Baseball America's best Brewers prospect of 2025 should come as no surprise

As the Milwaukee Brewers enter the final week of the regular season, down in the farm system, play has already wrapped for each of their minor league affiliates. Just one, the Double-A Biloxi Shuckers, qualified for the postseason, which ended in an unfortunate two-game sweep at the hands of the Montgomery Biscuits, the Tampa Bay Rays' Double-A team who has now eliminated the Shuckers from the playoffs in back-to-back seasons.

With the minor league season all but complete (only the Triple-A playoffs remain), one of the leading prospect ranking groups, Baseball America, released their picks for each organization's minor league player of the year in 2025. The publication, which competes with other prospect rankings lists such as the highly-popular MLB Pipeline Top 100 list, has been bullish on the Brewers' farm system for a while, especially the organization's top two prospects, Jesús Made and Luis Peña.

While Peña and Made each had impressive follow-up campaigns to their 2024 breakouts in the Dominican Summer League, the latter continued hitting at an impressive clip after the two young infielders were promoted to High-A, whereas Peña's numbers took a hit after he joined the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers.

Therefore, while Peña posted better numbers in Low-A, where the two played a majority of their games this season, it's Made who takes home Baseball America's minor league player of the year in the Brewers' organization for his impressive response to the late-season promotion.

Baseball America names Jesús Made the Milwaukee Brewers' 2025 minor league player of the year

Made's first full professional season (the DSL and other rookie leagues only compete for a few months in the summer) began in Low-A, where he and several other top Brewers prospects competed for the Carolina Mudcats in their final year as a franchise. Made, who was 17 years old at the start of the season, performed more than admirably, especially considering he was the youngest player in all of Low-A. In 83 games for the Mudcats, Made posted a .267/.373/.388 slash line, which proved that the impressive ability to get on base that he displayed in the DSL in 2024 was no fluke.

However, what made Made stand out as a prospect a season ago was his unique blend of plate discipline and power, and through the first few months of the season, his power numbers were not what Brewers fans hoped they would be. Then, Made joined the Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, the Brewers' High-A affiliate, and everything changed.

In just 27 games, Made slugged 11 extra-base hits for the T-Rats, resulting in a slugging percentage of exactly .500. All the while, he continued to get on base at an impressive clip, pairing his improved power numbers with an OBP north of .400. For a now-18-year-old playing against some stiff competition in the Midwest League, maintaining a .915 OPS through roughly five weeks of games is an unbelievable feat.

The Brewers likely weren't planning on giving Made another promotion, but his performance in the Fox Cities forced their hand. Once the Timber Rattlers' season came to an end, the Brewers' top prospect joined the Double-A Biloxi Shuckers for their stretch run. He ended up collecting eight hits in 32 at-bats between the Shuckers' final regular season series and two postseason games, including a solo homer to open the scoring in what would be Biloxi's final game of the season, a 4-2 loss to the Biscuits in the Southern League Division Series.

All in all, Made's 2025 campaign was exactly the type of season that the prospect phenom needed. He was challenged with better competition and continued to show the same exciting tools that made him a popular name among prospect evaluators a season ago. It remains to be seen whether Made will begin the 2026 season back in Appleton with the T-Rats, or if his brief Double-A audition was enough to make the Brewers feel comfortable starting him in Biloxi next year. Regardless, it's clear that Milwaukee has another unique talent in its farm system.