baseball this year, but the Reds, projected in the middle of the pack thanks to their extremely difficult home stadium, have been similarly better than advertised. Elly De La Cruz might be the headliner, but the driving force behind Cincinnati’s winning record (and playoff hopes) is a rock solid group on the mound.

You might not have noticed how good the Pirates and Royals staffs have been this year because they’ve been overshadowed by each team’s moribund offenses. Both sets of pitchers have beaten expectations to be among the stingiest units in the game. It hasn’t much mattered for either team because of what’s on the other side of the ball, but both clubs rank in the top 10 for pitching WAR despite desultory overall records; that’s what this study is measuring, more or less.

In ascending order of how disastrous the pitching has been, the top five teams on this list can tell you a lot about how the 2025 season has gone. The Diamondbacks were expected to be playoff contenders thanks to a solid pitching staff, but instead they’ve turned in one of the worst run-prevention performances in the majors. It’s even worse than this, in fact; these estimates don’t penalize teams for injury, and Arizona lost Corbin Burnes early in the season. This table is essentially the reason the D-backs sold instead of bought at the deadline.

The Athletics and Nationals didn’t have playoff dreams in the same way that the Diamondbacks did, but they both came into 2025 with renewed hope after frisky 2024 seasons. The A’s offense has been good, and the Washington offense has been acceptable. But with the way these pitchers are getting lit up – the wOBA they’re allowing is the equivalent of playing the Dodgers every game – there’s just no way to win a lot of games. In both cases, you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, because there’s a lot to like on the other side of the ball. To be fair, you can cut the A’s staff a bit of slack because the projections didn’t know how small the ballpark would play. Regardless, the results haven’t been good for these two teams.

That just leaves the worst of the worst (from a pitching standpoint), and it’s gratifying to see that the two teams whose pitching performances have most shocked me this year are the worst two teams by this metric. The Orioles are perhaps the biggest negative surprise of the year; after two years of reaching the playoffs, they’re out of the race and tracking for a win total in the low 70s. That’s because they came into the season with a pitching staff that was projected to be among the bottom 10 in baseball, then had that staff disappoint by a huge margin. In numbers, out of the five Orioles who have made the most starts, Dean Kremer is the only one to beat his preseason projections (by six points of wOBA). The other four have missed their projections by an average of 37 points of wOBA. Oof. Trevor Rogers has been great, but he’s not one of the top five starters; health, too, has betrayed Baltimore.

That just leaves the Rockies. No one expected them to compete for a playoff berth this year. No one expected them to compete for 70 wins this year, if we’re being honest. But their 2025 season has been beyond even the grimmest expectations. They’re on pace to set a franchise record for most runs allowed in a season, an unfathomable 1,059. That would break the record set in 1999 in pre-humidor Coors Field, at the height of the Steroid Era and the peak of Colorado’s gonzo altitude-aided scoring environment.

Obviously, we projected the Rockies to allow more runs (and a higher wOBA) than any other team. They play home games in Denver, after all, and didn’t have good pitchers to begin with. But they’ve fallen short of those expectations by an enormous margin. With the wOBA they’re allowing – in aggregate – they’re turning the entire opposing team into a lineup of Bryce Harpers or Manny Machados. It’s grim out there, in other words.

I think the contrast between the hitting and pitching versions of this exercise is illuminating. The hitting list has smaller misses on average, and it’s also harder to guess which team goes where without seeing the entire list. The pitching list lines up very well with what I would have guessed before compiling it. It’s anecdotal, of course, with only one year of evidence, but it sure feels like it’s easier to judge from casual observation whether pitching has exceeded or missed expectations. The pitching side of things also seems to have a greater impact on team performance, particularly on the underachieving end, though that could be a one-year thing. Pitching might be more volatile, but it also seems very consequential. If you underperform your pitching projections by a wide margin, your team will probably struggle.