Welcome to the fourth part of this year’s Trade Value series. If you haven’t already, read the intro and get yourself acquainted with what question this is trying to answer, as well as an incomplete list of guys who missed the cut for one reason or another. You can see all the posts in the series here.

A few quick notes on the columns listed for each player. After the normal biographical information, I’ve listed Projected WAR, which is essentially a combination of ZIPS and Steamer’s current rest-of-season forecasts extrapolated out to a full-season’s worth of playing time. For non-catcher position players, this is 600 plate appearances; catchers are extrapolated to 450 PAs. For pitchers, this is extrapolated to 200 innings. It is not their 2014 WAR, or their last calendar year WAR; it is a rough estimate of what we might expect them to do over a full-season, based on the information we have now.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced last April by the present author, wherein that same ridiculous 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 the exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe, a term which possesses different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of the column this year, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists* and also (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on the midseason prospect lists produced by those same notable sources or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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In one sense, baseball’s most extraordinary pitcher right now might be Clayton Kershaw. He’s generating results that put even Cy Young-winning Clayton Kershaw to shame, to the point where he’s starting to make people reflect upon career-prime Pedro Martinez. Career-prime Pedro Martinez sets an impossibly high bar, but Kershaw’s trying his damnedest to get there, and it’s a pleasure for everybody that isn’t a baseball player tasked with the responsibility of opposing Clayton Kershaw. He’s doing what he can to be the perfect starting pitcher.

But we can attack the term “extraordinary” in a variety of different ways. Kershaw might be the most extraordinary pitcher by results, but what about the related but different matter of style? Who are baseball’s most unusual pitchers, in the way they go about their business? That’s the question I set out to answer, following a fairly simple and user-friendly process.

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The All Star Game took place on Tuesday, and for the first time since 2008, Justin Verlander was not there for the festivities. Looking at his recent performance, it seems like very, very long ago that Verlander was the consensus pick as the best pitcher in baseball, when in fact, it was 2012. What has happened, and is his descent from the Mount Rushmore of starting pitchers permanent? Great pitchers have had bad years before regaining their groove — Steve Carlton, for one, lost 20 games in 1973 and didn’t come close to resembling the monster who won 27 games for a terrible Philadelphia team the year before. All he did was go on to win three more Cy Young Awards over the next decade, while in the process reclaiming Best Pitcher in Baseball honors. Can Verlander make a similar resurgence? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Zachary talk to Houston Chronicle Astros beat writer Evan Drellich about the Astros’ contentious negotiations with no. 1 overall pick Brady Aiken.

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Based on the chats that we host, these things seem to go in waves. This past spring training, it felt like one of every two questions asked about teams trading for Nick Franklin. Once the season got underway, everybody was wondering when the Pirates would finally call up Gregory Polanco. And now there’s a new and different question of the moment: what are the Cubs going to do with all of their prospects? The situation appeared to be a little bit crowded even before the organization added Addison Russell and, less notably, Billy McKinney. Now there are people wondering when the Cubs are going to diversify.

I’ve dealt with this in a few consecutive chats. I think Dave has also done the same. But it seems like a topic worthy of a dedicated post. If all the players were to stay where they are, and if they all were to develop well, then the Cubs would have quite the crowd on their hands. At the moment, though, it’s a crowd that doesn’t exist. It’s a crowd that exists only in theory, in some possible future out of infinite possible futures, and therefore the Cubs aren’t facing any kind of urgency.

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So, we’ve been linking to our pieces over at FoxSports.com for a few months now, but today, those links go to their permanent new home. Fox has launched a new baseball page entitled Just A Bit Outside, and it will be the home for the content produced by the team Rob Neyer has assembled. The site officially launched today, and it will be updated daily with the kind of content that FanGraphs readers would likely enjoy. We’ll still be contributing our three pieces per week over there, and I’ll be doing some shorter stuff in the Baseball Joe section as well. Check it out.

Since the launch was happening this week, I wanted to do a tie-in to the Trade Value series that’s running here, and since it’s a popular question during Trade Value week, I decided to publish the Anti-Trade Value list over at Just A Bit Outside. So, if you’re wondering which five contracts would be the hardest to move, well, here’s my answer.

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Over at FanGraphs, I have an annual tradition of using the All-Star break to rank the game’s most valuable players by their overall trade value, factoring in not only their on-field performance but their age and contract status as well. After all, a good player making $1 million per year is likely more valuable to a franchise than a great player making $25 million per year, as the $24 million cost savings can be spent to buy the good player better teammates and result in a better product overall.

Not surprisingly, the top spot last year went to Mike Trout, as he was the best player in baseball and made the league minimum; his combination of high performance and low cost made him one of the most valuable properties in baseball history. Even after signing a new contract that guarantees him $140 million over the next six years, you can bet that Trout will still rank quite highly in the this year’s top 10, which will be released this Friday on FanGraphs.

But, of course, for every Mike Trout, there’s 10 big contracts that haven’t worked out so well, with teams now paying tens of millions of dollars for the kind of production you’d hope to get for a million or two. The history of long-term mega contracts for free agency is filled with high-priced busts, and when a team makes a mistake on a big money guy, they are often stuck with that player until the contract runs out. These players not only don’t have any trade value; they have negative trade value, and require a financial subsidy to another team just to move the player off their roster.

Paying a player to play for someone else is the most inefficient use of resources in baseball, but it’s also the reality that some teams face when they just want to move on from a bad decision. So which players would require the largest subsidies to another team in order to be willing to assume the rest of their contracts? Or, put another way, which players have the most negative trade value in Major League Baseball right now?

The easiest way to estimate how much money a team would have to include in a trade to move a player currently contract is to ask how much that player would sign for if he was made a free agent after the season ends. The difference between our estimated free agent price, and his remaining contract value, is a decent approximation of how much cash a team would have to kick in to trade their overpriced former stars. To come up with the five players with the most negative trade value, I’ve created estimated free agent prices, and included the difference in “dead money” that their current contract includes.

5. Prince Fielder, First Base, Texas Rangers

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

Madison Kyle Bumgarner plays pitcher for the San Francisco Giants. At 52-43, the Giants have the sixth-best record in baseball. Madison the pitcher has +0.8 WAR as a hitter. That means a pitcher has been the seventh-most valuable hitter on a playoff-caliber team. Most major league pitchers make very poor major league hitters. This hasn’t applied to pretty much any of the San Francisco Giants starters, but especially to Madison Kyle Bumgarner.

Bumgarner’s slash line through the first half of the 2014 season is .275/.302/.550. That gives him matching wRC+ and OPS+ totals of 140. Thanks to the great Dan Szymborski, I can tell you that his ZiPS end-of-season-projection includes a 107 OPS+. That is to say, even if he goes back to hitting like a pitcher in the second half, it is more likely than not that Madison Bumgarner will finish the season with above-league average hitting numbers. There are many actual major league hitters that won’t finish the season with above-league average hitting numbers.

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