Szymborski’s 2023 Breakout Candidates: Hitters

We’ve reached the point in the offseason when it’s time for one of my favorite/most hated preseason traditions: my attempt to predict breakouts and busts. Since any breakouts or busts beyond what a projection system suggests are naturally going to be low-probability outcomes, there’s a high probability of me looking pretty silly — something writers try to avoid. Let’s start by looking back at how smart I was last year…or how foolish:

First, the bad news. Kelenic and Adell were both just awful, and I would definitely call 2022 a giant miss for both players as they enter their post-prospect period. I suspect there’s more hope to still be had for Kelenic than Adell, but I wouldn’t exactly call myself prescient about either. Kepler’s breakout didn’t happen at all, and his power all but disappeared. Anderson I’ll call an incomplete because of injury, and while Higashioka did match his entire previous career in WAR, that was largely due to defense, which I can hardly claim credit for predicting. Hiura did hit far better than he had recently, but he also didn’t exactly get a ton of playing time with the Brewers, who appeared to have lost interest in him. There were a few triumphs, however: Kwan and Lux both had excellent seasons, especially the former.

Now, let’s turn to this year’s picks, as I throw myself upon the tender mercies of fortune.

Bryson Stott, Philadelphia Phillies

Stott struggled at times in 2022 and while he did show flashes of brilliance, he mostly didn’t look like a former first-round pick and top 100 prospect, at least early on. Because his first full professional season was ruined by COVID-19 shutting down the minors, he had to advance very quickly through the minors in 2021 just to get himself in a position for a full-time job in the majors last year. Stott couldn’t steal a hit through the first couple months of the season, and through the end of May, his hard-hit rate was a brutally low 22.9%. His 38.4% mark after May wouldn’t be confused with that of an elite power hitter, but it enabled him to hit some home runs, and with his BABIP also improving to “normal” levels, he was quite strong in the second half of the season. I think it’s possible to read too much into first half/second half splits, but I really think he’s much closer to the hitter he was in the second half (106 wRC+) than the first (58 wRC+).

Gleyber Torres, New York Yankees

Is this cheating? If so, well, I’m doing it anyway. Torres had a bit of a comeback season in 2022, but his line still didn’t match up to where he was at ages 21 and 22 before his clunker of a junior year. People sometimes forget that he’s still young — 2023 is his age-26 season — and I think a player can have multiple breakouts if there’s a long enough stretch of mediocrity in-between. Torres’ velocity numbers exploded last year, with a huge jump in his exit velocity data, and given that he has been a young superstar before, I still think there’s some of that left in him. I swear, I’m not just trying to wishcast his very optimistic long-term ZiPS projections pre-2020 back into existence!

Seiya Suzuki, Chicago Cubs

Suzuki didn’t exactly disappoint in his first season in the United States, but for those who were expecting instant stardom, it was a bit of letdown. But his NPB résumé doesn’t get memory-holed just because he has a full season in the United States; historically, projections get much less accurate if you remove NPB or KBO data after a player’s first full year stateside. You’d have made a big mistake last year if you wrote off Ha-Seong Kim based on an unimpressive rookie campaign and I think you’d be making a similar mistake if you just assume that one of Japan’s best hitters in 2021 can’t be a star here. It won’t be enough to put the Cubs on equal footing with the Brewers or Cardinals, but I think Suzuki still has a lot of star potential. This assumes, of course, that a month of rest resolves his oblique issue and that it isn’t an ongoing problem this season.

Oneil Cruz, Pittsburgh Pirates

Will Cruz’s contact rate improve? He’s never going to be Luis Arraez, but Cruz is still young enough that there’s hope he can get that whiff rate into more respectable territory rather than being even with Javier Báez’s career numbers. ZiPS allows me to request different projection scenarios, and one I did this winter out of curiosity was to see which players would get the most benefit from a contact rate five percentage points better than projected. No player in baseball got a bigger boost than Cruz, with each percentage point greatly increasing his ability to leverage his impressive physical tools. Just getting him up to a 72% rate, still safely below-average, was enough to push him into superstar territory. And that kind of offensive boost would help cushion the blow if he needs to move to another position, which, sadly, looks increasingly likely. Cruz’s upside is just so massive that I can’t not put him here.

Jesús Sánchez, Miami Marlins

My colleague Ben Clemens picked Sánchez as a breakout candidate based on just how freaking hard he can hit the ball, and how average exit velocity wasn’t truly capturing that ability. That’s one of the reasons to like him, but what also encourages me is that he was while in the minors in 2022, Sánchez showed considerable progress in drawing walks (sadly, the Pacific Coast League had public StatCast data but the International League did not). What I found especially maddening last season was that while Sánchez’s July wasn’t a good showing (.587 OPS), that was partially fueled by a .193 BABIP and significant improvement in his plate discipline. Sánchez drew as many walks in July as he did in April through June combined. That wasn’t just a mirage, either — both his out-of-zone swing percentage and contact rate also showed significant positive changes:

Remember, things like plate discipline are predictive in far fewer plate appearances than, say, hitting singles is. Given that progress, and with the Marlins not seriously contending at that point in the season, I would have liked to have seen the team stick with him. He didn’t have much more to prove in the minors.

Jordan Walker, St. Louis Cardinals

Walker ranked 12th on the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects despite rather lackluster mean projections for the next few years. As I noted at the time, the reason he ranked so highly wasn’t his average outcome, but just how crazy-good the upside scenarios were. I know spring training makes a liar out guys sometimes, but damn if Walker hasn’t looked like a legitimate major league hitter, even ignoring (as much as you can) an OPS over 1.000 and six extra-base hits in 28 spring at-bats. It’s bent the curve just enough that I’m a believer in one of those upside scenarios coming into play. It doesn’t hurt that the Cardinals are one of the best organizations in baseball at giving players chances when they deserve it while also putting those players in roles that maximize how good they are.

Riley Greene, Detroit Tigers

One of the components included in ZiPS is its own version of xStats (which I give the ultra-creative moniker zStats) with more bits of data used. No player in 2022 underperformed his zBB, zSO, and zHR stats, which are derived from Statcast and plate discipline data, more than Greene did. All told, ZiPS thinks that Greene underperformed in strikeouts by an incredible 31 Ks in 2022, second only to Bo Bichette (who I can hardly stretch into calling a breakout candidate). Greene’s home run underperformance was fourth in baseball (6.7 homers, behind only Gary Sanchez, José Abreu, and Ronald Acuña Jr.), and he “should have” had five more walks than he actually did. These components aren’t as predictive for hitters as they are on the pitching side, where their predictive value exceeds actual performance by a considerably margin. But they’re as predictive as actual stats, and combining zStats and the real numbers provides something considerably more predictive than either of them individually. Just convince Greene to get a little more loft in his swing, as he’s trying to do, and suddenly, there’s enough upside that he might wipe out the disappointment if Spencer Torkelson doesn’t bounce back.

Andrew Vaughn, Chicago White Sox

Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I think the way the team has handled Vaughn has greatly hindered his development. He was brought up to the majors very aggressively without ever really getting the hang of hitting minor league pitchers, and the team has jerked him in and out of the lineup. Chicago’s roster construction also hasn’t helped, resulting in him playing a lot in the outfield, a position he clearly couldn’t handle. And I really mean clearly, on the level of Todd Hundley’s brief experiment. He was a trooper about the whole thing, but he’s finally (hopefully) going to exclusively play first base, his college position.

Vaughn’s 113 wRC+ strikes me as quite impressive given how much has been working against him. He hits the ball very hard (48.4% hard-hit rate in 2022) in a park (the grotesquely named Guaranteed Rate Field) that is conducive to home run hitting. Now that he can just concentrate on hitting, I think he can do far better, and I can’t help but be moved by how monstrous those high-percentile projections are in ZiPS.