[FuzzyRussianHat]

The 2025 Baseball Grand Championship was the 16^th edition of the event and was hosted in Cape Town, South Africa. The auto-bids for the event were MLB’s Detroit and Nashville, CABA’s Guatemala and Juarez, EAB’s Saitama and Daegu, BSA’s Fortaleza and Barranquilla, EBF’s Zurich and Rotterdam, EPB’s Krasnoyarsk, OBA’s Sydney, APB’s Jakarta, CLB’s Nanjing, WAB’s Dakar, SAB’s Visakhapatnam, ABF’s Mashhad, ALB’s Basra, and AAB’s Lusaka. ALB’s Amman was the at-large team, making their third consecutive appearance in the event.

There ended up being a tie for the top spot as Lusaka and Nashville both finished 14-5. In their encounter on November 16, the Lake Monsters were 6-4 winners over the Knights, giving Lusaka the tiebreaker to send the Grand Championship to Zambia. The Lake Monsters became the second winner from the African Association of Baseball, joining 2015 Johannesburg.



Lusaka scored 116 runs (6.1 per game), setting a new event record. Their team .258 batting average was the second-best in BGC history. The Lake Monsters had the best run differential in 2025 at +33 with Nashville second at +27. The Knights were the first MLB team in the top two since New Orleans in 2021. Mashhad was alone in third at 13-6, which was the second time an Asian Baseball Federation team landed in the top three (Tabriz was champ in 2019).



Detroit and Dakar were both 12-7 with the Tigers officially taking fourth with the head-to-head tiebreaker. Detroit posted a .336 team OBP, a new tournament record. Barranquilla, Guatemala, and Rotterdam were each next at 11-8. The Ghosts allowed the fewest runs in the event at 56. Fortaleza, Juarez, and Zurich rounded out the teams above .500 at 10-9.

Sydney was alone in 12^th at 9-10. Six teams then finished at 8-11; Amman, Basra, Daegu, Jakarta, Krasnoyarsk, and Saitama. Nanjing was 19^th in 3-16 and Visakhapatnam was at the bottom at 2-17. The Volts had the worst record in BGC history.

Tournament MVP was Rotterdam 1B Zachary Brown, who played all 19 games with 21 hits, 17 runs, 7 doubles, 7 home runs, 13 RBI, .375/.500/.873 slash, 1.375 OPS, 272 wRC+, and 1.7 WAR. It was his lone season with the Ravens, as the 28-year old from Gibraltar arrived after a trade from Cardiff. Brown’s Rotterdam run and this effort earned him a six-year, $164 million free agent deal in the offseason with Warsaw.

Best Pitcher honors went to Juarez veteran Amauris Huerta in his fourth year with the Jesters. The 31-year old Mexican tossed 28 innings with a 1.29 ERA, 1-0 record, 27 strikeouts, 4 walks, 326 ERA+, and 1.1 WAR. He took it despite a record-setting 64 strikeout effort by Guatemala’s Israel Montague.

Other notes: Saitama’s Ju-An Youm set a BGC record with 14 doubles that still holds as of 2037. Detroit’s Eka Melgiansyan had 15 stolen bases, one short of the event record. Rotterdam’s Pasquale Barola set a record with a 22 strikeout game against Nanjing on November 5, doing it only eight innings.