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Who is going to surprise baseball this season? We have a new stat that could predict the future.

• For all the work done projecting the 2025 MLB season, we know the final standings aren’t going to match the preseason forecasts.
• The fun part is seeing the teams that emerge from this morass of rational prediction and become surprise stories — the breakouts.
• Last year we asked, What sort of traits do breakout teams tend to share? and applied those characteristics to spit out our list. The approach worked OK. Two of the five teams made major win leaps — the New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals. The Boston Red Sox improved in the win column but still landed at .500. Meanwhile, the Washington Nationals and Pittsburgh Pirates repeated their precise win totals from 2023. Well, at least none of the five got worse or collapsed.
• This year, we revamped our model — using a simplified, player-centric approach. Namely: Which teams have a lot of players who might break out? We also folded in this question: What would a breakout season for a team even mean?
• For teams that already project to be in the postseason, a breakout doesn’t necessarily mean a greatly enhanced chance at getting into the bracket, but it might mean more of a shot at a division title, pennant or World Series. Conversely, for teams like the Chicago White Sox, a breakout might not mean much in terms of playing on when the regular season ends — and because of those lower stakes, we’re not including them among the “breakouts.”
• Two types of teams, then, seem built for this: (1) those that figure to use a lot of young players in important roles and (2) those with a number of key players coming off subpar or injury-marred seasons who project to bounce back.
• Let’s break down the breakouts
• 1. San Francisco Giants
• Breakout index: 108.7
• 2025 win projection: 80
• 2024 win total: 80
• Key result: 818 playoff berths gained
• How we ranked the breakout teams
• 1. Using player-level breakout, collapse and attrition forecasts from claydavenport.com, I calculated these statistics at the team level by weighting Davenport’s numbers by my playing time estimates.
• 2. These team breakout and collapse rates were used to introduce an additional layer of randomness to the simulation process. Teams might break out or collapse in any given simulation season based on these rates, with the teams having higher breakout rates getting more of these breakout seasons, and vice versa for collapses.
• 3. The 10,000 simulations produced similar regular-season projections, with some variance based on the relative disparities between each club’s breakout and collapse rate. The larger differences were found in the frequency of playoff berths, pennants and World Series titles gained or lost because of the breakout and collapse rates, as compared to a set of simulations that didn’t use those rates.
• 4. Initial breakout scores were determined using this formula: playoff berths gained plus pennants gained times two plus championships gained times four. The final breakout index converts the breakout scores to a simple number, with 100 being the league average.
• Note: 2025 win projections represent the average between my current post-simulation forecast and the current over/under figure for season wins at ESPN Bet.
• The Giants are in the middle of the pack in terms of their baseline player-level improvement rate. Their finish in the top spot has less to do with that and more to do with what each simulated breakout season meant for a club that looks thoroughly imbued with mediocrity.
• The National League West looks like a fierce derby this season, led by the powerhouse Los Angeles Dodgers but also featuring two prime playoff candidates in the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres. All winter, the Giants have lagged behind all three teams in the forecasts. But a breakout season would get them past at least one of those teams, and almost every time that happened in the sims, it meant a playoff berth. That whispers about the upside for a team that enters the season with roughly a 1-in-4 shot at the playoffs.
• The Giants’ top two breakout candidates show the two main types of players who end up with that label, at least in this system. Coming in first is Heliot Ramos, a longtime prospect who showed signs in 2024 of finally coming into his own. Coming in second is Robbie Ray — a former Cy Young winner who is looking to get all the way back from Tommy John surgery.
• For what it’s worth, Ray has looked dazzling this spring, with 17 strikeouts and zero walks over three outings.
• 2. Milwaukee Brewers
• Breakout index: 108.6
• 2025 win projection: 81
• 2024 win total: 93
• Key result: Third-lowest collapse rate
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• It’s fascinating to see how, in this approach, breakout and collapse rates interact. Yes, young teams tend to have higher breakout rates, but they also in many cases have low collapse rates. After all, what would a young player be collapsing from? The Brewers are one of the teams that combine a low collapse rate with an above-average breakout rate.
• Last year, the method zeroed in on teams that might make a leap from one year to the next. This year focuses on which teams might beat their empirical expectation. For Milwaukee, this expectation feels low — an 81-win baseline — for a team that won 93 games a season ago. But that’s roughly what my system yielded and the over/unders mostly undergird that conclusion.
• But the Brewers have youth and athleticism all over the field, making them not only a statistical breakout candidate but one you can actually see when you watch them play.
• The Brewers’ top breakout candidates are hitters and none of them will come as a surprise: Jackson Chourio, Brice Turang and Sal Frelick.
• 3. Tampa Bay Rays
• Breakout index: 108.2
• 2025 win projection: 80
• 2024 win total: 80
• Key result: Fifth-highest rate of player breakouts
• The Rays have a classic breakout candidate leading the way in young masher Junior Caminero. The top pitcher breakout candidate is Taj Bradley. But in general, the Rays’ best hope for a team-wide breakout isn’t so much based on per-rata performance but a collective ramp up in volume from starting pitchers such as Shane McClanahan and Drew Rasmussen. Also, per the Davenport translations that fuel this piece, we should keep an eye on Garrett Cleavinger and Edwin Uceta in the bullpen.
• 4. Detroit Tigers
• Breakout index: 107.3
• 2025 win projection: 83
• 2024 win total: 86
• Key result: MLB-best breakout/collapse ratio
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• No team could have a better combination of breakout and collapse rates because the Tigers lead the way in both categories. That gives them the largest bump in baseline win total (0.82). lt also gives them 97 more simulated titles, the biggest leap among our top 10. (The biggest overall leap in titles was Arizona’s 135, but a high team collapse rate kept the Diamondbacks off this list.) This pretty much dovetails with what we think about the Tigers, right? Detroit is a young team that had a taste of success in 2024 and still has a number of young key contributors getting better, led by Riley Greene.
• 5. St. Louis Cardinals
• Breakout index: 107.2
• 2025 win projection: 79
• 2024 win total: 83
• Key result: Third-least stable projection
• What an enigma. The fourth-highest team collapse rate is the driving factor in the stability rating, which isn’t the focus of this piece but really stands out here. And yet the Cardinals also have the 10th-highest improve rate. It’s as if there are two different teams on one roster. Driving the happy part of this are breakout candidates Masyn Winn, Andre Pallante and Jordan Walker. In fact, Winn’s weighted breakout score makes him the fourth-highest rated candidate in the majors. Ahead of him: Anthony Volpe of the Yankees, Bobby Witt Jr. of the Royals and Ezequiel Tovar of the Rockies. And, yes, this is saying that Witt might break out on top of his 2024 leap, which is frightening. Also: There are a lot of exciting young shortstops in baseball right now.
• 6. Cincinnati Reds
• Breakout index: 106.7
• 2025 win projection: 77
• 2024 win total: 77
• Key result: 39 titles gained
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• The way in which this extra randomness of using breakout and collapse rates democratizes the playoff portion of the simulations is a boon for a team like Cincinnati, which won just 12 titles in the control group version of the simulations. It’s less exciting for the real frontrunners such as the Dodgers, Yankees and Braves. The Dodgers, incidentally, own the lowest overall breakout rate but rank first in stability. So don’t get too excited. The top two-rated breakout candidates are, unsurprisingly, Elly De La Cruz and Hunter Greene. Any scenario in which the Reds were to go on a run would almost certainly be fueled by those two leveling up at the same time.
• 7. Athletics
• Breakout index: 106.5
• 2025 win projection: 72
• 2024 win total: 69
• Key result: 299 additional AL West titles
• The A’s can’t rely on another Brent Rooker breakout, but for him the status quo will do just fine. If Lawrence Butler, buoyed by the extension he signed, replicates his second half of 2024 over a full season, that’s a breakout. Keep an eye on JJ Bleday and Tyler Soderstrom as well.
• 8. Los Angeles Angels
• Breakout index: 106.3
• 2025 win projection: 73
• 2024 win total: 63
• Key result: 668 playoff berths gained
• The Angels don’t actually have a number of obvious breakout candidates. Having Mike Trout on the field for 140 or so games would serve as that and more. This placing reflects an interesting thing about the work GM Perry Minasian did over the winter in building up his roster with non-star, stable-veteran types. This system noticed: The Angels have the sixth-best stability rate among the projections. Of course, since the Angels aren’t forecast to be a playoff team, they could use a little more variability.
• 9. Pittsburgh Pirates
• Breakout index: 106.1
• 2025 win projection: 75
• 2024 win total: 76
• Key result: 0 multiyear free agents
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• I guess I cheated in selecting a number that didn’t have anything to do with this exercise, but it still irks me, so there it is. The Pirates do have a high degree of stability in their forecasts, more so than pure breakout rate, and this resulted in 704 additional playoff berths from the control set of simulations, ranking third behind the Giants and A’s.
• But that’s all just more reason to be annoyed at Pittsburgh’s lack of aggression in building around its potentially dynamite young rotation. Paul Skenes should see a marked uptick in innings, which is a manner of breakout but of course there’s barely any ceiling in what he might do. The Pirates’ highest-ranked breakout candidate in this system is Skenes’ rotation mate, Jared Jones.
• 10. Cleveland Guardians
• Breakout index: 106.0
• 2025 win projection: 80
• 2024 win total: 92
• Key result: Second-highest improve rate
• There are so many similarities between Cleveland and Milwaukee that maybe I’ll just make them my subjective picks for the 2025 World Series, just to make up for all the analytical systems (including mine) that seem to be selling them short.
• Like the Brewers, the Guardians are predicted to take a big step back after winning a AL Central Division title last year. In both cases, it’s not obvious why this happened but math is math, so what are you going to do?
• But there is one difference between these clubs in this system. Though the Brewers’ place above was built on a combination of above-average breakout rate and rock-bottom collapse rate, the converse is true of the Guardians. Their collapse rate is middle of the pack but their collective improve rate is the second highest in baseball behind the Tigers. So if Cleveland and Detroit both get all of those breakouts, it’ll be a fun Central race between these two old rivals.
• The Guardians have a number of strong breakout candidates: Steven Kwan, Lane Thomas and Brayan Rocchio are familiar faces, but add to the list Bo Naylor, Jhonkensy Noel and Kyle Manzardo — all hitters.