The Fringe Five: Baseball’s Most Compelling Fringe Prospects
The Fringe Five is a weekly exercise (introduced in April) wherein the author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.
Central to this exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe. The author recognizes that the word has different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of this column, however — and for reasons discussed more thoroughly in a recent edition of the Five — the author has considered eligible for the Five any prospect who was absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists.
That said, it should also be noted that in cases where the collective enthusiasm regarding a player’s talent becomes very fevered — like how the enthusiasm collectively right now for Philadelphia third-base prospect Maikel Franco is very fevered, for example — that will likely affect said player’s likelihood of appearing among the Five, given that the purpose of the series, at some level, is to identify prospects who are demonstrating promise above what one might expect given their current reputations within the prospect community.
With that said, here are this week’s Fringe Five:
Ji-Man Choi, 1B, Seattle (Profile)
Of Choi, readers will first note probably that his given name (Ji-Man) holds many possibilities in the way of amusing sobriquets — or, perhaps just one amusing one that can used frequently. Upon further inspection, however, that same reader might note something more germane to Choi’s status as a ballplayer — namely that he (i.e. Choi) has precisely zero stats for 2011. “Whither Ji-Man?” the cry goes round — or did, one assumes, for the duration of that lonely season. “Rehabbing from a back injury,” appears to be the concise answer. Regardless of what happened two seasons ago, the present one (i.e. season) has been rather an excellent one for Choi. Beginning the year with High-A High Desert, Choi recorded walk and strikeout rates of 12.8% and 15.6%, respectively, while also hitting seven home runs in 211 plate appearances there. Following an early June promotion, the 22-year-old has been even more impressive with Double-A Jackson, posting a 14.1% walk and just 13.0% strikeout rate in nearly as many plate appearances (184), while hitting more home runs (eight) than in his Cal League stint while playing in a less robust park and league run environment.