The Fringe Five: Baseball’s Most Compelling Fringe Prospects
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 within Longenhagen and McDaniel’s most recent update — and the updates published by Jeffrey Paternostro of Baseball Prospectus and John Sickels at Minor League Ball — have also been excluded from consideration.
*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.
Cavan Biggio, 2B, Toronto (Profile)
This represents Biggio’s second appearance among the Five proper — and, as in the case of that first appearance, represents an opportunity to appreciate what appears to be his transformation into an actual, legitimate slugger.
Biggio currently possesses an 18.5% walk rate and .268 isolated-power mark, figures which place him second and first, respectively, among qualified hitters at Double-A. Among that same group, he’s the only batter to record walk and home-run rates at least two standard deviations above the mean (relative to that same qualified population).
| Rk | Name | Team | Age | PA | BB% | HR% | zBB% | zHR% | zAvg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cavan Biggio | Blue Jays | 23 | 508 | 18.5% | 5.1% | 3.5 | 2.1 | 2.8 |
| 2 | Zack Collins | White Sox | 23 | 491 | 19.8% | 2.9% | 3.9 | 0.4 | 2.2 |
| 3 | Joey Curletta | Mariners | 24 | 505 | 15.0% | 4.6% | 2.2 | 1.7 | 1.9 |
| 4 | Josh Ockimey | Red Sox | 22 | 376 | 15.7% | 4.0% | 2.5 | 1.3 | 1.9 |
| 5 | Bobby Bradley | Indians | 22 | 421 | 10.7% | 5.7% | 0.7 | 2.6 | 1.6 |
| 6 | Zack Short | Cubs | 23 | 479 | 15.4% | 3.3% | 2.3 | 0.8 | 1.6 |
| 7 | Isan Diaz | Marlins | 22 | 356 | 14.9% | 2.8% | 2.2 | 0.4 | 1.3 |
| 8 | Yusniel Diaz | LAD/BAL | 21 | 374 | 15.0% | 2.7% | 2.2 | 0.3 | 1.2 |
| 9 | Corey Ray | Brewers | 23 | 556 | 10.3% | 4.9% | 0.5 | 1.9 | 1.2 |
| 10 | Jose Rojas | Angels | 25 | 352 | 10.2% | 4.8% | 0.5 | 1.9 | 1.2 |
Patience and power aren’t wholly independent traits. Players who swing at better pitches tend to have better results on contact. While Biggio might possess only slightly better than average raw power, he appears — by virtue of his selectivity and also by means of his capacity to get the ball in the air — to have translated much of that raw power into games. In combination with second-base defense that grades out as solidly average by the advanced metrics, the overall profile is a promising one.