Hyun Soo Kim posted a .382 on-base percentage last season. He was one of just 20 players to post a .380 OBP or better (min. 300 plate appearances). As I’m sure you’re aware, that’s a pretty great mark. As I detailed a little in the positional power rankings for left field, Kim had a rocky start with the Orioles, who generally seemed not to like him very much. But by the end of the season, he was the club’s starting left fielder. He started only 78 of the team’s 162 games in left field, but he did start 40 of their final 64 there. And yet, despite ending the season as the team’s main left fielder and despite recorded a .382 OBP, he’s been buried on the bench to begin the 2017 season.

Let’s go back a second to that .382 OBP. That’s getting hard to pull off these days.

OBP is the heartbeat of an offense. So long as a club is avoiding outs, good things can happen. But it’s been a lot harder to find high-OBP figures over the past 10 years. Two years ago, for example, just eight players produced an OBP of .380 or better. It was the third-lowest total (after 1968 and 1963) since baseball integrated in 1947. Last year, only 20 batters reached that mark, which was tied for the 22nd-lowest total since Integration. The last few years, it has been very tough to find hitters who are really good at not making outs. And when teams find them, they cherish them. Here’s the list of the 20 players who pulled it off last season, and how much they’ve played this season. You’ll see one outlier.

Well, OK: two outliers, I guess. But David Ortiz voluntarily stopped playing games. Kim, on the other hand, hasn’t walked away from the sport. The Orioles simply aren’t playing him. His plate-appearance total is less than half of every other active player except Donaldson, whose total would be higher if he were healthy. They have a lot of other players to whom they’d rather give time, it seems. Joey Rickard was the favorite at this time last season, and remains on the team, despite a career .312 OBP and a negative career DRS and UZR. He’s a candidate to be the next Willie Bloomquist.

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It seems Stephen Strasburg is underappreciated.

Maybe it’s because of the hype and expectations that surrounded his draft position and prospect pedigree. It doesn’t help that he’s only been able to reach 200 innings once in his career. His durability and total volume of innings are real issues. But when he’s on the mound he has some of the best stuff in the game, and I’m not sure his reputation matches his actual value. Since his return from Tommy John surgery, he has produced the 12th-most WAR amongst all pitchers (20.1).

As I wrote in our positional power rankings, Strasburg’s teammate Max Scherzer is a pretty good comp for Strasburg — on a per-inning basis, at least. Scherzer posted a 31.5% strikeout rate, 6.2% walk rate, and 33.0% ground-ball rate last season. Strasburg finished with marks of 30.6%, 7.4%, and 39.5%, respectively. They’re each 6-foot-4 right-handers. But while they’re carbon copies in terms of size, handedness, rate stats, and stuff, the principle difference is that Strasburg has failed to reach 150 innings in the last two seasons.

But there’s something else, too: it perpetually seems as though Strasburg fails to get all that he can out of his mid-90s fastball, fall-of-a-cliff curveball, and fading changeup. For three straight seasons, and also over the entirety of his career, Strasburg’s ERA has underperformed his FIP. Scherzer, meanwhile, has outpitched his FIP (if just slightly) as a National. Of course, there are a number of factors out of Strasburg’s control with regard to runs that appear on the scoreboard and within his pitching line, but it speaks perhaps to not maximizing his full run-preventing potential. Strasburg’s 3.60 ERA last season was quite a bit removed from his 2.92 FIP.

To his credit, Strasburg was always been in search of ways to improve. Back in 2014, he added a slider, though he decided to discard it after last season, believing it might have played a role in time missed due to a flexor mass strain last season. (Hitters also produced a .302 average and .500 slugging mark against the pitch.)

The big change this year for Strasburg is his decision to scrap his windup. It’s a move often made by relief pitchers, but less commonly adopted by starting pitchers. And for what it’s worth, Strasburg has been better with no runners on base — allowing a career opponent slash line of .211/.266/.333 — as opposed to when runners are on base (.244/.304/.383).

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013.

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 among the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels*, and (most importantly) lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on a midseason list will also be excluded from eligibility.

*All 200 names!

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.

Matt Cooper, RHP, Chicago AL (Profile)
For the duration of his professional career, Cooper has mostly looked like the sort of polished collegiate pitcher who’s capable of thriving against less refined competition in the lower minors but who lacks the arm speed to succeed against more advanced hitters. In 213.0 innings as a professional, the right-hander has produced strikeout and walk rates of 33.3% and 6.8%, respectively. Statistically, that renders him the minor-league equivalent of Max Scherzer or Noah Syndergaard — except for that Cooper (a) recorded many of those innings in a relief capacity and (b) has typically thrown a fastball that travels about 10 mph slower than either Scherzer or Syndergaard’s.

As I say, he’s typically thrown such a fastball. At midseason of last year, however, reports suggested that he’d added a bit of velocity, sitting more comfortably in the low 90s. And, promisingly, he’s proved capable of surviving thus far against Double-A competition. After a successful run as a reliever in the Southern League last year, the former 16th-round pick has recorded strikeout and walk rates of 47.1% and 5.9%, respectively, over the course of two starts so far in 2017.

Here’s video from last season of what appears to be Cooper’s changeup thrown from a very high arm slot:

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Previously
Changeup: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Curveball: AL Starters.

We’re almost three weeks into the regular season, with sample sizes mounting but still not to a level worthy of significant analysis, Eric Thames notwithstanding. We’ll take the opportunity to continue our look back at 2016 pitch quality. We looked at AL ERA qualifiers’ curveballs earlier this week; today, we turn our attention to the senior circuit.

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So far, Mitch Haniger has been one of the best hitters in baseball. He’s not alone — Freddie Freeman has also been one of the best hitters in baseball. Eric Thames and Francisco Lindor and Khris Davis have been some of the best hitters in baseball. By definition, we’re talking in pluralities, but Haniger is one of a small group, and I would like to write about him. This is what that is. Yesterday, Haniger batted five times against the Marlins. What did he do? Here’s the first plate appearance.

(That’s a walk.)

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Once someone who’s erred has done his time, apologized, and satisfied society institutionally, there’s the matter of going on with life. This is true with every crime, however horrible, and the things Matt Bush did were horrible. He’s served his time — 39 months — and hopes we can forgive him. But that’s almost of secondary concern to him, at this point: life, and living, remains.

And Matt Bush, now perhaps the closer for the Texas Rangers, is doing his best to be a good baseball player because that’s the path in front of him. He believes any success he experiences in that role is due to the help he’s gotten. “Our pitching coaches are great, man, really great,” he suggested multiple times in our talk before a game against the Athletics this week.

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Caleb Joseph is a classic example of a catcher whose value extends well beyond his raw stats. The 30-year-old Baltimore Orioles backstop isn’t much of a hitter, and while his defensive numbers are good — he’s an above-average pitch-framer and has a solid success rate throwing out runners — they’re by no means elite.

More than anything, Joseph is a game-manager and a psychologist. The gear he wears is often referred to as the tools of ignorance, but that might be baseball’s most-misleading slang term. Catchers know the game, and Joseph knows it better than most. The ability to help a pitcher, especially an inexperienced pitcher, navigate from Point A to Point B isn’t something you can quantify. It does make you a huge asset to a major-league baseball team.

I recently approached Joseph to get his perspective on how young pitchers mature. Our conversation didn’t end there. We also delved into the development of young catchers.

———

Joseph on the maturation process for pitchers and catchers: “You don’t see many youngsters figure everything out right away. What we’re seeing now is a lot of power arms coming up. The stuff and the action, the power behind the fastball, is all there, and the location is secondary. You do have guys who are 89-92 with incredible command — they rely completely on that — but more times than not, you’re seeing the power.

“You get these young arms who dominated in high school, and they dominated in college, and it was mostly because of their stuff. They could miss in the middle of the plate. Then they got to the minor leagues and a lot of them could dominate at the lower levels there. But when you get to the big leagues, you have to mature in order to succeed. And there are a lot of different aspects to that maturity.

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Up until last year, Freddie Freeman was an example of just how good a hitter a player could be without top-shelf power. From 2013 to 2015, he was the only player in MLB to run a 140 or better wRC+ while posting an ISO below .200. He put up the same wRC+ as David Ortiz despite being out-homered by Big Papi 102 to 59, as his .351 BABIP helped him offset the relatively lower number of balls leaving the park. With a bunch of line drives and enough walks to keep the OBP up, Freeman became about as good a hitter as one can be while hitting 20 homers a year.

Last year, though, Freeman found his power stroke, launching 34 home runs and running a .267 ISO, eighth-best in baseball. While he sacrificed a little bit of contact to get there, raising his strikeout rate to 25% in the process, he continued to torch the baseball even when it didn’t leave the field, allowing him to run a .370 BABIP that kept his BA and OBP up even while the strikeouts increased a little bit. His 152 wRC+ was the best of his career and tied him with Miguel Cabrera for the sixth-highest mark of any hitter in 2016. And after the first couple of weeks of 2017, that looks less like a career year and more like what we should start to expect from Freeman going forward.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jason Benetti, Andrew Triggs, Addison Reed and Odubel Herrera, C.B. Bucknor’s bad day, and Starling Marte’s suspension, then answer listener emails about the nature of fandom, dominance against a division rival, a billion-dollar payroll, Eric Thames’s hot start, transplanting an NPB team, catching up to favorite players from childhood, Mookie Betts’s strikeout-less streak, an RBI record, an unusual replay-review scenario, an extreme shift suggestion, and more.

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