Who's the Next Jose Bautista? Predicting 2011's Breakout Players

A few years ago, we researched the predictive significance of Spring Training statistics. For the most part, a player's spring stats aren't predictive of regular season success. For example, Ichiro Suzuki hit .257 (19 for 74) last spring but still wound up hitting .315 and leading all of baseball with 214 hits during the regular season.

However, we did find that extremely good Spring Training numbers often indicated that a breakout season was on the way. In the study, about two-thirds of hitters who had spring slugging percentages at least .200 higher than their career total went on to best their career average that season.

Last year, Jose Bautista topped our list of potential breakout players with a spring slugging percentage near .900, nearly .500 points higher than his career slugging percentage of .400. The rest, as they say, is history: Bautista went on to slug a league-leading 54 home runs in one of the most surprising performances in recent memory.

Where can we find the next Jose Bautista? Well, the following list is a good place to start. Here are the 36 players whose Spring Training slugging percentages (minimum 40 at-bats) exceed their career totals by at least 200 points: