Boston Red Sox breakout, breakdown and neutrals for 2016
By Rick McNair
The Boston Red Sox will have some players breakout, breakdown and perform neutral in 2016. Let’s look at some possibilities.
The Boston Red Sox will have some failures in 2016 and some successes. Other players will perform right in the capacity expected and this is eerily similar to one of my other favorite pastimes – losing money in the stock market.
With research on markets, you can simplify it with three each to follow determinations: Buy, sell or neutral. All are self-explanatory and can be applied to baseball prognostication or – for a far more appropriate term – guesses.
The 2015 season brought a group of players that certainly had a designation that would slide comfortably into a baseball version of stocks with breakdown, breakout and neutral. Some reasonable examples certainly dotted the statistical landscape in 2015. An obvious neutral would be David Ortiz, who may have appeared as a breakdown, but eventually churned out a typical Ortiz season. With Ortiz, you have to follow historical references and realize the final outcome will be 30/100.
The breakout was a far more productive category with Mookie Betts, Xander Bogaerts, Blake Swihart and Eduardo Rodriguez among the handful of young players who salvaged emotionally a season that was disastrous. Occasionally a player will have a breakdown and breakout compacted into two segments of the season – Joe Kelly is one and a case can be made for Rick Porcello.
The breakdown is where I ignore breakdown emeritus Clay Buchholz. The seasons presented to the faithful by Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval will become Red Sox folklore as seasons march on. Their 2015 legend of incompetence will be historic unless a miraculous career resuscitation takes place.
So what about 2016? Just who will suddenly find a lost career or create a new one? Will the production be as expected from others and thus a neutral? My only picks using my sophisticated TRS-80 number cruncher and proprietary algorithms (guesses) are as follows.