Spring training camps are underway, which means it is time to look at the state of baseball. As part of our 2025 MLB season preview, ESPN's Buster Olney is bringing back his positional ranking series, in which he surveyed those around the industry to help him rank the top 10 players at every position.
Today, we cap our series by looking at the best of the best relievers.
The objective of this exercise is to identify the best players for the 2025 season, not who might be best in five years or over their career. We rolled out a position per installment. Here are the nine other lists: catchers, first basemen, second basemen, third basemen, shortstops, corner outfielders, center fielders, designated hitters and starting pitchers.
This is the golden age of relief pitching, a time when there are more dominant relievers than ever before, when teams can construct excellent bullpens faster, with more depth than ever.
More and more relievers are generating higher strikeout rates -- 74 had rates of 25% or better last season compared to 41 15 years ago -- and holding opposing hitters to batting averages under .200 -- 38 in 2024 compared to 22 in 2010.
At the ground level, in the front offices trying to construct effective pitching staffs, this is a good thing.
However, from 30,000 feet -- when evaluating what's good for the sport -- this is probably not a good thing, because the high volume of overpowering, short-outing relievers is depressing the offense that Major League Baseball has been working to goose.
The league-wide strikeout rate for bullpens was 20.3% in 2010, with opposing batters hitting .245. Last season, the league-wide K rate was 23.4%, with relievers holding hitters to a .234 average.
Earlier this week, an executive agreed that teams have more bullpen options than they had in the past -- but he said the process has become more complicated in identifying relievers "because there are 100 guys available, they all throw hard, and if you can make one tweak, one change -- the right change -- all of a sudden he's Emmanuel Clase."
The industry explosion of high-end relievers is reflected in the supply and demand of the winter market. With so many free agent relievers recycling into free agency every year, teams are mostly assured of their pick of good pitchers at team-friendly prices. Only two relievers received contracts of more than two years during this past offseason -- Tanner Scott, who signed a four-year, $72 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Jeff Hoffman, who landed a three-year, $33 million deal with the Toronto Blue Jays. Another 2024 reliever, Clay Holmes, signed a $39 million contract with the New York Mets as a starting pitcher.
Meanwhile, Kirby Yates, Jordan Romano, Paul Sewald and Kyle Finnegan -- all accomplished relievers -- signed one-year deals.
The list below of the best relievers is filled with examples of players who found a new pitch, or refined a pitch he already had, and ascended from average to great. That's part of the reason why constructing a strong bullpen is easier than it was a decade ago -- so many pitchers have gone to pitching labs in the offseason and used technology to ramp up their velocity and refine their pitches.
We've capped our list at 20 names -- the top 10 and 10 honorable mentions -- but if we wanted to, we could expand that to 40 or 50, because relief pitching has never been this good.