There are five spots on a Cy Young ballot. This season, in the American League, only the first two are going to matter. Last year, Justin Verlander received the most first-place votes, with 14, but he was ranked second on just two ballots. Rick Porcello, meanwhile, received 18 second-place votes in addition to his eight at the top spot. Porcello ended up the winner.

This year, Chris Sale and Corey Kluber are likely to occupy the top two spots on every ballot, and whoever receives more first-place will probably take the award. The pair have produced very similar statistical records this year, so voters will have to split hairs to decide which of the two is more deserving. Let’s begin splitting some of those hairs right now, examining defense, contact quality, various sorts of WAR, and how they all influence each other when it comes to the two best pitchers in the American League.

To provide an initial tale of the tape of sorts, here are a few numbers with which most readers will be pretty familiar.

The strikeout and walk numbers are pretty equivalent. Sale has the edge in homers and innings, leading to a lower FIP and therefore WAR. Kluber has a much lower BABIP, which helps him lead in ERA. If you want to factor for league and park, we can do that. Sale’s FIP- is 50 to Kluber’s 57, and Sale’s ERA- is 61 to Kluber’s 54. Part of Kluber’s ERA advantage comes from that BABIP. He also has an 81.6% left-on-base percentage compared to Sale’s 76.7%, though, so part of the advantage is simply due to sequencing.

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A couple of weeks ago, I talked about why Rhys Hoskins‘ early process should give Phillies fans a reason for real excitement. His combination of frequently hitting the ball in the air while still making above-average contact is the foundation for high-level offensive production.

At that point, though, Hoskins had just 47 plate appearances in the Majors. Anyone can have a good 47 plate appearances, so I tried to emphasize that the results of his first 10 or so games shouldn’t have changed your opinion of Hoskins much. There were encouraging signs in the approach, and other hitters with similar skillsets also got overlooked by prospect rankings on their way to stardom, but I tried to avoid making a big deal about Hoskins running a 159 wRC+ for a couple of weeks.

Well, it’s been three weeks since that post went up, and now the results themselves are worth paying attention to.

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Rarely do the graphs line up as nicely as they do for Twins shortstop Jorge Polanco, who changed his season — and maybe his baseball future — on a dime. Over a span of 310 plate appearances leading up to the end of July, he’d recorded a slash line of .213/.265/.305, a mark roughly 50% worse than average after adjusting for park and league. In the 170 plate appearances since then, however, he’s produced a .347/.409/.626 mark, 70% better than league average. There’s been some batted-ball fortune maybe, but that hardly accounts for the enormity of the improvement in the numbers.

While the change in outcome has been significant, the change in process has been relatively simple. Polanco has basically followed three steps to rethink his approach, allowing the former top prospect to regain his standing with the team.

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While so much recent focus on the Dodgers has (rightfully) centered on their recent stretch of poor play, how about this ray of sunshine: the club is on the cusp of receiving a nine-win season — the sort of value one can only dependably expect from Mike Trout — from a lone source this year.

Surprisingly, the player responsible for this unusually high level of production isn’t Corey Seager or Justin Turner or even Clayton Kershaw. It’s not even a single player, at all, but a combination of two players at one position: catchers Yasmani Grandal and Austin Barnes. The pair has accounted for 8.1 BWARP, the Baseball Prospectus version of wins above replacement that also accounts for pitch framing.

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Introduction
The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise (introduced a few years ago) conducted by the author with a view to identifying and monitoring the most compelling of those rookie-eligible minor leaguers 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 all their attendant midseason lists, as well. Nearly every week during the minor-league season — with the exception of those immediately following the birth of his loud, new son — the author has submitted the names of five “compelling” minor leaguers, each name attended by a brief summary of that prospect’s most relevant credentials.

Generally speaking, the word compelling has been used to designate those prospects who possessed some combination of the following:

1. Promising statistical indicators; and

2. The ability to play on the more challenging end of the defensive spectrum; and

3. Youth relative to minor-league level; and

4. A curious biographical or statistical profile.

With minor-league regular seasons now complete, the author presents here a summary and discussion of the Fringe Five for 2017.

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The Cardinals won again on Thursday. It should go without saying they’re far from being the hottest team in baseball, but they’ve played well over the last couple months, hanging around in both the wild-card and Central division races. The Cardinals have won 36 of their past 60 games, which, over a full season, would be good enough to put them on a 97-win pace. Other teams have been better, but the Cardinals have been strong.

Something that strikes me about this Cardinals team in particular is its distribution of talent. Tommy Pham wasn’t expected to make this kind of impact. Neither was Luke Weaver, or Paul DeJong. Dave just wrote about the emerging Jose Martinez. It’s a team with surprises, but then, it’s also a team light on elites. Pham is their only 4+ WAR player. Carlos Martinez is their only other 3+ WAR player. So many other players have just been…good. Helpful enough. These Cardinals seem like the very opposite of top-heavy.

That’s an impression. Below is the math. Following a hunch or two, I broke down every single team, in terms of its basic WAR distribution. We can start off by just looking at overall WAR.

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After the Cubs ended their curse and title drought last fall, there was talk about a potential dynasty having arrived. There’s been less talk of that this season after the Cubs stumbled for much of the first half. While Chicago has one of the oldest pitching staffs (average age of 30.9 years) in the game, they’ve played at a higher level in the second half.

Elsewhere, a prominent magazine recently devoted its cover to the Dodgers, wondering if this year’s version of the club might be the “Best. Team. Ever?” And it’s a team, despite its recent skid, that remains six games ahead of its closest NL competitor, a team with a number of young, cornerstone stars.

Finally, it wouldn’t be surprising to observe the Yankees transform into a hegemonic power in the AL East. Their impressive young core has begun to arrive — and arrive ahead of schedule. And just about everyone expects them to be big players, and winners, in the historic 2018-19 free-agency class.

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Earlier today, I published a post examining the major-league success of players who were never considered top-100 prospects. It’s a favorite subject of mine, and among the most delightful things about the current Cleveland Indians is that they’re being led in no small part by both Jose Ramirez and Corey Kluber, who came up as relative nobodies. No one’s surprised when a top prospect becomes a top player. When a top player emerges after having been off the radar, though — every one of those guys has a story. Why, here’s a story from today, about Whit Merrifield. Merrifield was nothing, until he was something. Now he’s a part of the Royals’ present and future.

In running the analysis for the post linked above, I didn’t spot any meaningful trends. The number of good players who were unranked prospects has remained fairly steady. The amount of WAR coming from players who were unranked prospects has also remained fairly steady. Through that lens, it doesn’t seem like much is going on. Nothing, that is, that’s out of the ordinary. Yet, under the surface, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think I’m saying anything original, here, but these are tough times to be a minor-league scout. Anyone can evaluate a prospect, but it’s perhaps never been harder to evaluate well.

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“Cardinals’ Devil Magic” is a bit of a running joke around baseball, as every year, it seems like the organization turns some marginal prospect into a big league contributor. This dates back to guys like Allen Craig and David Freese, but Matt Carpenter probably embodies the success the organization has had turning fringe talents into stars better than anyone. Last year, it was Aledmys Diaz coming out of nowhere to put up a monster season; this year, it’s Tommy Pham, who currently ranks 15th among position players in WAR.

More than any other strength, this is what keeps the Cardinals in contention every year. They have a unique strength of finding underpowered position players and turning them into big league contributors. And while Pham has gotten most of the headlines this year, they might just be doing it again, in the person of Jose Martinez.

The only time we’ve really talked about Martinez this year was back when I was wondering why the team was bothering to play Matt Adams in left field, when Pham was stuck in the minors. I mentioned Martinez in passing as a guy who had crushed the ball in spring training, and got carried as a bench bat, which caused the team to option Pham to the minors. Previously, the only mentions of Martinez on the site came courtesy of Carson Cistulli, who included Martinez in a Fringe Five write-up in April of 2016, and picked him as “Cistulli’s Guy” on the Royals prospect list a few months before that.

Here’s what Carson said about Martinez back then.

For what Martinez lacks in defensive ability — he’s pretty much confined to an outfield corner — he compensates for it by way of offensive skill and, to the degree it can be said of a player entering his age-27 season, projection. Martinez was the best player in the Pacific Coast League last year according to a rough minor-league approximation of WAR provided by StatCorner. Nor was that performance the product entirely of statistical variance. While the line was certainly buoyed by a .434 BABIP, Martinez also benefited from his typical command of the strike zone — recording strikeout and walk rates of 12.1% and 13.9%, respectively — while also posting a .179 isolated-power figure.

Nor does any of this recognize his most notable trait — namely, his height. Martinez is 6-foot-7. Over the last decade, only 10 seasons have been logged by players 6-foot-7 or higher. All told, players around his height — which is to say, from 6-foot-6 to 6-foot-8 — have recorded a .223 isolated-power mark in 17,750 plate appearances. All of which is to say that Martinez quite possibly hasn’t reached his power ceiling yet. Paired with an above-average penchant for contact, that conspires to produce an interesting offensive profile.

As Carson correctly noted, it was pretty unusual for a guy Martinez’s size to be a low-power/high-contact guy, but that’s what Martinez had been throughout his minor league career. In fact, low-power doesn’t even really do justice to what Martinez was. In 2013, while kicking around the Braves system, he ran an .086 ISO in Double-A as a 24-year-old. In 2014, the Braves actually sent him to high-A as a 25-year-old, as he was the quintessential organizational player, hanging around to be a good influence on younger teammates and to help lower level teams try to win some games.

But after he climbed back up the ladder and had the monster year in Triple-A in 2015, the Cardinals plucked him from the Royals in exchange for some cash considerations. He wasn’t very good for Memphis last year, though, putting up just a 95 wRC+ as a 27-year-old. The contact was still there, but Martinez just didn’t hit for enough power to look like a big leaguer, given his defensive limitations.

Over the winter, though, Martinez apparently made some changes.

“All the hitting coaches I had since I’ve been playing said I needed to hit with more leverage and elevate the ball,” said Martinez. “But, getting with Miguel Rojas and Martin Prado in the offseason (in Miami) was a big help for me.”

The three Venezuelans — Rojas and Prado both played for the Miami Marlins — worked out together at a hitting facility in the Miami area and Martinez said a hitting instructor he knew only as “Sosa” (presumably, not Sammy), told him, “I’m going to help you to hit more homers and more doubles.”

If you look at Martinez’s minor league batted ball numbers, he annually ran ground-ball rates north of 50%, and it’s nearly impossible to hit for power when you’re doing that. This year, though, Martinez has lowered his GB% to 42%, a little bit lower than the Major League average. And the results have been staggering.

In part-time work, totaling 257 PAs this season, Martinez has hit .314/.379/.546, good for a .388 wOBA and 141 wRC+. And while it’s easy to just say small sample size, there’s really nothing here that looks like a fluke.

Because while this isn’t what you’d expect from a 29-year-old who didn’t hit for any power in the minors, Martinez now hits the crap out of the ball.

And now that Martinez isn’t hitting the ball into the ground all the time, he’s spraying line drives all over the field. And so by MLB’x xwOBA calculation, Martinez’s results actually indicate he’s been a bit unlucky this year.

Martinez’s success obviously comes in a smaller sample than the guys around him, but the company he’s keeping is remarkably impressive. And while small sample results absolutely need to be regressed heavily against a guy’s track record, it’s much harder to fluke your way into hitting the ball hard for this long. And we already knew Martinez controlled the strike zone; the key was always just unlocking his power.

He still doesn’t really pull the ball all that often, but with the changes he’s made to his swing and approach this year, he’s now driving the ball the other way with authority. The aforementioned J.D. Martinez has the highest wRC+ (321) on balls hit to the opposite field, but Jose Martinez comes in right behind him, with a 309 opposite field wRC+. When you’re driving the ball like this without trying to pull everything, there is obvious natural raw power there. Martinez just had to figure out how to use it. Now, at 29, it looks like he finally has.

With Matt Carpenter still around, and guys like Jedd Gyorko and Kolten Wong vying for playing time at 2B/3B, Martinez still doesn’t have a clear path to everyday at-bats in St. Louis next year. But given the changes he’s made this year, Martinez has earned a shot at a regular first base job somewhere. A high-contact guy who has unlocked his power and showing a pretty good idea of the strike zone is still a useful player, even if he’s limited to first base defensively and is a bit on the older side.

The Cardinals certainly have a logjam of position players to sort through this winter. If they don’t think they’ll have a spot to give Martinez 500 at-bats next year, he could be a very interesting trade chip. But if I’m John Mozeliak, I’d probably just keep Martinez and make him my everyday first baseman next year. Given the organization’s success with unlocking power from contact hitters, I wouldn’t be surprised if Martinez really has turned himself into a high-level hitter.