The one thing in baseball that’s hardest to predict is when a young player will make the great leap forward. Some players, like Sean Burroughs, have all the tools and impeccable pedigrees reaching from amateur ball through the minors, and never establish themselves as even merely solid regulars – the breakout year simply never comes. Others, like Adam Dunn, start off as promising prospects, look like they’re on the rise, hit .215 one year for no apparent reason, then hit 46 home runs the next year after many have already written them off.

If you look at all players as a whole, they neatly increase in value up until they’re 26, hold steady for a few years, and then start losing value, first slowly and then with terrifying speed. Almost no players actually age this way; rather than a gently rising and then steeply sloping curve, the careers of individual players are usually best pictured as mountain ranges, with long plateaus and high peaks and low valleys that crop up seemingly at random. For all the work that’s been done on projecting future performance statistically, it’s still best thought of as more art than science.

So, I’ll be happy to be proved wrong about my top breakout pick for this year, San Diego pitcher Chris Young. He certainly looks like he’s ascending. The 6’10”, 250-lb. Lefty (who doesn’t throw heat, despite his size) threw really well in 2004, running up a 1.49 ERA at Triple-A before pitching solidly in a 7-game trial for the Rangers, and last year he went 12-6 with a 4.26 ERA, which is just outstanding considering he was pitching in the most hitter friendly ballpark in the American League. Having been traded (why I can’t imagine) to the Padres, who play in the most pitcher-friendly ballpark in the National League, Young could pitch no better than he did last year and see his ERA drop by half a run or more.

There’s good reason to think he’s actually going to pitch better. The main one is that he’s still learning. Young played basketball in college, well enough to be drafted by the Sacramento Kings; the Rangers had to guarantee his money to get him to sign with them. He’s never thrown more than last year’s 164 2/3 IP, and he’s 27. That means he hasn’t had anything like the pitching experience most of his peers have had, and yet he was able to thrive as a finesse lefty in one of the toughest environments in the majors. As he learns his craft, he should, it stands to reason, get still better; by the end of the year, this trade is going to look like the biggest steal of the winter.

As with Young, I’m hardly putting my reputation on the line by pointing to Milwaukee second baseman Rickie Weeks as someone who’s going to put up numbers this year; after hitting .500 BA/.619 OBA/.987 SLG at Southern University, he was the second overall pick in the 2003 draft, and he hit .320/.435/.655 in Triple-A last year at 22. He’s going to be good. The reservation people have about Weeks – whose stance and tremendous bat speed are uncannily like those of Gary Sheffield – is that he hit .259 in Double-A, and .239 in the majors last year. He has a good enough batting eye and enough power to be a productive second baseman hitting .239; the question is whether he’ll be a star. I think he will, this year.

The main reason why is his strikeout rate. In Double-A, he struck out 107 times in 565 at-bats. In Triple-A, that ratio went way up – he struck out 51 times in 246 at-bats. In the majors, it actually went down a bit, to 96 in 412 at-bats. Strikeout rates, obviously, correlate with contact hitting; that he put the bat on the ball a bit more while moving up to the majors is an enormously encouraging indicator for Weeks, who would have been about as productive as Marcus Giles had he hit even .270. I’m on the Brewers’ bandwagon this season, and Weeks is a big part of the reason why.

There are quite a few other players who look like good candidates to make their first All-Star team this year, like the Mets’ Jose Reyes, Seattle’s Jeremy Reed, and the Braves’ Brian McCann, but the one most crucial to a pennant race may prove to be Justin Morneau. The Twins first baseman has been touted as the next great first baseman for years, and has yet to prove he’s even worthy of a major-league job – he hit .239/.304/.437 last year, which is completely unacceptable for a corner position, especially when the player putting up the line is busy getting in fistfights with teammates. That aside, Morneau has elite power – his isolated power, the difference between his batting and slugging averages, was about the same as Gary Sheffield’s and Hideki Matsui’s last year. Twenty-six-year-olds with that kind of power are very safe bets to have good seasons; if Morneau does what he can do, the Twins will make it a threeway race in the Central. Or he might not do anything, get non-tendered in the offseason, and end up playing first base in Boston. Who knows?