With the 2025 Major League Baseball season coming to a close, award season is nigh and on Thursday two Cardinals were named finalists for the Silver Slugger.
There is a 66 percent chance a Card takes home some hardware for their efforts this season as Alec Burleson and Brendan Donovan were named two of the three finalists for the Silver Slugger at the utility position. They are joined by San Diego’s Jake Cronenworth.
For the season, Burleson slashed .290/.343/.459 with an OPS of .801. Burleson homered 18 times and drove in a very #nice 69 this season. Donovan, on the other hand, slashed .287/.353./422 with an OPS of .775 en route to his first ever All-Star selection. Fort those wondering, Cronenworth has the least impressive slash line of the three finalists (.246/.367/.377) despite having the exact same number of plate appearances (515) as Donovan.
The winners for the National League will be announced on Thursday, November 6 at 5:00 P.M. CT on The Baseball Insiders YouTube stream. The winners for the AL will be announced the following day at the same time and place.
Elsewhere in MLB…
Did ya see this? Did ya hear about this? Folks this little thing I like to call “The World Series” begins tonight across the border in Toronto as the Blue Jays host the defending champion Los Angeles Dodgers in the best-of-seven series.
Toronto’s going to give the ball to rookie Trey Yesavage, while Los Angeles is countering with Blake Snell. Game One is set for 7:00 P.M., and FOX will carry the entire series. The Dodgers are favored to win a second straight World Series, at the time of this writing they are a -215 favorite on our sister site DraftKings, while the Blue Jays have +185 odds.
The other bit of news that’s worth monitoring is the status of Toronto’s Bo Bichette. On Thursday Toronto manager John Schneider said that Bichette could see time at either second, shortstop, or DH for the World Series. Bichette hasn’t played since spraining his knee on September 6. Bichette took some grounder at second base on Wednesday but has never actually played the position in his seven years at the Big League level; the last time Bichette played second base was a 30-game stint back in 2019.
Bichette led the club with 181 hits and finished second to Aaron Judge with a .311 batting average.
