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 any updated list — such as the revised and midseason lists released by Baseball America or BP’s recent midseason top-50 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.

Yonny Chirinos, RHP, Tampa Bay (Profile)
The right-handed Chirinos made his debut among the Five last Friday. That evening, he started for Triple-A Durham and exhibited all the same traits that led to his first appearance here, recording a 6:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 29 total batters over 8.0 innings in a game against the Tigers’ Triple-A affiliate (box). To the extent that one can tell merely by observing game footage, he also appeared to demonstrate even more impressive velocity than in earlier contests.

Consider, by way of example, this three-pitch sequence to Detroit prospect Jason Krizan — a collection of fastballs at 95 and 95 and then 96 mph, ending in a strikeout:

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The first domino of the 2017 trade deadline fell yesterday, as the Cubs swung a deal with their crosstown rivals for Jose Quintana. Quintana has been one of the best pitchers in baseball the past few years, so he understandably brought back a substantial prospect haul. The Cubs coughed up top prospects Eloy Jimenez and Dylan Cease in the deal. Both are possess enticing upside, but neither has put up dominant numbers in the low minors. As a result, KATOH is relatively low on both.

A couple of lower-tier prospects, Matt Rose and Bryant Flete, were also included in the deal.

Below are the projections for the four players whom the White Sox receive. WAR figures account for the player’s first six major-league seasons. KATOH denotes the stats-only version of the projection system, while KATOH+ denotes the methodology that includes a player’s prospect rankings.

*****

Eloy Jimenez, LF (Profile)

KATOH: 4.7 WAR (87th overall)
KATOH+: 11.5 WAR (12th overall)

Jimenez is undoubtedly the centerpiece in this deal. The 20-year-old Dominican left fielder ranked fifth and eighth on Baseball America’s and Baseball Prospectus’s lists, respectively. After missing the season’s first few weeks with a shoulder injury, Jimenez has hit .271/.351/.490 at High-A. He hit a loud .329/.369/.532 in Low-A last season. Over the winter, Eric Longenhagen praised Jimenez’s power potential, ranking him No. 15 on his preseason top-100 list.

He’s got 70 raw power right now, flicking lasers over the left-field wall with ease during BP and stumbling into wall-scraping homers he barely squares up in games. I think he’s going to have elite power in his mid-20s and there’s solid feel for contact here, too.

My KATOH system is a tad skeptical of Jimenez due to his near-complete lack of defensive value and 20% strikeout rate in A-ball. Still, it sees a good deal of promise in his power and youth. For someone Jimenez’s age, 24 homers in 154 games at A-ball is impressive, regardless of what position he plays.

To put some faces to Jimenez’s statistical profile, let’s generate some statistical comps. I calculated a Mahalanobis distance between Jimenez’s A-ball performance and every season since 1991. In the table below, you’ll find the 10 most similar seasons, ranked from most to least similar. The WAR totals refer to each player’s first six seasons in the major leagues. A lower “Mah Dist” reading indicates a closer comp.

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By now, you’ve probably heard of The Freeze. Although many would say he flopped in his All-Star Game appearance, The Freeze has nevertheless become a sensation in Atlanta. There’s a reason he was invited to the All-Star Game in the first place. The premise: Between innings, some lucky fan gets to try to run pole to pole, in the outfield. The fan is given a head start of several seconds, after which The Freeze gets to sprint after him. It’s a regular footrace, except that one of the contestants is some random individual with limited training, and the other is a world-class sprinter. Hence the head start. It tends not to matter. You’ve seen the footage, and, every damn time, it’s amazing. The closing speed is unfathomable.

On a related note, Mike Trout is back. Most importantly, that’s great news for Trout and for the Angels, but hereabouts, we don’t have a particular Angels lean. They’re one of 30 ballclubs, and it doesn’t make a real difference to me what they do. We’re people who love Trout and statistics, and, officially, Trout will have missed a month and a half with a tear in his thumb. Which means that, if Trout stays healthy the rest of the way, he’ll play three quarters of one season. The other top players should play four quarters of one season. Where is Trout going to finish in WAR?

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Jose Quintana trade, an Aaron Judge anecdote, Dan Uggla’s disastrous 2008 All-Star Game appearance, and the significance of Ken Rosenthal being barred from writing by Fox, then discuss ways to spice up the All-Star Game with a skills competition that could actually work before closing with a question about Judge and Mike Trout.

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Welcome to the final installment of this year’s Trade Value series; you can find links to the previous five posts above. If you’re not familiar with this project, there’s an explanation of the process in the HM post, so that’s the best place to start.

As a reminder for those who don’t like clicking links, however, the five-year WAR projections are based on Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS forecasts, though the players aren’t ranked based on those projections; these figures are included merely as a piece of information to help round out the picture. The guaranteed-dollars line measures the amount of money the player is owed outside of team options or arbitration years; for most of these guys, team options are very likely to be exercised, and many of them will end up making more than the guaranteed-dollars number reports.

Now let’s turn our attention to today’s top 10. In reality, this ended up being two groups of five, with plenty of room for movement within those two groups. And at the very top of the list was the toughest call I’ve ever had to make in putting this project together. The amount of great young talent in the game right now is simply remarkable.

Just as a note: I’ll be chatting about this list at 12 p.m. ET, so if you have any questions, feel free to swing by and I’ll answer as many as I can. Now, on to the top 10.

Corey Kluber was already amazing. He might actually be getting better, though. His strikeout rate has jumped from 26% to 34%. His ground-ball rate is at a career high, but so is his infield-fly rate. He still throttles contact quality. With the way he’s pitching now, he’s in that next tier of non-Kershaw starters. He’s everything you want in an ace.

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It’s the All-Star break, and the Houston Astros have 60 wins. That’s more wins than they had in all of 2013. It’s more wins than they had in all of 2012. It’s more wins than they had in all of 2011. Now, those Astros teams were supposed to be bad, and this Astros team was supposed to be good. No one ever expected it to be this good. No baseball team is ever expected to be this good.

There’s credit to be spread all around, but this is a post that’s focusing on the hitters, so, let’s focus on the hitters. I pretty much always choose to eliminate pitcher hitting performance, so, keep that minor factor in mind. The Astros, in April, had a 106 wRC+. They scored 4.5 runs per game. In May, they had a 129 wRC+. They scored 6.2 runs per game. In June, they had a 131 wRC+. They scored 5.8 runs per game. And so far in July, they have a 191 wRC+, and that’s a 191, not any other number, like 181 or 171 — it is not a typographical error. They’ve scored 9.8 runs per game. Over the past 30 days, the Astros as a team have combined for a 153 wRC+, which is incidentally right where you find Paul Goldschmidt. It’s been a month of a team of Paul Goldschmidts.

These Astros hitters have been insane. In just a short few minutes, I’d like to provide you with some historical context.

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There’s a fairly prevalent belief that teams should be reluctant to trade with other teams in the same city. Something to do with rivalries, or whatever. You don’t want to have a valuable former asset helping out some other club just a few miles away. Indeed, if you examine trading histories, these moves are fairly uncommon. Baseball has established a precedent by which intra-city ballclubs seldom come together for a swap. However, that’s stupid. The Cubs and White Sox realize that’s stupid, and so, as of Thursday morning, we’ve got ourselves a blockbuster.

Cubs get:

• Jose Quintana

White Sox get:

• Eloy Jimenez
• Dylan Cease
• Matt Rose
• Bryant Flete

It’s long been fairly obvious that Quintana was going to get moved. While he’s a long-term asset, he’s really a short-term asset under long-term control, and the White Sox probably would’ve liked to have moved him last winter. Seeing Quintana get dealt isn’t surprising. It’s also not surprising to see the Cubs jump on a cost-controlled, somewhat young starter. This has been the rumor for what feels like years. They developed their bats, and they’ve needed to acquire pitching. Quintana is said pitching. Everything about this makes sense, once you move beyond whatever shock you might feel about the two Chicago teams reaching an agreement. This is a sensible exchange. It’s also a total doozy.

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Talk to pitchers on the record, and the links they’re willing to draw between an increase in blisters and what looks like a tighter baseball are minimal. That makes sense — and it’s doesn’t seem to be concern for politics or press relations that’s holding them back. There are so many confounding factors that it’s the probably the right way to approach the situation.

Talk to a few pitchers off the record, though, and another link emerges, one that might provide some insight into the relationship between seams and blisters.

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Let’s start with a comp, courtesy of Connecticut Tigers pitching coach Ace Adams:

“He reminds me of Jonathan Papelbon, who I had for a couple of years with the Red Sox. The same type of arm action, the same type of delivery; the stature, the arm strength. There’s a lot of life on the four-seamer.”

The “he” in question is pitcher Matt Manning, whom Detroit drafted ninth-overall last year out of a Sacramento, California, high school. The 19-year-old right-hander — all six feet, six inches of him — is being tutored by the longtime pitching coach in short-season ball.

Papelbon was a starter before becoming a reliever, and if all goes as planned, Manning will remain in a rotation for the duration of his career. Adams feels he has a chance to be “pretty special,” and the scouting world pretty much agrees. Baseball America, MLB.com, and our own Eric Longenhagen all rank Manning as the top prospect in the Tigers’ system. Read the rest of this entry »