Last fall's World Series featured two teams, the Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks, whose presence in the Fall Classic served as the ideal outcome of what were already breakout seasons. For the Rangers, the new champs, it was a breakthrough for the ages.
Not every unexpected contender is going to win a title -- or even make the World Series -- so what exactly is a breakout team? We throw the term around a lot in sports, but we don't spend nearly as much time thinking about what it means. Here's a loose definition:
A breakout team is a team coming off a losing season that beats its established level of play by at least 10 games and winds up with a winning record.
Last season, there were six, including our aforementioned World Series opponents. Joining the Rangers and Diamondbacks were the Minnesota Twins, Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati Reds and Miami Marlins.
Breakout teams are fun, and last season featured a lot of them. There were just two in 2022. The six breakout teams marked the most in a season during the period covered by today's study, which goes back to 2007.
So can we really predict which teams will break out in 2024? Well, we're giving it a go. We identified traits most associated with MLB teams who have made similar jumps (those include prospect rankings, projections, roster age, organizational record, previous leap, luck and free agent spending) and combined them into a single number we'll call The Breakout Index (BRK). In our formula, 100 is average, 110 is a standard deviation above, and anything beyond that is, well, a very strong indicator.
This initial iteration of the model produced about a 35% success rate in identifying past breakout teams. Four of the six breakout clubs from 2023 were correctly flagged by the system. To be eligible this year, a team had to finish under .500 in 2023. If the "under .500" rule was ignored, the Cubs would have emerged as the No. 1 breakout candidate based on their overall traits. Alas, the Cubs won 83 games last season.
Here are the five teams the formula sees as the most likely to have breakout seasons in 2024.