The Michael Busch Slander Will Not Be Tolerated ...Middle East

Performative outrage! Performative OUTRAGE!

Okay, as someone who has to put his baseball opinions online all the time, I want to give Bailey from Foolish Baseball a little bit of grace for his outrageous ranking of first basemen on MLBNow — specifically, for his unforgivable Michael Busch erasure. After all, nobody is perfect. To err is human. A third idiom for rhetorical balance.

But then I saw his reply indicating that Michael Busch would be on his list, albeit ranked tenth, if it weren’t for the requisite “Wild Card” pick … which goes to sworn enemy Andrew Vaughn. Unfortunately, this nonsense has gone too far! And I intend to prove it.

Michael Busch and 1B Rankings

First, the ranking.

Foolish Baseball’s #Top10RightNow at 1B

And you can watch/listen to his explanation for each pick right here, if you’re interested.

Now, I could do a whole song and dance on why Michael Busch deserves not only to be on this list, but to rank as high as sixth. But instead, let me just keep it simple with some of his 2025 rankings in key stat areas:

Michael Busch among all 1B (min. 400 PAs in 2025).

Even if you want to err on the side of track record (plus Nick Kurtz, understandably), there’s really no reason to have Busch behind Devers, Rice, and Pasquantino, to say nothing of Vaughn (though I suppose Bailey’s WC explanation absolves that sin). He simply was better than most of those guys last year (both in results and peripherals) and is significantly younger than Alonso, Olson, Harper, and Freeman.

I probably wouldn’t rank him any higher than seventh, but that would be only out of an abundance of caution/fear of homerism. Because I genuinely believe he’s well-positioned to wind up as one of the top-3 or top-5 first basemen in 2026. And when I say that, I mean only offensively. Defensively, I think we all were pleasantly surprised by how well he handles the position. I can see him becoming a Gold Glove finalist at some point in the future (perhaps never winning, but in that general tier).

Even Busch’s ZiPS projections – which are conservative in nature – are projecting a relatively big season out of him in 2026: .257/.345/.485 (132 wRC+) with 28 HRs.

Now, for what it’s worth, MLB Network did have Michael Busch on their official Top-10 ranking of first basemen, coming in at No. 9.

Michael Busch is the No. 9 first baseman on @MLBNow's #Top10RightNow. pic.twitter.com/clEWy7YTgx

That full list looked like this (according to The Shredder):

But there’s even some weirdness with that one, too (I am simply not taking Yandy Diaz over Michael Busch, like what are we doing?).

Fortunately, the fan vote is here to save the day with what I think is easily the best of the three rankings so far.

That list looks like this (Fan Vote):

Much, much, much better. Hooray for the power of crowdsourcing.

There are some other top-1B lists out there now, too, with most of them keeping Michael Busch in that 7-9 range, which I think is reasonable. Obviously, none of this “matters” once the rubber hits the road, but I just want to see our guy get the recognition he deserves.

The common denominator among the explanations for each ranking is Michael Busch’s underwhelming performance against left-handed pitching. And that’s fair. He has struggled a bit against lefties in his career, but that is something on which guys can improve. Do you remember Anthony Rizzo’s gigantic leap from being nearly unplayable vs lefties (70 wRC+ through his first three seasons) to actually dominating them (140 wRC+ in his next four seasons)? It does happen.

And for his part, Busch did turn it around against lefties over the last two months of the season: .250/.318/.550 (140 wRC+) with a 9.1 BB%. It was a small sample (22 PAs), but a positive sign.

Of course, he doesn’t need to be anywhere close to dominant vs lefties to be an incredibly productive offensive player. If he’s merely average (something he did in 2024, mind you: 102 wRC+ vs LHP), his production against righties, of which there are many more, will carry the day.

For no reason at all: t.co/ZwSY1oOPRA pic.twitter.com/oIOpvLnEJ6

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