The Fringe Five is a weekly exercise (introduced in April) wherein the 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 this exercise, of course, is a definition of the word fringe. The author recognizes that the word has different connotations for different sorts of readers. For the purposes of this column, however — and for reasons discussed more thoroughly in a recent edition of the Five — the author has considered eligible for the Five any prospect who was absent from all of three notable preseason top-100 prospect lists.
That said, it should also be noted that in cases where the collective enthusiasm regarding a player’s talent becomes very fevered — like how the enthusiasm collectively right now for Philadelphia third-base prospect Maikel Franco is very fevered, for example — that will likely affect said player’s likelihood of appearing among the Five, given that the purpose of the series, at some level, is to identify prospects who are demonstrating promise above what one might expect given their current reputations within the prospect community.
With that said, here are this week’s Fringe Five:
Chad Bettis, RHP, Colorado (Profile)
Bettis appeared among the Five — either Fringe or Next, one or the other — three times in May, but was forced to the disabled list in that same month with an oblique injury. He returned on July 3rd, however, and has now made four starts for Double-A Tulsa. He’s been excellent, as well, recording a 23:5 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 20.0 innings. There’s little doubt about the quality of Bettis’s arm speed: he’s known for sitting in the mid-90s with his fastball and also throwing an excellent slider. For that reason, it’s encouraging to find that, according to Troy Renck of the Denver Post, he maintained his 95 mph fastball into later innings recently.
Here’s an example of Bettis’s slider from the right-hander’s July 14th start against Royals affiliate Northwest Arkansas:
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