Last week, I discussed the players who terrified me as we headed into the second month of the season. This time around, we get to the happier side of the coin -- those players who are having legitimate breakout 2018 seasons, not April mirages. Separating the Chris Sheltons from the Jose Bautistas of the baseball world is tricky, but predictions aren't too exciting if there's no risk of being incredibly wrong.
Yoan Moncada, Chicago White Sox: Yes, Moncada strikes out a lot, and while there will likely be some bit of improvement long term, he's going to always be a player who whiffs frequently. But what makes me unconcerned about this issue is that he swings hard and is swinging at the pitches he's supposed to be swinging at. Before being placed on the disabled list over the weekend with a tight hamstring, Moncada ranked 22nd best of 174 qualifiers at not swinging at out-of-zone pitches. He's not always hitting strikes, but what he is hitting, he's hitting hard, currently in the top 10 in baseball in average exit velocity. His .868 OPS will come down a bit once he's healthy, but he is a solid second baseman and can lose 100 points and still be a terrific player.
Outlook: The ZiPS projection of .249/.340/.418 the rest of the way looks about right to me in the batting average and on-base percentage, but I suspect Moncada's slugging percentage winds up north of .450. I'm not worried about the hamstring unless it becomes a nagging issue.
Adam Ottavino, Colorado Rockies: Breakouts are even more fun when they have a story attached. Struggling veteran reliever loses his control (6.6 BB/9) and struggles seriously for the first time in his major league career. Repurposes a vacant shoe store as a top-secret pitching bunker. Becomes absolutely unhittable and is declared Emperor of the World. OK, I made up that last bit, but we're one sports montage away from a screenplay. Ottavino has all but abandoned his traditional 95 mph fastball this year, going with his worm-burning two-seamer and aggressively using his slider in any count against any hitter. He has 35 strikeouts and has allowed just five hits in 19 innings. You can't fake that.
Outlook: Pitching in Coors is always an uphill battle, so I expect an ERA somewhere around 3.00 for the rest of the season, but I might still be underestimating Ottavino.
Didi Gregorius, New York Yankees: Will Gregorius finish the season with an OPS bordering on 1.100? That's extremely unlikely, of course, but so is hitting 10 homers in 32 games. He won't end the 2018 campaign with 50 home runs, but ZiPS already has his over/under at 30 for the year, enough to make him more than a borderline star. (He hit 25 last year, but home runs are down so far this season, making 30 even more impressive than it sounds.) Gregorius already was the first Yankee with more than 50 percent of his plate appearances while playing shortstop to hit 25 home runs in 2017, and he'll set a new record this year. Did I mention he's doubling his career walk rate?
Outlook: Gregorius' batting average drops to around the .300 mark, but he beats the current home run projections and approaches 35 homers.
Mike Clevinger, Cleveland Indians: In March, I labeled Clevinger as one of the players most likely to beat his projections in 2018 (his ZiPS was 4.43 ERA). What he has actually done so far, with a 2.82 ERA and a 3.12 FIP to back it up, isn't likely to make me change my mind. His 5 percent ratio of home runs to fly balls rate is unsustainably low, but his curveball ought to also be missing more bats than it has so far this year, so I don't expect his ERA to balloon all that much.
Outlook: ZiPS still thinks he's only a league-average pitcher. I'm more optimistic and think his ERA will be in the 3.70-3.90 range for the next five months.
Kyle Schwarber, Chicago Cubs: Schwarber's 2015 debut was wholly successful, a .246/.355/.487 rookie season that featured jaw-dropping power. After a year of injury and a year of struggles, Super Nintendo Schwarber is back, and while he still hits for incredible power, he's also swinging at fewer bad pitches and making more contact than he did even in 2015. Despite the Opening Day adventures, he's proving to be far more adequate in the outfield than many people, including myself, had thought.
Outlook: ZiPS projects an .834 OPS for Schwarber the rest of the season, up from his .821 preseason projection. I'll say .850.
Bud Norris, St. Louis Cardinals: Norris seems almost like some hallucinogenic fantasy after watching him as a starting pitcher in Baltimore. Norris revived his career in relief after completely abandoning his mediocre changeup and replacing it with a nasty cutter. This is the year he has put everything together, and after allowing four walks per game last year, he has only issued two walks total this season. His continued mastery of the cutter has even made his 95 mph fastball more effective; prior to this season, FanGraphs pitch value had his heater delivering below-average results every single year of his career. Until now. The Cards found their closer, and it turned out to not be Greg Holland.
Outlook: I see no warnings in his stat line or stuff. I believe his ERA will stay below 3.00. Shockingly, he's having this start despite a .366 BABIP, which almost has to go down.
Jorge Soler, Kansas City Royals: When the Royals were still hanging around the wild-card race for a time last year, they had a reasonable excuse to not just hand Soler a job and let him run with it, to succeed or fail on his merits. This year, there's no such out, and to their credit, the Royals have let Soler have the job and take his cuts. So far, it has paid off. He has made significant strides in his plate discipline and is now less prone to swinging at bad pitches than he was while with the Cubs. And in a rebuilding season, the Royals will hopefully do a better job of letting him play through his struggles, should they recur.
Outlook: Something along the lines of .250/.350/.450 with another 15 homers, and one confusing short-term benching when he has a bad couple of weeks.
Carlos Martinez, St. Louis Cardinals: We've been waiting for him to have that Cy Young-esque breakout season, to go from borderline star to major one. We might just be seeing that now. Martinez's wide arsenal of pitches got even larger this spring, as he has added a cutter learned from Adam Wainwright. ZiPS now projects Martinez to finish the season in the top five in the National League in WAR. Just imagine how good he'll be when he actually has a year of throwing a cutter under his belt (see Bud Norris).
Outlook: ZiPS has been a fan of C-Mart for a long time, and I can't argue with the projections here. It has him finishing with a 2.92 ERA and 213 strikeouts, and neither number strikes me as obviously wrong.
Teoscar Hernandez, Toronto Blue Jays: One of the things the Blue Jays were sorely missing last season was secondary talent in the lineup. If you looked at all teams in 2017 after their top three position players, the Blue Jays ranked 30th in WAR (FanGraphs) at a combined minus-0.6 WAR. The team aggressively added some complementary players such as Yangervis Solarte and Aledmys Diaz to the mix in order to remedy this situation, but none might be more important than Hernandez, acquired at the trade deadline for Francisco Liriano.
The barrel stat for Statcast data measures hits with the exit velocity and angle to lead to a minimum of a .500 batting average and a 1.500 slugging percentage since the start of Statcast. Hernandez ranks second in baseball in the rate that he makes these hits, in 15 percent of his plate appearances, behind only Mookie Betts and just ahead of Gary Sanchez. He's certainly not a scientific hitter, but his power increase in the majors is for real.
Outlook: The simpler in-season ZiPS model isn't capturing Hernandez's power as much as it ought to. You may not like his batting average and OBP going forward, but I think he'll slug .500 from here on out.
Gerrit Cole, Houston Astros: Last year, Justin Verlander went on an unhittable streak after joining the Astros, and now Cole is doing the same thing in Houston. There was always a sense of unfulfilled promise in Cole, a pitcher who was projected to be an ace as a prospect but really had only a single star-level season in Pittsburgh. Coming into the season, Cole never had been much better than the average pitcher when it came to contact, his best performance being a 78.2 percent contact rate in 2016. In 2018, that's 66.1 percent, second among the 94 qualifying pitchers in baseball, behind only Patrick Corbin, and that's while facing fewer hitters than Corbin. Cole already has five games in 2018 with double-digit strikeouts; he had only six in his entire career coming into 2018.
Outlook: ZiPS now has Cole finishing the year with a 2.99 ERA, 238 strikeouts and 6.4 WAR, that last number wedged in between Max Scherzer and Chris Sale. He's a legit Cy Young contender.