It’s very much that time of year again, which is to say that it’s time to prepare ourselves for the 2025 baseball season the same way we’ve done it for the last few years – by breaking down the 30 teams into a handful of nebulously defined tiers.

For all the work done projecting the 2025 MLB season, we know the final standings aren't going to match the preseason forecasts. The fun part is seeing the teams that emerge from this morass of rational prediction and become surprise stories -- the breakouts.