Castrovince: Setting up 10 MLB resolutions

We enter each January as agents of change, armed with our New Year’s resolutions and ready to make a difference in ourselves or the world around us.

Usually, though, we evolve into, simply, agents — negotiating, haggling, sometimes settling. “Six days a week at the gym? Eh, how about two and I’ll do a few situps at home before dessert?”

While most resolutions are made to be broken or modified, some are simply less negotiable. And it is in that vein that we present these 10 musts from the Majors.

1. Yasiel Puig must resolve to build on his Oklahoma City experience.

Does any player better represent the Sisyphean struggle that is the New Year’s resolution better than Puig? It seems every year we convince ourselves this will be the year Puig lives up to that MVP-type talent he possesses, but it never comes together. In 2016, it was more injury (hamstrings), more plate discipline problems and, eventually, a demotion to Triple-A.

The Dodgers liked what they saw from Puig at Triple-A (.348/.400/.594 slash line), and they like the progress he’s made with his offseason nutritional program. All that’s missing is a, “We really mean it this time!” The bottom line is that this club needs to drastically improve its performance against left-handed pitching, and that makes Puig really important to them.

2. The Red Sox must resolve to be all right with a lefty rotation.

Three teams have had four lefties make 20 starts in a season. That’s it. Three. And two of them were White Sox teams featuring — you guessed it — Chris Sale.

So what the Red Sox are potentially doing with Sale, David Price, Eduardo Rodriguez and Drew Pomeranz is rare to everybody involved except the new guy himself. The question is whether this rarity will work in a home park that has typically been unkind to southpaws, as Price, who surrendered a career-high 30 homers in 2016, can attest.

Of course, if Price and Sale are on-point from a strikeout standpoint, it’s a moot point. And that’s what Boston’s betting on.

3. Bryce Harper must resolve to bounce back.

The .814 OPS and 116 OPS+ marks from 2016 aren’t abjectly terrible on their own. But they were a steep, steep step down from Harper’s 1.109 and 198 marks in his National League Most Valuable Player Award-winning season of 2015, and the latter numbers are much more in line with the reported $400 million starting price Harper will be looking for in just two years’ time, when he’s eligible for free agency.

Harper’s free-agent timetable adds to the impetus on the Nats, who just sold off a significant chunk of their farm system in the Adam Eaton swap, to go deep into October. There were reports in 2016 about Harper playing through shoulder discomfort, though Harper and the team denied it. If an injury does explain the drop in production, well, that only adds to the concern that the 24-year-old Harper is simply injury prone. And if an injury wasn’t the issue, well, what was?

This will be a fascinating bounce-back bid on a high-profile team for one of the game’s most magnetizing talents.

4. The Indians must resolve to make like the 2015 Royals.

It’s a three-year guarantee with Edwin Encarnacion, but it’s hard to overstate just how much emphasis is placed upon the 2017 portion of that new deal.

The Tribe came a win away from ending what is now a 69-year title drought, and the Encarnacion pact was designed to get them back to that spot and over the last remaining hump. Every year, we talk about the difficulty of repeating as a pennant-winner, specifically how October takes …

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