Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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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 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)
This represents Chirinos’s third consecutive appearance among the Five. His start this week, on Wednesday against Pirates affiliate Indianapolis, was consistent with the others he’s produced over the past month or so. Against 26 batters over 6.0 innings, the 23-year-old right-hander recorded an 8:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio and conceded his lone earned run on a homer (box).
Chirinos continues to exhibit impressive comfort with his secondary pitches, showing a willingness to throw them in all counts. Indeed, he began his most recent appearance with three different pitches, all for strikes, to dispatch swiftly of Indy leadoff hitter Eury Perez.
This video footage documents that sequence:
Heading into the year, the Mariners plan seemed to be to acquire as many low-ceiling middling prospects as they could find and throw them all at the wall, hoping one or two would help stabilize the back end of the team’s rotation. Over the last year and change, they’ve acquired and started Ariel Miranda, Dillon Overton, Chase De Jong, Chris Heston, Christian Bergman, and Ryan Weber. Thanks to a .220 BABIP, Miranda’s been a reasonable enough starter for the team, but most of the other guys made a few low-quality appearances and were then shipped back to Triple-A.
But the Mariners are apparently undeterred, and are trying this strategy one more time.
#Mariners acquire LHP Marco Gonzales from St. Louis for minor league OF Tyler O’Neill.
— Ryan Divish (@RyanDivish) July 21, 2017
The other day in the Giants’ clubhouse, I told Jeff Samardzija he was close to setting a record. “I don’t want to hear about it,” laughed the amicable righty. “No, no, a good one,” I pointed out, informing him of how he’s close to recording the best strikeout-to-walk figure of all time.
“Doesn’t mean I don’t have plenty to figure out,” he responded back.
It’s been an utterly lost season for the San Francisco Giants. Sure, it’s not an even year, so finding the Giants outside of the playoff mix isn’t a total shock, but the second-worst record in baseball? Not exactly what Bay Area fans had in mind.
| 12:02 |
: Happy Friday, everyone. Jeff and I switched days this week because he wanted to go climb something this weekend. I fully expect there to be 20 trades in the next 24 hours since he’s gone.
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| 12:02 |
: If the Cubs are to get one more starter, who do you think they get?
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| 12:04 |
: The rumor of the morning put them on Darvish, but there are diminishing returns on adding another guy at that level. You’re starting Lester/Quintana/Arrieta in the postseason, so if you pick up Darvish, one of those guys makes just one start in a seven game series.
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| 12:05 |
: So I’d think it would be more like an Estrada type, a guy who could potentially be a buy low and would give them depth if Hendricks has more problems, then could maybe be a reliever in October.
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| 12:06 |
: With everyone focused on Nats bullpen issues, is adding a starter or left fielder the main priority now?
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| 12:06 |
: I don’t think they need a starter. They basically have a playoff spot locked up, and Scherzer/Strasburg/Gio/Roark is fine for the postseason.
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This is Matt Swartz’ fifth piece as part of his July residency at FanGraphs. A former contributor to FanGraphs and the Hardball Times — and current contributor to MLB Trade Rumors — Swartz also works as consultant to a Major League team. You can find him on Twitter here. Read the work of all our residents here.
When I tell people about my side career as a baseball analyst, they frequently ask me of what research I’m most proud. The answer? The work I did establishing that teams receive fewer WAR per Dollar when signing free agents away from other teams than when re-signing their own players.
My clearest and most thorough analysis of this topic came in the 2012 Hardball Times Annual. The results were initially met with strong skepticism when I published a post on the topic at Baseball Prospectus back in 2010. It took a couple years of evidence before I was able to persuade the sabermetric community that it was true — and, more importantly, that the reason for this phenomenon was that teams re-signing their own players had better information on them.
My 2012 Hardball Times Annual article tested and confirmed that this held true for a variety of players. Traded MLB players and traded minor-league prospects both tended to underperform their projections when compared to untraded players.
What’s the significance of this discovery? Generally speaking, it means that an “average” player who reaches free agency is overvalued by his projections relative to another “average” player who doesn’t reach free agency. So much of sabermetric analysis involves looking at free agents. Suddenly, I had research indicating that such analysis was based on a biased sample. The results immediately colored every potential free-agent signing. With every free agent I encountered afterward, I began asking myself: “is there some reason this player’s original team let him go?”
Faced with an expensive market for premium starting pitching, but in possession of one of the least effective rotations in the majors, the Twins are reportedly close to finalizing a deal for left-handed Braves pitcher Jaime Garcia.
A proportional response from MIN: About to upgrade their rotation by adding Jaime Garcia for a minor-leaguer, at relatively low cost.
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) July 20, 2017
Mike Berardino of the Pioneer Press has more information:
The Braves would pick up less than half of Garcia’s remaining obligation, the person with direct knowledge said, but that figure was still being discussed along with which player or players the Twins would surrender. Medical reports were still being evaluated as well, but the deal was said to be “very close to final.”
Entering Friday, the Twins (48-46) are surprisingly just a half-game behind the Indians, the reigning AL champs and and heavy division favorites. The Twins are also just a game behind the Yankees for the second Wild Card spot in what is expected to be a bit of a log jam. So there’s some cause for optimism.
At the same time, however, Minnesota ranks 25th in the majors in BaseRuns win percentage (.438), suggesting they’ve benefited considerably from sequencing. Entering Friday, FanGraphs expects the Twins to finish with 78 wins and 84 losses. Overall, the club possesses a 10.6% probability of reaching the postseason according to FanGraphs’ playoff odds — and a 2.6% chance of capturing the division. The projections, in other words, don’t have much belief in the current roster.
So with 68 games to play, the Twins find themselves in a somewhat delicate position, in close proximity to a postseason berth but quite possibly lacking the roster to really go for it.
Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Mariners’ and Marlins’ David Phelps trade, Sam Dyson’s bounceback, an eight-strikeout game, the Salina Stockade, Matt Davidson and Jeff Mathis, the first post-All Star Game weeks of Mike Trout and the Cubs, and early trade-deadline activity, then examine the results of a FiveThirtyEight survey about the most- and least-liked MLB teams.
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I don’t know if the Cubs are actually coming out of their funk, but it sure looks like they are. It feels like a matter of days before they re-claim first place in the NL Central, which is the outcome we’ve all long expected. There’s still work to do yet, but as the Cubs improve, it sends more eyes over to the Indians. The Indians have been in a funk of their own, and while they’re already sitting in first, they’ve been unable to shake the Twins and the Royals. Even the Tigers remain within conceivable striking distance, and they’ve begun to sell. The Indians were supposed to be better than this, and the clock, as a clock does, is ticking.
Struggling team? Check. Trade deadline approaching? Check. Observers are wondering how the Indians might look to get better in the week and a half ahead. One thought has been that the club could look to add another starting pitcher. With Danny Salazar about to return from injury, perhaps that wouldn’t be necessary. But for me, the key isn’t the return of Salazar. Rather, it’s the emergence of Mike Clevinger. Clevinger has stepped up in a big way, giving the Indians more than they thought they might have.