2025 Big League “Fast Forward” with History Maker Baseball
We're getting ready for our 11th annual History Maker Baseball "Fall Classic Pre-PLAAY" to be held Saturday, September 14th at the Hampton Inn and Suites in Davenport IA. We'll crown OUR 2025 big league champion a couple months BEFORE the real thing happens! You're welcome to join us, read more about it here.
In anticipation of the event we, of course, had to fast-forward the 2025 regular season to its conclusion to see who made the playoffs. (In recent seasons, we've begun this project after the real-life regular season had concluded, plugging in the actual playoff teams and starting the "pre-PLAAY" with the Wild Card round. Prior to COVID, though, we would "fast forward" the regular season starting in early-to-mid September and determine our OWN playoff field!) We did this by using the HMB "Instant Results" chart to determine the winner for every game on the schedule, from September 4th through the 28th (this took about an hour to do). Here's a side-by-side comparison of what the standings were when we started rolling (8am 09.04.25) and how they ended up. Division leaders are highlighted in blue, wild card teams are highlighted in magenta...
As you can see, the same twelve teams who would have made the playoffs had they been held September 4th ended up earning playoff berths in our "fast forward" project. However, there were a couple of interesting twists in the playoff seeding, some near-misses that could have changed the field (worth noting as the real-life season unwinds), and a couple of notable surges and nose-dives!
Here's a quick re-cap of the "fast forward," division by division...
AL East
Down by four games when we started, New York finished the season with an 18-5 run (best of any team) to steal the division from Toronto by a game. The Jays had a chance to tie for the division lead with a win in the season finale over Tampa Bay--but lost, settling for the #4 seed.
AL Central
Detroit finished poorly (8-13) and saw their division lead shaved to five games by surging Cleveland, which won 8 of its last 9, 13 of its last 17 to jump into the Wild Card conversation but fell just short.
AL West
Houston started our project with a seven game losing streak, and lost 11 of 14 games before stringing together some wins at the end to salvage a Wild Card berth. Seattle--four games back as of September 4th--finished 14-8 and spent much of the "fast forward" in first place. It was back-and-forth over the last week of the season. Texas held the division lead on September 21st (84-74) but ended up losing its last five games to fall out of the playoff picture entirely. Seattle's win over the Dodgers in the season finale clinched the title for the M’s.
NL East
Philadelphia finished 12-11 but had a big enough lead to easily hold off New York, who clinched a Wild Card berth. Miami won 9 of 11 games to start the "fast forward," within a whisker of .500, but then tailed off. Washington stumbled badly, losing 17 out of 20 games before two wins in their last three games got them past the 50-win mark.
NL Central
Milwaukee cruised to the #1 seed, but Chicago hung right there with them—both teams finished 15-7 in the "fast forward." Surprisingly, Pittsburgh was ALSO 15-7 (including a sweep of the Brewers September 5-6-7) that moved them up to tie for third-place in the division! Notable was the "crash and burn" by Cincinnati: they were at .500 (70-70) when the project began, but won just 3 of their last 22 games.
NL West
San Diego started out our fast-forward with a TWELVE game winning streak! Wow. That quickly eclipsed the gap between them and Los Angeles (who finished 12-11) and put L.A. in the "catch up" role for the rest of the season. However, the Dodgers had a shot: the Padres lost to the D-Backs on the last day of the season and L.A. would have pulled into a tie for the division lead IF they could beat Seattle—but alas, they did not. Interesting: If the Los Angeles HAD beaten Seattle, BOTH the AL WEST and NL WEST divisions would have ended in a tie!
Fall Classic Wild Card Pre-PLAAY-offs
Here's how our Wild Card round shapes up, these are best-of-three series with the higher seed hosting all games on consecutive days. Each series will be played by a member of the PLAAY Games community (in parentheses)...
• Houston at Seattle (Ed Meek)
• Boston at Toronto (John Wise): Toronto won both games, 4-3 and 7-4.
• New York at San Diego (Micah Wimmer)
• Los Angeles at Chicago (Michael Bratta)
Fall Classic Divisional Pre-PLAAY-offs
The winners will advance to the divisional round, which will be best-of-five...
• (Winner HOU/SEA) at Detroit
• Toronto at New York
• (Winner NYM/SDP) at Philadelphia
• (Winner LAD/CHC) at Milwaukee
The winners of these four series will meet on the tabletop in Davenport, IA on 09.13.25 for the League Championship and Fall Classic series...stay tuned!