The Pirates have developed a reputation for their work with pitchers. Ray Searage seems to receive most of the credit, but the club’s recent successes with arms like Francisco Liriano, Edinson Volquez, A.J. Burnett, J.A. Happ, and Joe Blanton is probably a group effort to some degree. No matter who the true pitcher whisperer is, the Pirates have clearly become a team that takes pitchers who weren’t great and turns them into pitchers who are good.

It’s not clear if the club is particularly adept at targeting pitchers who are poised to recover or if they have a formula for fixing arms with strong potential. In either case, all their recent success suggests the Pirates have something working for them that most teams don’t. And when a reputation like that takes hold, it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of assuming they’re going to go on like this forever. Call it a Ray Searage halo.

Unfortunately for the Pirates, the halo has not protected Jon Niese.

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The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a few 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 who (a) received a future value grade of 45 or less from Dan Farnsworth during the course of his organizational lists and who (b) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on an updated prospect list or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Greg Allen, OF, Cleveland (Profile)
This represents Allen’s sixth appearance among the Five proper this year — the top mark among prospects who don’t also possess the exact same DNA, arranged in precisely the same manner, as Sherman Johnson. Allen has been both (a) incredible overall and (b) even more incredible recently. Regard, by way of illustration, the following table, which contains certain of Allen’s most relevant numbers relative to the 200 other qualified position players across all of High-A.

Naturally, this isn’t a perfect method: the run enivornments of the Carolina League (to which Allen belongs) differ from those of the California and Florida State Leagues, the former possessing greater offensive production; the latter, less. Still, one finds that the Cleveland outfielder possesses elite numbers by several different measures.

The effect is heightened when one compares Allen’s numbers since May 27th (the date of his first appearance among the Five) against all the same qualified batters — a sample of 152 plate appearances.

If one interested in identifying a plus hit tool merely by numbers alone, Allen is an ideal case study. He’s recorded one of the top three walk rates at High-A while also recording one of the top three (which is to say, lowest) strikeout rates — while also converting batted balls into hits at a rate higher than almost everyone else.

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Jay Bruce is going to be traded. That’s a near-certainty. He’s the only player on this year’s market to be (almost) traded not once, but twice by the team for which he still plays. The rumors have been persisting for more than a year now. Bruce is in the last guaranteed year of his contract, the Reds were never in contention, and he’s rebuilt his value with a great first half at the plate. Already, we’ve heard Bruce linked again to the Blue Jays, alongside the Indians, Nationals, Dodgers, and others. It will be an upset if he finishes the season wearing a Cincinnati uniform.

That much about Jay Bruce, we can be confident. We can be confident that he’s been a good hitter in the past, we can be confident that he’s been a good hitter in the present, and we can be confident that he’s likely to be moved within the next month. There exists an area of Bruce’s story that’s far more murky, though, and one’s perception of that area of Bruce’s game goes a long way towards one’s evaluation of Bruce. Despite a 120 wRC+ this season, Bruce has been worth 0.0 WAR, according to our calculations and 0.4 WAR by Baseball-Reference’s, and that’s all due to his defensive numbers.

The defensive numbers hate Jay Bruce this year. Ultimate Zone Rating calls him the season’s worst defensive right fielder, among 21 qualifiers. Defensive Runs Saved has him in a tie for last, with J.D. Martinez. Those negative marks stretch back a couple years now, but then you get recent tweets like this from Jeff Passan:

Bruce is 29 and has very reasonable club option at $13M for 2017. D metrics don’t like him, but two scouts say he’s avg to slightly > in RF.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) July 1, 2016

And quotes like this out of Buster Olney columns:

Bruce’s defensive metrics are not good, but some scouts believe that he’s better than those numbers indicate, and wonder if his skills are properly reflected in the stats — which some evaluators believe may be inexact.

And you begin to sense a divide on the evaluation of Bruce’s defensive ability. And it’s an important divide, because a Bruce with average-to-better defense is a useful player. A Bruce closer to what the defensive metrics suggest is a replacement-level designated hitter. Those two players fetch far different returns in a mid-season trade.

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Six weeks ago, August Fagerstrom wrote about how Matt Bush’s fastball approximates Aroldis Chapman’s in terms of velocity and spin rate. Not much has changed. The Texas Rangers reclamation project — Bush was in prison and hadn’t pitched for four years — is still throwing heat. This past weekend the 30-year-old right-hander sat 98-99 in a scoreless inning at Fenway Park.

Much has been made of the former first-overall pick’s fall from grace and the Rangers’ willingness to give him another chance. (The attention is warranted: Bush’s substance-abuse and legal issues are serious matters.) Far less attention has been paid to the arsenal and mindset he brings to the mound. With that in mind, I sat down with Bush to talk pitching on the Fourth of July.

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Bush on why he’s having success: “I think it’s my arm action. My fastball has a lot of life to it. I’m also doing a good job of locating; I’m hitting my spots down in the zone. A lot of times it looks like the ball is going to be down and out of the zone, but it has extra life to it, which keeps it there in the zone. Other than that, I have an understanding that it’s not easy to hit a pitch that’s thrown as hard as I throw. I’m going out there with confidence.

“My spin rate is 2,500-something. Someone had mentioned it to me, so I looked into it and was pretty surprised to find out that it’s one of the highest in the game. That’s an indicator of why my fastball is tough to square up. I’m not afraid to go right after hitters, because with that spin, the ball has life. It’s not straight. You also don’t have very much time to pull the trigger. Read the rest of this entry »

Beginning last season, there’s been a raging debate concerning the identity of baseball’s best shortstop. In fairness, I guess, people have probably been arguing about this forever, but now there’s this outstanding, new, young crop, and it’s hard to believe they all exist. There are veterans in there like Troy Tulowitzki and Brandon Crawford, but you’ve also got Carlos Correa. There’s Francisco Lindor, and there’s Xander Bogaerts. Corey Seager! And maybe we’re supposed to include Manny Machado. There are so many good shortstops. There are so many good shortstops that I’ve left several out.

I’m very comfortable asserting this: Whoever might be the best shortstop in baseball, I believe it is not Aledmys Diaz. Diaz isn’t a premium baserunner, nor is he a premium defender. Remember, he wasn’t even supposed to be in the majors. But here’s a fact for you — Machado leads all players listed as shortstops in wRC+. There in second place, trailing by just five points, is Diaz. He leads everybody else. And he’s officially now a National League All-Star.

It comes off like a classic case of the Cardinals. In the middle of last summer, when Diaz was in the minors, he was removed from the 40-man roster. Anyone, at that point, could’ve had him. The Cardinals brought him back. The rest is history, and the present.

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Ben and Sam talk to Jason Coskrey of The Japan Times about the incredible two-way dominance of Japanese ace/slugger Shohei Otani.

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So many good players right now. Let me fluff that up. So many great players right now. For Major League Baseball, it really is a kind of embarrassment of riches. Dave just wrote about Josh Donaldson earlier. He’s great. Kris Bryant? He’s great. Francisco Lindor, Manny Machado, Jose Altuve — all great. These are just great position players, of course. These players, and so many more, deserve all the attention they can get. But still, there’s Mike Trout. The current leader in position-player WAR is Mike Trout. Over the past calendar year, the leader in WAR is Mike Trout. Going forward, the leader in projected WAR is Mike Trout. Mike Trout Mike Trout Mike Trout. It’s hard to believe we ever stop thinking about Mike Trout.

Or maybe it’s not? Everything good in our lives, we take for granted. At least, given enough time. And while Trout isn’t boring, consistency is boring, and since becoming a regular Trout hasn’t posted a wRC+ under 167 or over 176. At some point we all run out of original ways to remind ourselves that Trout is fantastic. His supporting cast doesn’t help. Now it seems like 80% of conversations about Trout concern whether the Angels should trade him.

I can’t speak to the real purpose of Valentine’s Day, but it functions as a day of appreciation. Not that you should require a scheduled push to appreciate your partner, but, again, we take good things for granted, because it’s how we’re programmed. A Mike Trout FanGraphs post is similar. Take a minute. Think about Trout. And, wouldn’t you know it, but the man is evolving. He’s not as static as he seems.

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Ben and Sam discuss the causes and ramifications of this season’s dramatic (but easily overlooked) rise in home run rate.

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The All-Star break is beckoning as we come down the homestretch of our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality. We will again use granular ball-in-play data such as BIP frequencies, exit speed and launch angle to perform the analysis. Two positions to go. Last time, it was center fielders; today, it’s the right fielders’ turn.

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