It’s funny now to reflect on some of the things that were said over the offseason, when the Dodgers went through an almost complete roster overhaul. Granted, people have to say something, because that’s how this business works, but think of the concern expressed in some corners regarding the immediate future of the Dodgers’ offense. How were they going to make up for losing Matt Kemp? How were they going to make up for losing Hanley Ramirez? How were they going to make up for losing Dee Gordon? Two of those players, as it happens, have hit quite well this year. Hasn’t mattered to the Dodgers. After swapping so many different pieces around, the Dodgers became an early-season offensive juggernaut.

It is, of course, a big reason why the Dodgers have the second-best record in baseball, and the highest run differential. They’ve dealt with significant injuries on the pitching side, that have left them weakened, but the lineup has picked up the slack, despite some injuries of its own. The point isn’t just to say, hey, the Dodgers have hit pretty well. No, that wouldn’t be worthy of a post. The point of this is to explain to you the magnitude by which the Dodgers have out-performed everybody else. The state of things is ridiculous.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple years ago by the present author, wherein that same author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own fallible intuition 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 the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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A cursory examination of the WAR leaderboards for shortstops in 2015 shows a few surprising developments. At the very top, we have the nice blend of defensive and offensive aptitude in Zack Cozart, and the mainly defensive-minded duo of Brandon Crawford (who has surprised at the plate this year) and Andrelton Simmons. Then, where we might expect a name like Ian Desmond or Troy Tulowitzki, we instead have Marcus Semien.

It’s only May, so we’re still dealing with the usual parts of the game that suffer from small sample size issues when it comes to player comparison and valuation, like BABIP and defensive metrics. Still, there’s something about Semien being toward the top of the boards that warrants our attention: not only is the A’s shortstop there because of his offense, he’s there despite his defense.

On Sunday, we saw both the best and worst of him. Let’s start with defense. During the bottom of the second, Logan Morrison hit a routine one-hopper up the middle to Semien, who was shifted along with the rest of the infield. The outcome was one Athletics fans have wearily gotten used to:

That was the 24-year-old’s 9th error of the season, briefly tying him with Ian Desmond and Danny Santana for the league lead, that is until he moved into sole possession of first by making another on Monday (he made one last night too). If you don’t like errors, Semien sits at -1 runs by DRS, good for 20th in the majors.

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A little over a year ago, the Cleveland Indians locked up much of their future core, signing Jason Kipnis, Michael Brantley, and Yan Gomes to contract extensions. Kipnis received double the guarantees of his teammates after a great, five-win 2013 season, but last year the fortunes reversed, as Brantley and Gomes both had breakout years and Kipnis struggled. Kipnis got out of the gate slowly in 2015, as the hits were not falling, but a solid approach taking the ball the other way has the new Cleveland leadoff hitter’s production on the rise.

Last April, Kipnis performed well in the first month after signing his $52 million extension, posting a .234/.354/.394 line with a 120 wRC+ that could have been much higher if not for a .250 BABIP. At the end of that same month, though, Kipnis strained his oblique on a swing, forcing him to miss a month. He never got going in his return, hitting just .241/.299/.315 with a 77 wRC+ in 442 plate appearances over the rest of the season despite an acceptable .297 BABIP. Kipnis finished his lost season having produced roughly a win.

Determining the effect of Kipnis’s oblique injury on his production the rest of the season is a tricky proposition. The injury does not require surgery, varies in severity and does not have a set recovery time. Chris Davis and Ryan Braun suffered oblique injuries last season and neither player had a good season, but Joe Mauer played well, albeit without power, after hitting the disabled list for the same injury. Jason Kipnis played through his struggles last year, but he did admit in the spring that the injury gave him trouble.
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Justin Turner isn’t Babe Ruth — mostly because only Babe Ruth is Babe Ruth. Of late, however, Turner’s numbers have been Ruthian in nature. Consider: since the beginning of 2014, only two hitters in all of baseball have been better than Turner, pound for pound. Two hitters! All this after the Mets released him. Turns out, he met someone on the 2013 Mets that changed his life.

Someone else’s life changed in 2013. This 35-year-old veteran outfielder with a little bit of power and a little bit of speed and a little bit of defense was coming off a down year and a suspension — circumstances which might otherwise be known as “the end of a career.” But he’d heard something about hitting he’d never heard before, and he’d spent the winter in Mexico putting his new philosophy to work. That year in New York, he was hitting for more power than he’d ever had before, and he was relevant once again. He thought he’d tell a red-headed backup infielder a little of what he’d learned.

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Billy Hamilton is the fastest player in baseball. He’s done some remarkable things on the field with his legs, including scoring on a pop-up that barely left the infield. He currently leads the majors in stolen bases with 17 thefts, and only 12 teams have stolen more bases this year than Hamilton has himself. His speed is a weapon, and when he gets on base, good things happen for the Cincinnati Reds.

But he isn’t getting on base very often. He’s currently hitting just .202 with a .259 on base percentage. That Hamilton has stolen 17 bases while only reaching via a hit or walk 35 times is a testament to just how fast he is, but while the Reds will take the stolen bases, what they really need is for Hamilton to simply reach first base more often. And there’s one very clear way for that to happen: he needs to get better at bunting.

From a quantity perspective, no one tries more often than Hamilton, as he put down his 10th bunt of the season in the first inning of last night’s contest with the Braves. However, it took him until that 10th attempt to get his first bunt hit of the year, and a less generous official scorer might have ruled it an E-5 after Alberto Callaspo mishandled his attempt to scoop it off the grass. Before last night, Hamilton both led the league in bunt attempts while also last in the league in bunt hits, which is not a combination you’d expect from the fastest guy in baseball.

On the one hand, you’d think that maybe Hamilton is just having trouble bunting his way on board because defenses expect him to try and are aggressively positioning their defense to defend against it, but the evidence suggests that this is just good old-fashioned lousy execution. For example, here are three of his previous attempts earlier this season.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Miami at Los Angeles NL | 19:50 ET
Cosart (34.1 IP, 105 xFIP-) vs. Frias (12.2 IP, 77 xFIP-)
One of the giant but also rarely mentioned benefits of marriage is that it provides each of its constituent members with an infallible means by which to excuse him- or herself from unappealing invitations. Were loathsome Dayn Perry of CBS Sports to suggest, for example, that he and the present author meet at a local bar tonight, it would be entirely reasonable for that same author to decline the offer while mumbling something about his wife. Perry, despite his wide and impressive array of flaws, would be compelled to accept this answer and look to afflict his bilious spirit on someone else. For a mere “girlfriend,” however, no such vague excuses could be made, nor would Perry capitulate so quickly. In short, it would be awful.

Besides spouses, however, one other sort of alibi can prove effective, if used sparingly — namely, the sort involving emergencies. And here one finds the relevance of tonight’s Marlins-Dodgers game — in particular, the part of it including Los Angeles right-hander Carlos Frias. Frias, a relative unknown before joining the Dodgers bullpen last year — and still something other than a household name — has recorded both an expected FIP and average fastball velocity both more than 1.5 standard deviations better than the respective means produced by the league’s starters. He also throws strikes at a rate roughly one standard deviation better than those same starters. What this particular game represents is an opportunity to observe Frias en route to excellence. It is, in short, an emergent need that requires the attention of the reader — and can be cited as such should Dayn Perry or one of his spiritual doppelgangers invite you to an awful thing.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Los Angeles NL Television.

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We’ve had fun, but this might be the last post I ever write about opposing pitchers trying to work Mike Trout upstairs with good heat. It’s not that I’m tired of it. I didn’t think I could ever grow tired of it. For me, it might’ve been the most interesting single thing in baseball, the game’s greatest player having such an obvious vulnerability. How often do we really get to talk about that kind of stuff? No, I’m not saying this because I’m tired of the subject. I’m saying this because it might not be a subject anymore.

I can’t imagine you need background. Everyone knows what was going on. Everyone saw what the Royals did to Mike Trout in last year’s ALDS. Trout’s strikeouts went up because teams realized they could throw him fastballs upstairs. OK, this, we’re all familiar with. It was probably unrealistic to expect Trout to make an adjustment last year on the fly. He’d need an offseason to work out how he wanted to respond. I think we’ve now seen his response. That glaring, obvious weakness? It’s completely disappeared.

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