Baseball has long revered power-hitting teammates. It goes all the way back to Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, if not before, and continued through Hank Aaron and Eddie Mathews, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris with the 1961 Yankees, Willies Mays and McCovey in San Francisco, the Bash Brothers of the late ’80s, Big Papi and Manny Ramirez on the Red Sox. Should we go as far as the one-year partnership of Juan Soto and Aaron Judge in the Bronx?
So who are the best slugging duos in 2025? Let’s rank them.
The D-backs traded away one of the best sluggers in baseball this season and still found a way into the top 10 behind their franchise cornerstones. Carroll leads the majors with 14 triples in addition to his 26 homers and 21 doubles, paving the way for a .561 slugging percentage. Marte has 21 home runs in just 86 games and is slugging .536.
The All-Star break was a nice showcase for the youngster here in Junior Caminero. He now sits with 33 home runs here in his age-21 season, doing some heavy lifting to prop the Rays up to ninth place in these rankings. Lowe is no slouch as a slugger. He has hit 39 home runs in a season before and he sits with 23 right now in 97 games.
Kurtz’s star was on the rise anyway, but his four-homer game in late July really put him on the map. He’s slugging a ridiculous .626 through 80 career games with 23 home runs. Keep in mind, as is often the case, there was an adjustment period for Kurtz at the big-league level. If we lopped off his first 23 career games, he’s hitting .340/.429/.745 with 18 doubles, a triple and 22 homers in 57 games since.
The difficult decision with these A’s was picking the second guy because three were firmly in the mix. I went with Rooker over Shea Langeliers and Tyler Soderstrom by a nose due to the former having hit 39 homers last season in addition to his 24 this year with a .500 slugging percentage.
Torkelson is one of the few players on this list who isn’t slugging .500 (he’s at .488). Isolated power (“ISO”) subtracts batting average from slugging percentage to measure, if you will, which players get the most bang for their buck with their hits. Torkelson is 15th in the majors in ISO (the top four, for those curious, in order: Aaron Judge, Cal Raleigh, Shohei Ohtani and Kyle Schwarber). Torkelson has 26 homers. That’s only good enough for second on the team here, as young star Greene has 27 with a .507 SLG.
Though their offense has struggled the last several weeks, the Cubs have two of the 11 players in baseball this season with at least 27 home runs. They are the only team to have enjoyed all of those homers (that is to say that there’s another team with two players in the top 11, but one of those was acquired at the trade deadline).
Pop quiz: Do you know the last time the Cubs had a 30-homer player? It was 2019. Schwarber had 38 and Kris Bryant had 31. Even Javier Báez’s 29 that season is more than any Cubs player have hit in a season since. But Suzuki and PCA are both on pace to hit 37 this year. If either gets hot again, 40 is attainable. The Cubs haven’t had a 40-homer guy since Derrek Lee hit 46 in 2005.
You could argue this duo should be much higher — even No. 1 — or shouldn’t even make the top 10. Why? It’s all about the variance from Big G. When Stanton is healthy and going well, the Judge-Stanton combo is the most menacing in baseball. It’s just that Stanton is so often hurt or hitting terribly these days. At present, he only has 11 home runs this season, but those 11 came in his last 29 games and he’s slugging .548 overall.
Judge is, of course, a Hallof Fame-caliber slugger still in his prime.
The Mets are broken right now. There’s no debating that. They are still in playoff position and a very talented team, though, so we can’t ignore the power of their slugging duo. Alonso is tied with Darryl Strawberry for the most home runs in Mets history and is poised to take the mantle for himself any day now. This season, he has 26 home runs with a .511 slugging percentage.
We all know Juan Soto, but he’s gotten so much negative attention this season some people might be surprised that he’s actually leading the team with 28 homers. Only six players in all of baseball have more home runs this year and four of them are still to come in these rankings.
Plenty of arguments could be made here. Andy Pages is actually second on the Dodgers in home runs with 19 while Teoscar Hernández has 18. Max Muncy has 17 homers in only 88 games and Will Smith has a higher slugging percentage than Freeman. Freeman is still a dangerous hitter with a .303 average and 140 OPS+, of course, and I think the World Series performance is still fresh enough in my head for him to prevail over these others listed here.
The next argument would be that I can’t rank a team with one guy having 14 homers and a .487 slugging percentage this high. My response to that is Ohtani has 42 homers and a .624 SLG. He does the heavy lifting here and it doesn’t matter who the second banana is.
By the same token, Schwarber has 42 homers with a .584 SLG. His four seasons with the Phillies so far, in home runs: 46, 47, 38 and 42. He went from a fun player to legitimately one of the best sluggers in all of baseball.
The Phillies get the slight edge over the Dodgers here due to Harper having 17 homers in only 90 games with a .490 SLG. Like Freeman, he’s still got the pedigree to put fear into an opponent when stepping into that batter’s box, but he’s closer to his prime slugging age and has a bit more pop at this point.
There shouldn’t be an argument for No. 1, though.
1. Mariners – Cal Raleigh and Eugenio Suárez
As things currently stand, Suárez hasn’t done much at all with the Mariners since the trade (.105 average with one home run and a .211 slugging), but that’s only a 10-game sample. We’re talking about the best home run hitter this season in Raleigh along with a guy who has hit 37 total home runs so far this season and it’s the sixth season in his career he’s topped 30. I don’t think Suárez is going to get back on the home-run hitting pace he had with the D-backs before the deal, but he’ll start popping them again soon enough.
The bottom line is here on Aug. 12, the Mariners have a player with 37 home runs in their lineup and he’s trailing a teammate for the major-league lead by eight.
Who would’ve thought heading into this season that the Mariners could have been ranked first on this list come the middle of August?