MLB Power Rankings: Top 25 players under 25
Major League Baseball is incredibly blessed to count these players under 25 among its biggest stars.
As a professional sport, Major League Baseball has a long history of distrust when it comes to youth and rookies. Top prospects are rarely just handed over the keys and allowed to run wild without cautious reservation. The current crop of young players in MLB is going to flip that notion on its head. It now seems as though every team is batting 1.000 on its young draft picks. They are getting to the big leagues faster, making All-Star teams sooner, and winning awards and titles before they turn 25.
Kris Bryant won the Rookie of the Year Award in his age-23 season and turned around and followed it up with an MVP at 24. Bryce Harper has produced numbers on par with Mickey Mantle. Manny Machado has done things by his 25th birthday that Pete Rose and Barry Bonds did not do. Year-round baseball may not be good for everyone, but it is certainly good for the best of the best. Players just look ready for the bright lights as soon as they step on an MLB diamond.
The list that follows is the definitive list of the young players who will shape the next generation of baseball, and it does not even include Aaron Sanchez and Mike Trout because they turned 25 too soon. For the purpose of breaking down players who were 24 for part of this season, June 30 has been used to determine players in their age-24 and age-25 seasons. Read on to see which players (besides Judge) MLB should be aggressively marketing in hopes of recapturing young baseball fans everywhere.
25. Dylan Bundy
The Baltimore Orioles have been waiting nearly 20 years since the departure of Mike Mussina for a homegrown starting pitcher to take control of the starting rotation. After years of injuries, Dylan Bundy seems to be healthy and is establishing himself in the big leagues. The fourth pick in the 2011 draft hardly pitched at all from 2012 to 2016 due to elbow and shoulder injuries, but has shown promise after the Orioles were forced to carry him on their roster last season.
Bundy got off to a very solid start this season, and ended May with a 6-3 record and 2.89 ERA. The wheels have begun falling off over the past month-plus, and Bundy is now 8-8 with a 4.33 ERA and have given up 10 home runs in his past 36.1 innings of work. All the tools are there for Bundy to be a dominant starter, and his fastball is rising back up closer to 95 more consistently this year.
The Orioles lost over three years of development with Bundy, and are trying to make up for lost time. He will have ups and downs at the MLB level the rest of the season, but will top his career-high in innings very soon. Bundy has made it through 18 starts all in one piece, has flashed ace potential, and that’s good enough for the Orioles this year while everything else crumbles.