2025 MLB Predictions: WagerKey Staff Picks for Divisions, World Series

This article is part of our MLB Picks series.

2025 MLB Predictions: WagerKey Staff Picks for Divisions, World Series

To celebrate Opening Day, I asked everyone involved in our MLB coverage to give me their picks for this year’s division winners, pennant winners, World Series winners and major awards winners. I’ve broken down our picks for each race below, and you can find all 21 sets of responses I received at the bottom of the article. This article contains our picks for the divisions, pennants and World Series, with our award winners following in another article later today.

For some of the races, our spread of answers aligned quite well with the bookmakers’ odds, which you can find at our MLB Futures and MLB Player Futures pages. For others, you’ll find a fair amount of disagreement, starting with the first division on the list, the American League East.

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AL East Picks

The Yankees are the bookmakers’ favorites to win this division, with the Red Sox and Orioles not too far behind, but our staff doesn’t see it that way. Over half of us have the Red Sox winning the division for the first time since 2018. Boston made big additions this season including Alex Bregman and Garrett Crochet and has lots of young talent ready to help out as well, including Opening Day second baseman Kristian Campbell. The Yankees and Orioles have their backers as well, and two of us are even on the Blue Jays, who have the longest odds according to the books.

AL Central Picks

The books and our staff both see this as a four-way race, with no runaway favorite and everyone but the White Sox having a legitimate chance. While the books have the Twins as the slight favorites and the Royals in fourth, we’ve got Kansas City as the most likely team to win the division. Salvador Perez is still here from the World Series-winning team from a decade ago, but the new leader is Bobby Witt Jr., who tops our Roundtable Rankings.

AL West Picks

This is clearly a three-team race, with the Angels and Athletics nowhere near the rest of the pack. The books have it as almost a dead heat, but we have the Rangers a bit ahead of the Astros and Mariners. If Jacob deGrom and the rest of the rotation stay healthy enough and Wyatt Langford turns his potential into reality, several of our staff see big things happening in Texas. This isn’t the last you’ll see of the Rangers in this article.

NL East Picks

Here we have another three-team race, but we disagree on how it breaks down. Atlanta leads our poll as well as the odds, but the lead among our staff is much slimmer. Perhaps there are fears about Ronald Acuna Jr. and Spencer Strider as they return from their second torn ACL and second major elbow surgery, respectively. Or maybe many of us just like the Mets, who added Juan Soto for $765 million over the winter. Fewer us of like the Phillies, though some (including me) see them winning the division crown for the second straight year behind potentially the best rotation in baseball.

NL Central Picks

Our fifth and final three-team race. None of us was brave enough to pick the Pirates or Cardinals, despite the teams having odds no worse than the Blue Jays, who did have two supporters. The Cubs, who added Kyle Tucker and Ryan Pressly, lead our poll as well as the odds, but both the Brewers and Reds have a sizable number of supporters. For Milwaukee, that would be their third division win in a row, while the Reds haven’t won since 2012.

NL West Picks

It’s remarkable to see a -600 next to a team’s division chances on Opening Day, but our staff agrees: the Dodgers are runaway favorites in the NL West. They won the most games in the regular season before going on to win their second World Series in five years, and then they went out and added Blake Snell and Roki Sasaki over the winter. Only one of us (John Venezia) was brave enough to go with anyone else. His choice, the Diamondbacks, won the NL pennant two years ago and added Corbin Burnes in free agency.

AL Pennant Winner

The American League pennant race could hardly be more wide open, with over half the teams being picked to make the World Series by at least one of us. The Yankees won the pennant last year and lead the way according to the bookmakers, but they only found a single vote of support among our group, the same number as the Twins, Royals and Blue Jays. More of us landed on the Rangers, who won the World Series in 2023 and then won just 78 games in 2024, than any other team, while the Red Sox, who haven’t made the playoffs since 2021, are our second choice.

NL Pennant Winner

As you would expect, there’s far more consensus here than in the AL. While it’s not quite unanimous, the Dodgers are the nearly as heavily favored to win the entire NL as they are to win just the NL West. If the Dodgers do make it, it would be their fifth trip to the World Series in the last nine years. The Braves, Phillies and Diamondbacks made it in 2021, 2022 and 2023, respectively, and earned one vote apiece from our staff, as did the Mets, who haven’t made it since 2015.

World Series

Last year, 45 percent of us correctly landed on the Dodgers as the eventual champions. This year, two-thirds of us are predicting a repeat, making them an even bigger favorite than they are in the World Series odds. No team has won back-to-back titles since the Yankees won three in a row from 1998 to 2000, but in the absence of an obvious second favorite, most of us landed on the obvious choice. The Yankees sit second according to the oddsmakers but couldn’t find a single backer in our group, while the Orioles, who have the sixth-best odds, were the only team with multiple supporters. Still, despite the Dodgers’ dominance, a total of seven teams received at least one vote, so we should be in for an exciting season.

Full Set of Picks