Max Scherzer has already won three Cy Young awards, and if he’s keeping them on his mantel, he might need to do some remodeling, as he’s threatening to add a fourth. The 33-year-old righty is having, by some measures, the most dominant season of his career — and one of the most dominant of all time.

After carving apart the admittedly hapless Orioles on Wednesday night (eight innings, two hits, one walk, no runs, 12 strikeouts), Scherzer leads the NL in a host of statistical categories both traditional and advanced: wins (nine), innings (79.2), strikeouts (120), strikeout rate in two flavors (13.6 per nine and 38.7% of all batters faced), K-BB% (32.6), hits per nine (5.5), FIP (1.95), and WAR (3.2). Meanwhile, his 1.92 ERA ranks second behind Jacob deGrom, who right now looks like the only other NL Cy candidate with more than a puncher’s chance, which is to say that it will take somebody else going on an an unforeseen roll — perhaps Clayton Kershaw, whose 2016 and -17 injuries already factored into Scherzer’s hardware tally — to justify a place in the discussion.

In terms of ERA and FIP, our heterochromic hero has enjoyed strong stretches such as this at various points in his career — more or less annually since 2013:

However, Scherzer has never put together a full season this strong, which is to say Kershaw-esque. Where the Dodgers’ lefty ace has banked two seasons with both his ERA and FIP below 2.00 (2014 and ’16), Scherzer’s lowest full-season ERA was last year’s 2.51, while his lowest FIP was his 2.77 in 2015. Even in his award-winning seasons, he’s never led the league in either category, whereas Kershaw has five ERA titles (tied for third all-time with Walter Johnson, Sandy Koufax, Pedro Martinez and Christy Mathewson, trailing only Roger Clemens with seven and Lefty Grove with nine) and two FIP titles.

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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 2017 | 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 Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels, and (most importantly) FanGraphs’ Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel* and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated, midseason-type list will also be excluded from eligibility.

*Note: I’ve excluded Baseball America’s list this year not due to any complaints with their coverage, but simply because said list is now behind a paywall.

For those interested in learning how Fringe Five players have fared at the major-league level, this somewhat recent post offers that kind of information. The short answer: better than a reasonable person would have have expected. In the final analysis, though, the basic idea here is to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.

Jonathan Hernandez, RHP, Texas (Profile)
Hernandez appeared here last week among that group designated as the Next Five. In his lone start since then, the right-hander recorded 11 strikeouts and just one walk while facing 27 batters in 8.0 innings for High-A Down East (box). Over his last three appearances now, Hernandez has produced strikeout and walk rates of 44.4% and 5.6%, respectively, in 20.0 innings.

Signed originally out of the Dominican Republic for $300,000 during the 2012-13 international signing period, Hernandez looked more like a “pitchability righty” in his first exposure to professional ball, according to Eric Longenhagen. More recently, however, the 21-year-old has developed greater arm speed, sitting 93-96 mph during a recent start.

There’s some concern, also according to Longenhagen, that Hernandez’s arm slot might leave him vulnerable to left-handed batters. Thus far this season, he’s actually been quite strong on that account, recording better strikeout and walk figures against left-handed batters (40.0-point K-BB%) than right-handed ones (19.8).

Here’s footage from a recent start of Hernandez striking out a left-handed batter on three pitches — what appears to be a pair of breaking balls follows by a stiff, but effective changeup:

https://gfycat.com/HopefulHollowKouprey

And here’s slow-motion footage of that final pitch, with what appears to be the sort of pronation typical of a changeup:

https://gfycat.com/ImpeccableSneakyBat

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In James Paxton’s final start in the month of May, he didn’t have it. Or at least, he didn’t have it like he’d had it before. Nevertheless, over five innings, he allowed just two runs, while striking out five and throwing two-thirds of his 89 pitches for strikes. Paxton has graduated to the point where even his mediocre outings are kind of all right. The four walks in five frames tell a misleading story; Paxton wasn’t wild. Paxton wasn’t wild because Paxton isn’t wild.

Paxton’s month began with 16 strikeouts against Oakland. That game was followed by a no-hitter in Toronto, and then, the next three times out, Paxton issued only one total walk while whiffing 23. Over six starts in May, Paxton went 43 innings and allowed eight runs, with opponents batting .143 and slugging .240. It’s quite possible this wasn’t even the best month of May for any pitcher — Justin Verlander also started six times, and he allowed five runs, to go with a .195 wOBA. But Paxton shook off a roller-coaster April, and established himself as one of the top starters in either league. If, that is, he wasn’t yet established.

Under the hood, as Paxton wrested greater control of his at-bats, he made some changes to his game plan. The month of May saw Paxton throwing a different fastball. And, as well, the month of May saw Paxton throwing a different curve. He does have a third pitch that’s in between the two, but it was the heater and the curveball that drove the bulk of Paxton’s success.

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