The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced last April by the present author, wherein that same ridiculous author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own heart 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 in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists* and also (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on the midseason prospect lists produced by those same notable sources or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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Intermittently, over the past month or so, the present author — leaning heavily on historical data from Baseball America — has examined the ways in which prospects distinguished for possessing certain tools as minor-leaguers have ultimately fared at the major-league level. The goal: ideally, to develop a better sense of what does and doesn’t correlate to future success, with a view towards better assessing contemporary prospects.

The first of these posts considered the 2005 “class,” as it were, of best-tool prospects and their respective major-league futures; the second post, that collection of prospects from 2005 to -09 who had been recognized both for their hit tool and plate discipline simultaneously; and the third, that subset of the best-hitting, most-disciplined prospects who had also been recognized for their defensive acumen.

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Episode 438
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he analyzes real major-league baseball that has happened in 2014.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 39 min play time.)

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Recently, in these electronic pages, the author made a study of those hitting prospects who had been recognized by Baseball America for possessing the best of this or that tool (i.e. ability to hit for average, ability to hit for power, etc.) within their respective organizations. The study, specifically, was designed to identify how certain tools, on average, had translated to the majors. The results? While not exhaustive, the exercise in question seemed to indicate that those prospects who had been recognized either for their ability to hit for average or their plate discipline had produced markedly better numbers at the major leagues than those prospects who were recognized for their power, speed, or athleticism.

A sequel of sorts to that first piece focused specifically on those prospects who, during at least one of the years between 2005 and -09, had been recognized by Baseball America for possessing both the best hit tool and the best plate discipline within their respective organization. While, as noted in that second post, one doesn’t expect talent to have been distributed evenly among every minor-league system — and, accordingly, can’t expect the best hitter in a talent-poor system to match the skills of the best hitter in a talent-rich one — the value of the Best Tool designations is that they function as a reasonable proxy for more sophisticated data that isn’t available publicly.

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Note: because he (a) assembled the following list by hand and also (b) is a careless idiot, the author neglected some names from the first version of this post. Do not hesitate to raise concerns about the absence of a notable prospect.

What follows is an attempt to identify, using a nearly sound methodology, the rookie-eligible players* who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2014 (regardless of whether they actually receive the opportunity to do so). What it is not is an attempt to replace the work done by prospect analysts who assemble similar lists by means of “knowledge” and “skill.” Unlike their lists, no attempt has been made here to account for future value.

*In this case, defined as any player who’s recorded fewer than 130 at-bats or 50 innings — which is to say, there’s been no attempt to identify each player’s time spent on the active roster, on account of that’s a super tedious endeavor.

To assemble the list, what I’ve done first is to calculate prorated WAR figures for all players for whom either the Steamer or ZiPS projection systems have produced a forecast. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce approximately a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

All figures published below are averaged 2014 projections produced by Steamer and ZiPS, except in those cases (represented by an asterisk*) where only Steamer has produced a projection. Players eligible for the list either (a) enter their age-26 season or lower in 2014 or, alternatively, (b) were signed as international free agents this offseason.

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On Friday, managing editor Dave Cameron published the various (and probably wrong) FanGraphs staff predictions for the American League and National League — shortly after which the present author provided the readership their own opportunity to make embarrassing predictions.

Below are the results of that same exercise for the National League. The results for the American League, published earlier this afternoon, are available here. Note that, owing to rounding error, percentages might add up to slightly more or less than 100%.

Division Winners

West: L.A. (89%), San Fran. (6%), Arizona (3%), San Diego (2%), Colorado (1%)
Central: St. Louis (87%), Pitt. (8%), Cinn. (5%), Milwaukee (1%), Chicago (0%)
East: Washington (82%), Atlanta (17%), Miami (1%), Phil. (1%), New York (0%)

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On Friday, managing editor Dave Cameron published the various (and probably wrong) FanGraphs staff predictions for the American League and National League — shortly after which the present author provided the readership their own opportunity to make embarrassing predictions.

Below are the results of that same exercise for the American League. The National League will follow later this afternoon. Note that, owing to rounding error, percentages might add up to slightly more or less than 100%.

Division Winners

West: Oakland (49%), Anaheim (29%), Texas (18%), Seattle (4%), Houston (0%)
Central: Detroit (83%), Kansas City (10%), Cleve. (7%), Chicago (1%), Minn. (0%)
East: Tampa Bay (47%), Boston (37%), New York (8%), Toronto (4%), Balt. (3%)

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Episode 437
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he provides something not unlike a preview of the 2014 season.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 55 min play time.)

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Episode 436
Nathaniel Stoltz is a very thoughtful prospect writer for FanGraphs and RotoGraphs. He’s also the guest on this edition of the podcast, recorded live on tape from Dave Cameron’s house in Winston-Salem, NC.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 49 min play time.)

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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This afternoon, Dave Cameron has published in these electronic pages the results of the FanGraphs staff predictions both for the American League and also the National League. As Cameron notes, those predictions will be wrong — grievously so, in some cases.

In the spirit of egalitarianism that pervades this site, FanGraphs is giving readers the opportunity to be just as wrong as our staff — by allowing them (i.e. those same readers) to predict the various winners of baseball’s divisional titles and wild-card berths and end-of-season awards.

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