My list of breakout candidates last year was shorter than usual, with just five names, because I didn’t feel strongly enough about anyone else to endorse them. Two of the five did break out, with Triston McKenzie having a huge season, while poor Gavin Lux had a moderate breakout (1.1 fWAR to 3.0, 90 wRC+ to 113). The others — Jarred Kelenic, Daniel Lynch and Dylan Carlson — are still possible breakout players for this year, with Lynch the least likely given the lack of any real changes to his stuff so far this spring.
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This year’s list has 10 names on it, from eight teams, plus a few more guys at the end who I haven’t completely given up on even though they haven’t panned out like I expected yet. Only non-rookies are eligible, since I’ve already ranked this year’s rookies for potential impact, and also wrote a lot of words about prospects that you should go read anyway. So preseason Rookie of the Year favorites Corbin Carroll and Gunnar Henderson aren’t here, nor are contenders Triston Casas and Grayson Rodríguez, but I still think they’re going to have great debuts.
Brayan Bello, RHP, Boston Red Sox
I had Justin Havens on my podcast in January, and he mentioned Bello as one of his two breakout candidates for 2023. I’m going to join him on the Bello Bus, as the sophomore right-hander had some awful luck on balls in play last year and his stuff should allow him to limit overall contact and limit hard contact as well. Bello has an out pitch in his changeup, which has big tailing action and good separation from the heater, and gets huge sink on his two-seamer to generate groundballs (56 percent last year in the majors). His .404 BABIP allowed is going to come down, probably a lot, so while he’ll allow a few more homers this year, I think he’s poised to take a big step forward. One quick caveat is that he missed much of the spring with forearm tightness, making a very successful spring debut on March 19, and will start the year on the injured list as he builds back up. Justin also cited Baltimore’s Ryan Mountcastle as his hitter breakout candidate, although I don’t buy Mountcastle’s approach or pitch recognition enough to join him there.
Alec Bohm, 3B, Philadelphia Phillies
Bohm makes a lot of hard contact, and cut his strikeout and whiff rates from 2021 to 2022, by getting more aggressive early in counts and hunting fastballs. In 2021, he hit offspeed stuff well but fastballs killed him; that flipped in 2022, as he was best against fastballs and struggled against sliders and cutters in particular. I think this is a matter of consolidating everything he’s shown he can do into one season, which isn’t a guarantee but certainly something we expect good hitters to do with experience. He has always projected to hit and his swing is as good as it was in college when the Phillies made him the third pick in the 2018 draft. I think this year he hits for more average and gets to 20-plus homers. I make no promises about his defense, though. I’ll also add that I saw Scott Kingery briefly this spring and his swing did look substantially better than it has in the past few years; someone on their minor-league side changed his swing for the worse right as he came to the majors, and I think that’s at least the primary reason he hasn’t hit in his major-league trials. I’ve got some hope here for the first time in a while.
JT Brubaker, RHP, Pittsburgh Pirates
I saw Brubaker during my spring training run through Florida — which was great for draft scouting, less so for seeing pro guys — and spoke to an exec who also praised what he’d seen and heard of the right-hander this spring. Brubaker is a sinker/slider guy, mostly, while his four-seamer and changeup get hammered — the four-seamer especially was vulnerable, with hitters hitting .417 and slugging .750 when they hit it. In the game I saw, against the Blue Jays, Brubaker stuck to his sinker, with Statcast registering all of his fastballs as sinkers and none as four-seamers, while he threw just three changeups in his 68 pitches. I wish his slider had break more commensurate with its spin, but hitters have whiffed on it 42 percent of the time they’ve swung at it over the past two years. If he sticks to the sinker, slider, and curveball, with the occasional changeup to left-handed batters only (which is how he’s used it the past two years), and ditches the four-seamer, he’s got a chance to at least step up to be a league-average starter.
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Read more: Keith Law’s takeaways on three potential MLB Draft first rounders at Wake Forest and Miami
Edward Cabrera, RHP, Miami Marlins
I’ve been a Cabrera booster for a while now, and he made a lot of progress just from 2021 to 2022 as he adjusted to the major-league ball. Cabrera’s changeup has always been his out pitch, but he struggled to throw it in his big-league debut in ’21, giving up a ton of hard contact on the pitch in large part because he got less movement on it. He turned that around last year, with Baseball Savant showing the pitch’s run value going from +8 in 2021 to -10 in 2022, making it the seventh-most valuable changeup by run prevention in 2022, even though he threw far fewer changeups than the six guys ahead of him. (I do have questions about whether the Statcast system correctly tagged his pitches in 2021, as at least a few fastballs at the low end of his velocity range were tagged as changeups.) Cabrera’s 2022 season was marked by some good luck, as he had an 86 percent strand rate and allowed just a .207 BABIP, both of which are going to regress to the mean rather quickly. I’m betting that he takes a big enough step forward in his strikeout rate to counteract that, and throws enough of a full season to call it a real breakout.
Riley Greene, OF, Detroit Tigers
I could even have made this an all-Tigers column with Spencer Torkelson, but I feel more strongly about Greene becoming a star than I do about Torkelson doing so. Greene struck out over 28 percent of the time last year, but it wasn’t a swing-and-miss issue — he took a ton of called strikes, and that’s an easier thing to improve. When he makes contact, it’s generally hard contact, and he’s already posted top exit velocities well above the median even as a 21-year-old. He might not become a star this year, but that’s in his future, and for 2023 I expect him to get to 15-plus homers and an OBP over .340 as he cuts his strikeout rate by several points.
Keibert Ruiz, C, Washington Nationals
The Nats probably hope I’m right here, since they just gave Ruiz a big contract extension, but I think that deal’s going to work out for both sides. Ruiz is an exceptional hitter for contact who has flashed some power in the minors but hit just seven balls over the fence in his first full season in the majors in 2022. He doesn’t make a lot of hard contact, but his top-end exit velocities are more than enough to project him to 15-odd homers a year; he hit 50 balls into play with EVs of 100 mph or more last year, which I think gets lost in stats like average exit velocity (his was below the median) or hard-hit rate (his was, um, WAY below the median). I could see him peaking at 20 homers or so, but for this year I see around 15 homers and about 20 more points of batting average, .270-275, all of which would make him an above-average regular even without any boost in his walk rate or his defense.
Cole Ragans, LHP, Texas Rangers
Ragans is a two-time Tommy John recipient, and when he finally debuted in the majors last year, it seemed more like a feel-good story than anything else, as he averaged just 92.1 mph on his four-seamer and got hit very hard. This spring, he’s touched 98 several times and 97 in every outing, and combined with the pitch’s high spin rate and huge arm-side run, it should go from being a major weakness (the pitch was worth -13 runs last year, per Statcast) to an asset. He’s got a big-breaking curveball and a changeup with plus fade, with the curveball playing up because its spin-based direction is dead opposite to that of the fastball and change. I do worry that his two main pitches both move away from right-handers, while he needs his curve and cutter (which could also be better with the better arm strength) to work more east-west and keep right-handed hitters from creeping up on the plate … but that we’re even at a point where that’s the main concern is a sign that his prospects are much brighter this year.
Leody Taveras, OF, Texas Rangers
Taveras is currently out with a low-grade oblique strain, which isn’t ideal but I hope won’t keep him out too much past Opening Day. Taveras is still just 24 this year, and in 2022 showed improvement across the board, cutting his strikeout rate and making more hard contact than he did the year before. He set new career highs in max and average exit velocity, while walking about 25 percent more often than he did in 2021. I admit to being a longtime booster of Leody’s, but I think the early disappointments from when he came to the majors at age 21 before he was really strong enough to impact big-league pitching are irrelevant now. I think he’s a league-average hitter this year, and there’s more power to come, if not in 2023 then in the next two to three years.
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Andrew Vaughn, 1B, Chicago White Sox
I’m betting that getting Vaughn out of left field and returning him to his natural position, first base, will help him become the hitter the White Sox thought they were getting when they drafted him third overall in 2019. Vaughn was an extremely patient hitter who hit for average with some power in college, but in the majors, he’s been much less disciplined while making harder contact. He did show significant adjustments from 2021 to 2022, making better swing decisions and picking up pitch types better. Two things alone should help him go from a replacement-level player last year to one who’s at least 2 wins above it this year — moving out of left field and getting better results on balls in play against lefties, against whom he was really unlucky last year. He rarely strikes out with the platoon advantage and 32 percent of the balls he hit into play against lefties were at 100 mph exit velocities or harder, but he had just six extra-base hits and a .377 slugging percentage against southpaws. I think there’s more improvement overall coming, but those two areas are low-hanging fruit for Vaughn and Chicago.
Matt Vierling, OF, Detroit Tigers
I said at the time of the trade that sent Vierling to the Tigers with two other players for Gregory Soto that I thought Vierling might be a breakout candidate, because he has shown he can make very hard contact but hasn’t converted that into big production yet. Among all players who had at least 200 plate appearances in the majors last year, he had the fifth-worst differential between his actual wOBA and his expected wOBA based on his Statcast metrics (exit velocity, launch angle, etc.), in part because a lot of his hardest contact came on groundballs. He’s a very good athlete who could handle center and should be an above-average defender in either corner, and I think more of that hard contact is going to go out to the gaps this year, raising his average and slugging percentage.
A few other players I liked as prospects who haven’t produced yet in the majors but for whom I hold out some hope: Cristian Pache, OF, Oakland; Nick Pratto, 1B, Kansas City; Alex Kirilloff, OF, Minnesota; Vidal Bruján, UTIL, Tampa Bay.
(Top photo of Riley Greene: Nuccio DiNuzzo/Getty Images)
