Buckle up: It’s nearly Opening Day, so it’s also “breakout player” season.
As always, your mileage may vary on what a ‘breakout’ even means. Casual fans may know little about these players, or think that their story has already been written, but the real deep-league fantasy sickos or team-focused prospect hounds may have been following their every last movement for years. A ‘breakout’ can be a post-hype sleeper finally ready to fulfill that long-ago promise; it can be a young veteran who’s had some success but seems ready to take that next step; it can be a full zero-to-hero type, too.
What’s key, though, is not just “well, he hit well for the last week or two of the season.” It’s if there’s a real reason we can point to behind it, something that might give us a little extra confidence.
We’ll spare you the obvious types like “we think Ben Rice can be even better” (though we do) or “maybe don’t judge top prospect Jac Caglianone by a few disappointing first weeks in the bigs,” skip right past “did Dominic Canzone already break out?” and get right to … our seven favorite position players ready to take a big step forward this year.
Francisco Alvarez, C, Mets
Once the top prospect in baseball, Alvarez struggled so badly last year that the New York tabloids were screaming for his departure even before the Mets actually did send him back to Triple-A in June. By that time, he was hitting a mere .236/.319/.333 and frustrating Mets fans with repeated defensive issues. Entering his fifth Major League season, he still hasn’t established himself in the way that the prospect hype would have projected.
But at 24, he’s essentially the same age as Jacob Wilson and Colson Montgomery, two of last year’s top rookies; he’s still so young. Upon his return, he was a top-15 second-half hitter, at least among those with as many plate appearances as he had. His line looked eerily like that of Juan Soto’s – in half as many times to the plate, it should be noted. As we said, we’re looking for reasons to believe, beyond just the outcomes, and here there are many; back in January, MLB.com’s Jared Greenspan broke down all the easily noticeable changes in Alvarez’s swing, showing that he opened his stance and figured out a way to get more on time with fastballs.
We’re in on that, but there’s more to it here. For all the focus on his bat, the defensive problems were real, as Alvarez’s fielding declined from +11 runs to +2 to a very poor minus-6, as his framing and blocking each declined. Lost, somewhat, in the 12 homers and 1.043 OPS he posted in Syracuse was the work he did with catching coach J.P. Arencibia on his pre-pitch footwork setup – work that Arencibia claimed had “fixed” the issue after just two weeks.
Well, let’s find out, looking at the rate of takes on the edges that Alvarez turned into called strikes. For context: The Major League average there is 42%.
That’s pretty compelling. If Alvarez can even be an average bat and average catcher, that’s a solid everyday player. If he can be better than average at either or both? There’s still star potential here.
Bo Naylor, C, Guardians
Speaking of once-hyped young catchers entering their fifth season who haven’t done a whole lot recently but maybe can take a late-season swing change into something big-time, we have Naylor. The 2018 first-round pick had a nice debut (121 OPS+ in 2023) but hasn’t come near that the last two seasons, hitting only .198/.273/.365, for a 78 OPS+. That was maybe OK in 2024, when he rated as a very good defender behind the plate, but it really didn’t work in 2025, when he was merely an average defender.
Thus it went until September, when Naylor hit .290/.324/.548 (.872 OPS), then homered in Cleveland’s Wild Card Series loss to Detroit. This part is key: A month’s worth of good play does not outweigh two seasons worth of poor play. That said, we wanted to find real changes, and Naylor gave us a good one. His bat is faster, and his stance is totally different. He was openly talking about it in the second half, and the numbers couldn’t be clearer.
His stance widened by an entire foot. His setup, previously one of the most open in the sport, became far more neutral. As MLB.com’s Tim Stebbins went into detail on earlier this month, Naylor swapped out a leg kick for a toe tap, too. If he looked like a different hitter when he was hitting better … well, that’s because he was.
“The mechanical change he made last year was huge for him,” Guardians hitting coach Grant Fink said. While we’re certainly not going to put too much emphasis on one spring homer, the lefty-on-lefty blast he hammered off a pretty good southpaw in Gabe Speier in the WBC certainly caught our attention. Naylor, after all, had just two homers off lefties all last season.
Daulton Varsho, OF, Blue Jays
This one’s different, because unlike Alvarez and Naylor, it’s long been established that Varsho is who he is, which is to say “an absolutely elite defensive center fielder who strikes out too much and has poor OBP skills, but you live with it because a 20-HR Gold Glover is a valuable player.” After parts of six seasons in the Majors, all that’s changed is that he no longer moonlights behind the plate, as he once did with Arizona. He turns 30 this summer. What more could there be?
Maybe nothing, if you look at his .238 average last year, because he will forever be a low-average bat. But two years after hitting 20 homers in 581 plate appearances, Varsho hit 20 homers in only 271 plate appearances, around time missed with shoulder and hamstring issues. Among players with at least 250 times up, that was tied for the seventh-most-frequent-homer-masher, and we hardly need to tell you that the names of the guys above him were along the lines of “Cal, Giancarlo, Aaron, Kyle, and Shohei.” You can find him in a lofty place on the barrels leaderboard, too.
What changed? A huge increase in bat speed, for one, going from a 34% fast-swing rate to 56%. A change in stance, going from 2024’s more-open-than-average to 2025’s slightly closed.
While we cannot caution you enough to put almost no real stock in Spring Training stats, we’re at least aware that a hitter who struck out 28% of the time last year has managed to K just twice in 43 plate appearances.
That’s fun. Don’t focus on it too much. Focus on the idea that if Varsho did what he did last year over a fuller season: That’s a 40-homer bat with elite center field defense. That’s borderline MVP territory – if he shows it.
Spencer Horwitz, 1B/2B, Pirates
Here is perhaps our favorite fun fact of the 2025 season: Which team had the best offensive production out of first base over the final two months of the season? You’re thinking maybe the Blue Jays (Vladimir Guererro Jr.) or Dodgers (Freddie Freeman) or A’s (Nick Kurtz) or any of the other clubs with stars at first and … well, no. It was the Pirates. Yes, really. Horwitz still counts as a breakout possibility because you absolutely did not notice this while it was happening.
Acquired from Toronto in what was essentially a three-teamer last winter, Horwitz missed much of the first part of the season after undergoing spring wrist surgery. It took some time to figure it out after that, as you’d expect; he reached the All-Star break hitting only .232/.298/.329. But the rest of July into August was very good (.833 OPS), and September was fantastic (1.089 OPS), and all of a sudden, Horwitz has gone from an afterthought to a particularly interesting piece in what Pittsburgh hopes is a revitalized lineup.
So what happened? In late July, he also talked about adjustments he’d made, and the numbers back it up – his second-half stance was six inches wider than it had been in May, and more open, too. Whether it was getting healthy, getting a better look at the ball, or both, it’s hard to fake “dropping your strikeout rate from 23% to 14% while also adding nearly 200 points of slugging,” as he did from first half to second.
If there’s concern here, it’s this: The bat does not move fast, leaving Horwitz in just the eighth percentile in swing speed. That doesn’t mean a batter can’t succeed; just ask Steven Kwan or Mookie Betts. It does make the margin for error considerably smaller. The top projection systems think he can be 15% to 20% above average in 2026 which, if not exactly star-level, would be a huge boon for the Pirates.
Agustín Ramírez, C, Marlins
Maybe this should be about whether he can even still be a catcher – Ramírez rated as a very poor defender as a rookie, and he’s been open about the fact that he has to be better there – but we’ll focus on the bat for now. This is actually a good test case for, “Did he already break out?” Ramírez is one of a very few catchers to ever hit 20-plus homers as a rookie, but since it came with a below-average 92 OPS+ and 0.0 WAR due to the defense, there’s still room to improve. (It’s also a good test case for “ignore Spring Training.” He’s 0-for-17, as of Thursday, though he was away at the World Baseball Classic as well.)
Here’s what stood out to us about Ramírez: a powerful metric that we don’t reference terribly often. That’s “blasts,” which simply put means squaring up a ball and doing so with high bat speed. Usually, the squaring-it-up kings are those with slower swings, like Luis Arraez or Kwan, while the faster swings square it up a little less. The combination of both is much harder to do, and leads to incredible outcomes – a blast, in 2025, carried average outcomes of a .547 average and 1.138 slugging.
All that explanation aside, the list of fast swingers who also square it up – those with the highest blasts-per-swing rate – is exactly who you’d expect: the most feared batters in the sport. That’s a list topped by Juan Soto, with Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Shohei Ohtani, Aaron Judge, Kyle Schwarber all in the top 10. It’s such a good list, in fact, that 12 of the top 15 names from last year have made at least one All-Star team. Rice, who already had his breakout, is one of the other three. Pittsburgh’s Oneil Cruz, probably as physically tooled-up as anyone else in the sport, is another.
And, also Ramírez. The combination of bat speed and squaring it up, as a rookie, places him in pretty elite company. As Cruz has shown, that does not alone guarantee success – but if you’re looking for markers, for signs to dream on, they’re in that bat. Besides, if he gets on base even a little more, then his surprisingly good base stealing (16 bags as a rookie) would get more opportunity to shine. Who doesn’t like a potential 20-20 catcher?
Carter Jensen, C, Royals
The biggest roadblock for any Royals catching prospect is the presence of Salvador Perez, but at 36, Perez is spending more time at first base and DH, particularly as it seems Vinnie Pasquantino may be best suited to avoiding tough lefties. Jensen surely isn’t under-the-radar to Royals fans – he did win the organizational hitter of the year award last year, and he grew up in Kansas City to boot – but the greater baseball public might not quite be aware of him, yet.
That, we think, might be a mistake. No, not because he had a .941 OPS in 69 late-season plate appearances, though that certainly helps. It’s because of how he got to that number, which is to say “he absolutely pulverized the baseball.” Among players who had at least 50 plate appearances, Jensen’s barrel rate was the highest in the sport, where Judge, Ohtani, and Pete Alonso were next. We cannot stress enough that 69 plate appearances are something like 10% of what those stars took, and that in no way does this say that Jensen is as talented as they are.
What it does say, though, is that he didn’t dink-and-dunk-and-good-luck his way to fluky numbers over a few weeks. Past research has shown that barrel rate tells you something after approximately 50 batted balls. Jansen had: 48. Close enough.
Jeremiah Jackson, INF, Orioles
OK, let's get deeper – much deeper, because some of the names above might be too well known. We have to get a little more off the radar to finish this off.
Now, should this be Coby Mayo, a far more highly touted Orioles infield prospect with a clearer path to playing time? Yes, probably – but that’s less fun. Perhaps Vance Honeycutt, a former first-rounder who was the early talk of camp when he homered four times in a row? Well, no; he has just one hit since, and he slugged .275 in Single-A last year. Instead, may we suggest a player once drafted by the Angels, later traded to the Mets and picked up by the Orioles two years ago as a Minor League free agent?
Consider this, to start. You didn’t notice, but in 183 Major League plate appearances last year, Jackson put up a 117 OPS+, which is to say “17% above average.” Now, that wasn’t fully supported by the underlying Statcast metrics, but we like seeing some top-level success already in the books, and what really caught our eye is what he did at Triple-A, even beyond the 1.073 OPS that was one of the best marks at the level. (Let’s not go too wild on it: We’re talking 171 plate appearances.)
No, the leaderboard to look at is the 2025 Triple-A list of highest barrels per plate appearance, limited to those 25-and-under to keep it to younger prospects and not up-and-down veterans with big league time. The top 10 there is full of either top prospects on the verge (Carson Benge, Bryce Eldridge, Spencer Jones, etc.) or those who spent some time in the Minors last year before establishing themselves in the bigs later on (Roman Anthony, Sal Stewart, Samuel Basallo, etc).
Plus, Jackson hit a jaw-dropping blast for his first Major League homer last summer …
… and scorched three balls on Wednesday (105.7, 100.7, and 99.1 mph), including his first spring home run. Is this one likely to hit? Assuredly not; it’s not even clear he’ll make the Opening Day roster. But we said we wanted to get deep. This one’s deep.