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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Introduction
Players #50 to #41
Players #40 to #31
Players #30 to #21
Players #20 to #11

Man, this group is something else. I think I could make a solid case for any of the #1-#9 guys belonging in the top three, and I’ve re-ordered this thing so many times I have lost almost all of my conviction about there being much difference between guys at this level. If you prefer the guy at #8 to the guy at #4, I’m not going to put up much of a fight. These guys are all special, and we’re lucky that the sport we love is being overrun with players this talented.

As a reminder, in addition to the player’s biographical information, I’ve added a summary of his contract situation, and as a new feature this year, Dan Szymborski has provided me with five year ZIPS forecasts for all of the players on the list, which I’ve listed along with their 2016 projection. Of course, not every player listed is under control for the next five years — some are locked up well beyond that time frame — but this should offer you a pretty decent view of what a player is expected to do both in the short-term and the longer-term, according to Dan’s forecasting system.

For the contract details, I’m only displaying future obligations beginning with their 2016 salary. I’ve tried to ensure that these are as accurate as can be, but they were also collected manually, so there probably will be some mistakes; there are plenty of weird clauses and options that make aggregating all this information particularly annoying. Also, we’re not including things like All-Star bonuses or incentive escalators, as this is intended to give more of a big picture view than be a precise accounting of the exact cost of a future player. A few hundred thousand here and there won’t change the rankings.

Also, keep in mind that some players have contracts that give them a guaranteed minimum, but they are also able to opt-into arbitration when they are eligible. This is pretty common now with prominent international signings, and so some of these guys will probably earn more than their contracts currently call for, but I’ve still just included the guaranteed minimum in the future salary commitment because we don’t know for sure that they’re going to opt into arbitration yet.

Finally, we’ve also included a nifty little graphic at the bottom that visualizes a lot of the information contained below, so if you want to see the projections and contract status for everyone together, you can get a summary of that at the bottom. The chart goes out five years, so some players have additional value beyond what’s displayed, but it should give you a good overview of what each player offers going forward.

Alright, on to the list.

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A couple weeks ago, I examined, on the team level, who has and hasn’t been drawing a benefit from the called strike zone. That post is here, and it talks about the zone while pitching, and about the zone while hitting. Earlier this very week, I looked at some individual hitter strike zones through the season’s first half, and that post is here. It makes sense to look at individual pitchers. If we have the team data, and if we have some individual hitter data, why not close the loop? I don’t want to leave you wanting more. I want to leave you never wanting to hear about this stuff again, or at least not for a while.

When a hitter’s had a particularly big or small strike zone, that seems to be luck, for the most part. Some of it’s the competition, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a signal. With pitchers, there’s more of a signal, because they’re the ones in control. And they’re also linked to their catchers, who might be good or bad pitch-framers. If a hitter’s been, say, lucky with strikes, that hardly means anything going forward. But if a pitcher’s racked up extra strikes, that bodes well for what’s to come. That’s something to keep in mind when you read all the rest.

We’ll be looking at pitchers with more or fewer strikes than expected. As you peruse the tables, you’ll be seeing evidence of skill, but skill that leaves many frustrated. Pitchers with good command tend to get more favorable zones than pitchers with bad command. And pitchers with good receivers will get more favorable zones than pitchers with bad receivers. Command is a developed skill, and receiving is a developed skill, but to a lot of people, the strike zone is the strike zone, and it shouldn’t shift around. To a lot of people, it should be called the same for everybody. It’s not! Maybe one day. For now, we’re still in our day.

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Are you going to be in town for the Saber Seminar? Of course you are, you wouldn’t miss the best baseball conference of the year, would you? Of course not. And, are you of legal drinking age and would like to meet up with other people who will be at the conference? Well, why wouldn’t you be? We can’t think of one good reason. So, for the third straight year, we’re organizing a Meetup at The Mead Hall in Cambridge on Friday, August 21, aka Saber Seminar Eve.

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As we unwind during baseball’s midsummer break, let’s take a look at the hitters and pitchers whose first-half contact scores sat at the extremes. For those of you who haven’t read my previous work on this topic, a player’s raw contact score is determined by stripping the strikeouts and walks (Ks and BBs) from his record. Run values are applied to all other events, and scaled to league average, represented by 100. Raw contact scores aren’t adjusted for context, so some noise can remain, often caused by home park, player speed, or luck. Still, the most pertinent variable is usually contact authority and overall quality, made or allowed. Read the rest of this entry »

Not to beat a dead horse, or any kind of horse, but the Matt Kemp trade has been lopsided. There’s still an awful long way to go, but for now the Matt Kemp trade is more like the Yasmani Grandal trade, and Grandal and the Dodgers couldn’t be happier. The other day on Twitter I was tipped off to an article about Grandal written by Matt Calkins. The headline: “Padres blew it with Yasmani Grandal.” It talks about Grandal’s limited playing time, and the lack of trust some Padres pitchers had in him. One paragraph stood out to me as particularly interesting:

Despite the general San Diego approach being to throw down and away, Grandal thought the power pitchers should be throwing inside in the early part of the count before using the outer half of the plate to record the out. But the veteran hurlers weren’t catching his drift, and as a result, he wasn’t catching their pitches.

Pitchers identified were Andrew Cashner, Tyson Ross, and Ian Kennedy. Last season, Grandal didn’t catch Cashner. Ross eventually stopped throwing to him, and Kennedy did too. They preferred working with Rene Rivera. This year, the Padres pitching staff has struggled. From the bottom of the same article:

San Diego’s pitching, however, has disappointed, and Grandal can’t help but wonder if that would be the case had his advice been heeded.

On the one hand, this doesn’t really matter. Grandal isn’t in San Diego anymore, so everyone just ought to move on. But on the other hand, this can be an interesting thing to investigate. So let’s talk about what Grandal talked about.

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Over the next month, rumors will shape baseball coverage, and a small portion of those rumors will actually develop into real trades. Every team with a shot at the playoffs wants to get better, and adding a starting pitcher is often the mode for many organizations. Even teams that have pitching could probably use a little more. To be willing to part with organizational resources, teams need to have an appropriate nexus between the impact of the new pitcher and a spot on the marginal win curve that makes the upgrade worthwhile.

Eliminating buyers is harder than finding them at present. Every team in the American League except for the Chicago White Sox, Texas Rangers, and Oakland Athletics have at least a 15% chance of making the playoffs and even those three teams might not have thrown in the towel yet this season. Only the Kansas City Royals, New York Yankees, and Los Angeles Angels have greater than a 55% chance of making the playoffs and even those teams do not have commanding leads in their respective divisions. The National League looks slightly more clear with seven teams likely fighting for five playoff spots. In a tight race, a pitching addition can have a considerable impact, but how much difference a trade makes depends on the hole the new player is filling.

A quick look at the rest-of-season depth-chart projections reveals how rotations are expected to perform in the second half. The graph below shows the projected WAR for all Major League Baseball rotations. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve teased in the last few chats that some big updates on the various prospects lists will be out in a few weeks, but I wanted to address some of the most-asked-about prospects I’ve recently scouted in one piece as an appetizer for the big update.

Jeff Hoffman, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays

In Hoffman’s offseason scouting report I noted that he was in contention to go #1 overall until his elbow surgery, just before the 2014 draft where he went ninth overall. He made his first pro appearance this year and started making buzz right away, showing big velocity in a late big-league spring-training appearance, then in extended spring training and in his regular season debut at High-A Dunedin (he was just promoted to Double-A in the last few days). In the video, the first game shown is when I saw Hoffman about a month ago and the second game is when our own Chris King saw his first start for Dunedin about a month before that.

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Despite his below-average walk rate and high strikeout numbers, Ian Desmond’s power and speed have made up for his contact inadequacies during the past three years. He is, at once, an exciting and frustrating player to watch: a hitter prone to incredible dry spells followed by gluttonous power explosions. The Nationals have accepted his droughts — even going so far as to offer him a seven-year, $107 million dollar contract extension before the 2014 season — because the hot streaks were worth it.

Desmond has relied on that full combination of speed, low contact, and high power during the years since his breakout in 2012, and because of that, his skill set is a relatively tenuous one. We’ve seen players excel at a high level with those same type of skills, but the difference between productive and unproductive is closer when you rely on the ball going over the fence a certain number of times.

If we navigate to the batter leaderboards and sort by wRC+, Desmond has been the seventh-worst qualified offensive player in the majors this season. He’s been the very worst defensive shortstop. The nightmare scenario has come to fruition in Desmond’s walk year: a cratered home-run rate per fly ball (HR/FB), a walk rate dive, an almost total absence of speed, and really poor defense. The 2015 edition of Ian Desmond is now 2010 Desmond, except with more strikeouts and less on the base paths. Take a look:

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