The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple 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 in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

Read the rest of this entry »

Before beginning in earnest, it’s essential or nearly essential for the reader to know that this post for FanGraphs.com on the internet relies on an improbable set of assumptions. One of those assumptions is this: that you (the reader) are a member of a major-league front office. Another is this: that you’ve solicited me, the author — a person who lives in rural New Hampshire and possesses only a basic reading-level command of Spanish — that you’ve solicited me to recommend some Mexican League players who might find some success in the majors. A third assumption is this: that you’re entirely comfortable with the knowledge that I’ve seen only a couple of these players in person — and even then it was at a spring-training game in Mexico City’s new facility while consuming a number of tall beers with British illustrator/dipsomaniac Craig Robinson.

Weirder things have probably happened than the scenario I’ve laid out above, but almost all of them have been confined to parties hosted by Silvio Berlusconi. What, then, is the purpose of this post? Mostly just to become acquainted with the most interesting (and generally young) talents in the Mexican League (or LMB).

It’s probably best to address first this question — namely, what sort of talent the LMB has produced in the past that has gone on to success in the American major leagues. The answer, broadly speaking, is that it has produced notable talent. Joakim Soria and Fernando Valenzuela, for example, both pitched in the LMB before ever making an appearance in the majors. Baseball’s current top pitching prospect, Julio Urias, was employed by the Diablos Rojos of Mexico City before that club and the Dodgers reached an agreement for him to move to the latter team. In a lower profile but still relevant instance, Houston acquired two other players from Mexico City: Japhet Amador and Leo Heras. The former was compelled to return to Mexico when his wife became ill, but Heras remains in the Astros system at the Double-A level, where he’s exhibited promising plate discipline and speed. These examples skew decidedly anecdotal, but the idea with them isn’t to supply anything like an exhaustive study, but rather merely to illustrate that a player from the LMB has ever once succeeded in the majors.

Always it’s best to complement any sort of endeavor such as this one with observational evidence. Owing to the author’s geographical constraints and also the paucity of video available for the LMB, however, that’s not really an option. In any case, one can reach some basic assumptions about a player’s talent level by considering certain relevant information and weighting it responsibly.

This sort of information, for example:

Age
Younger players are obviously more likely to improve — or at least not decline. Also, with regard to the LMB, specifically, one finds that the average age is on the older side — nearly 31 for batters and 29 for pitchers. For the purposes of this post, I’ve considered only those players who are 27 or younger.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple 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 in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 558
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect analyst for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses some Atlanta-area prep prospects and some Nashville-area prep prospects and the near futures both of Mike Foltynewicz and Carlos Frias.

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 50 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

For all her conspicuous virtues and manifest talents, late singer Aaliyah was almost certainly mistaken in her assertion that age “ain’t nothing but a number.” It is a number, that’s true, but it’s a number that represents the number of years a thing or person or some other manner of noun has existed. Which, that’s more than nothing.

In the context of baseball prospect analysis, age is decidedly not nothing. As both anecdotal evidence and also more rigorous statistical evidence* suggest, age relative to level is predictive of future major-league performance, where younger relative to level is better. One finds, for example, that players who debut at a younger age produce higher prorated WAR figures than players who debut at an older one. It’s not because they’re younger that they’re better, of course. Rather, their respective teams have generally recognized that they’re capable of handling the highest level of competition. And it follows that, if they’re able to handle that level of competition en route to their respective peaks, then they’re also generally able to handle it in the decline phase of their careers, too.

*Such as the sort produced by Chris Mitchell.

The relationship between age and performance and level is the foundation for the considerable and deserved excitement regarding Mike Trout’s career — not only for his career up the to present day, but also the prospect of what his career will have been once it’s finished. Trout has recorded the highest WAR among all hitters ever through his age-22 season, for example. That’s not only impressive, but probably also predictive. Because consider: basically all of the next 20 guys on that particular leaderboard are now in the Hall of Fame.

Players who, like Trout, combine youth and talent are notable. And, all other things being equal, it’s reasonable to expect that the prospects who are producing the top performances at the youngest ages will develop into the best players.

This question of talented youth is relevant today largely because of the Dodgers, their rotation, and their top pitching prospect left-hander Julio Urias. The Dodgers possess the largest major-league payroll by roughly $50 million. They also possess the sort of expectations associated with that kind of payroll — and, over the first month of the season, the club has more or less met those expectations. As of today, for example, they lead the NL West by two games and feature nearly a 90% chance of winning that division according to the numbers and methodology used at this site.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, introduced a couple 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 in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from the most current iteration of Kiley McDaniel’s top-200 prospect list and (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on any of McDaniel’s updated prospect lists or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last two weeks, my insatiable desire to rank everything manifested itself in a three–part roundup of the buzz, rumors and scouting reports of this year’s top international amateur prospects and an excessively long ranking of the top prospects for this summer’s domestic draft. Earlier this year, I mentioned the top two names already making buzz in the 2016 July 2nd class, so it only seemed reasonable to also dive into the next two draft classes as well.

For obvious reasons, there’s a lot more information available for future draft classes than for future July 2 classes, but there are still limitations to what we can know at this point.

– It’s easier now to scout non-draft eligible high school players because of the showcase circuit, but scouts aren’t focusing on them so many don’t have strong opinions, much less rankings of these players. An average scout’s knowledge about guys on this list is limited to a handful of guys that are on loaded high school teams they see regularly, a guy that really stood out at one summer event they went to, collegiates that play at major programs or that were known prospects out of high school. We have video of most of these players and will start adding it to the FG YouTube page in the coming weeks.

That means making this list is combining what I’ve seen, what scouts tell me, notes from various other sources and which underclassmen are attracting interest from advisors, which is a surprisingly good indicator.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 555
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses a recent pro scouting trip to Montgomery, some notable high-school prospects, and the current state of the international market.

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 1 hr 12 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 554
Touki Toussaint is a right-hander in the Arizona system who was selected 16th overall in the most recent draft. Brian Johnson is a left-hander in the Red Sox system, currently playing for Triple-A Pawtucket. This edition of FanGraphs Audio features both of them, in conversation with lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel. (Note: Toussaint’s interview begins at about the 12:45 mark; Johnson’s, around the 20:35 mark.)

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 35 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Episode 552
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses his recently updated draft rankings in some depth and also some width.

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 47 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS