"Okay, as someone who has to put his baseball opinions online all the time, I want to give Bailey from Foolish Baseball a little bit of grace for his outrageous ranking of first basemen on MLBNow - specifically, for his unforgivable Michael Busch erasure. After all, nobody is perfect. To err is human. A third idiom for rhetorical balance."
"Michael Busch among all 1B (min. 400 PAs in 2025). Even if you want to err on the side of track record (plus Nick Kurtz, understandably), there's really no reason to have Busch behind Devers, Rice, and Pasquantino, to say nothing of Vaughn (though I suppose Bailey's WC explanation absolves that sin). He simply was better than most of those guys last year (both in results and peripherals) and is significantly younger than Alonso, Olson, Harper, and Freeman."
Michael Busch was omitted from a top-10 first basemen ranking despite 2025 offensive and peripheral metrics that compare favorably to many players on that list. A top-10 ordering placed Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Pete Alonso, Nick Kurtz, Matt Olson, Bryce Harper, Freddie Freeman, Rafael Devers, Ben Rice, Vinnie Pasquantino, and Andrew Vaughn (wild card). Busch's 2025 results among first basemen (minimum 400 PA) exceeded Devers, Rice, Pasquantino, and Vaughn in key areas, and Busch is younger than Alonso, Olson, Harper, and Freeman. A conservative placement would be seventh, though Busch projects as a potential top-3 to top-5 offensive first baseman in 2026.
Read at Bleacher Nation
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