On July 10th, the Brewers were in Miami to face the Marlins in a game that didn’t seem to have anything of note going into it. Jhoulys Chacin was facing Pablo Lopez, there were no stats leaders in the game, and playoff spots weren’t directly at stake. After both teams put up a run in the first inning, J.T. Riddle stepped in and whacked a slider in the middle of the zone to center field.

Okay, “whacked” might be an exaggeration. It exited the bat at only 71.1 mph and, with a launch angle of 30 degrees, represented a pretty standard short fly ball. Fortunately for Riddle, it was well placed and landed in front of the center fielder for a single. Despite Starlin Castro coming around to score and giving the Marlins an early 2-1 lead, it would ultimately go for naught: the Brewers put up four in the top of the second and went on to an easy 8-4 win.

Seems like a throwaway single in a relatively meaningless game, right? On the one hand, yes. On the other, there’s something interesting in that moment, and it has nothing to do with Riddle or the Marlins. Rather, it’s an interesting event for Brewers center fielder Keon Broxton. “But why?” I hear you say. “He didn’t catch the ball. Sure, it looks like he considered diving there for a brief second, but he didn’t and let the ball land.” However, the fact that the ball landed is what’s notable. That bloop single is the only ball hit to Broxton in 2018 — with a catch probability greater than 0% — that he didn’t catch. And he was only a couple of strides from reaching it at that! In a part-time role, necessitated by his poor hitting and the Brewers’ very crowded outfield, Broxton is putting up an unprecedented defensive season.

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For all intents and purposes, the Angels are having a disappointing season. Not every club that begins the season as a contender is able to end it in the same way, but somehow the organization has been remarkably consistent in their path to disappointment. For the third year in a row, they’ve been swarmed by numerous debilitating ligament injuries to the arms of controllable starting pitchers — seven in the last three years and four this year alone. This season, that list is headlined by Shohei Ohtani and Garrett Richards.

Craig Edwards recently discussed the team’s competitive positioning and outlook following the news of Zack Cozart’s season-ending labrum surgery, noting that, at the time of publication, the Angels had just a 4.5% chance of reaching the postseason. Edwards advocated that, with little to sell and hopes of contending in the near future, the club’s best course of action may be to do nothing, to bet on positive regression, and to hope that Seattle falters before the end of the season.

With numerous players’ failing to reach their projected levels, one might say underperformance is the team’s middle name. (Well, one of them.) Platoon specialist Luis Valbuena sports a 57 wRC+ against right-handed hitters, fanning a whopping 34% of the time. Ian Kinsler boasts a measly .214 BABIP en route to a batting average just five points higher, and Cozart had a rough albeit inconclusive go in learning the hot corner (-5 DRS in 278.1 innings). Kole Calhoun’s year, however, is the most incomprehensible roller coaster of them all.

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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 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.

Tony Gonsolin, RHP, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
Gonsolin debuted among the Five last week following a series of increasingly impressive starts that culminated in an 11-strikeout effort against just 20 batters on July 10th. While he failed to overwhelm his opponents so decisively in his lone appearance over the past week, his July 16th start was notable for another reason — namely, that it occurred against the Arkansas Travelers of the Texas League and represented the right-hander’s debut at Double-A.

The former ninth-round pick was still quite strong, recording an 8:0 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 26 batters over 6.0 innings (box). One account indicates that Gonsolin touched 98 mph, which is roughly in line with previous reports.

Gonsolin’s slider is naturally effective against same-handed batters, but he appeared to have some strategies for dealing with lefties, as well.

Here, for example, is a back-foot breaking pitch at which Beau Amaral offered hesitantly:

And a changeup that, despite suboptimal location, nevertheless elicited a swing and miss from Logan Taylor:

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All things considered, the Chicago Cubs were in a pretty good place headed into the All-Star break. Their NL-leading offense had carried the team to a 13-4 record in the 17 games before the break, scoring 6.82 runs per game in that span and effecting a net five-game swing in the standings. The starting pitching, though — whose shortcomings were examined earlier today by Craig Edwards — had recorded an unimpressive 4.67 FIP coming into the break (ranked 14th in the National League) while benefiting from strong defense and perhaps, yes, a measure of good luck to record a 3.88 ERA that ranked seventh league-wide. Critical to the Cubs’ success, then, was the bullpen, which posted an 3.09 ERA (2nd) and 3.74 FIP (5th) on the back of strong performances from Steve Cishek, Carl Edwards Jr., Brandon Morrow, Pedro Strop, and Justin Wilson.

The twin problems for Cubs relievers were that they were, in the main, pitching a little bit more often than you’d like (their 3.7 innings pitched per game ranked fifth in the National League coming into the break, due to some early exits from Cubs starters) and that they were walking too many people while they were at it (their 11.3% free-pass rate as a relief corps was the worst in the game). These were problems even before the Cubs announced on Thursday that Morrow, their closer, would be placed on the disabled list with a “right biceps inflammation,” which does not sound pleasant even at the best of times and was particularly inconvenient for Chicago at this time. With that announcement, the Cubs’ public quest for relief depth acquired a more urgent flavor, and they sent A-ball starter Tyler Thomas, who’s having a nice season, to the Rangers for Jesse Chavez.

The good thing about Jesse Chavez, insofar as the Cubs are concerned with him, is that he’s used to throwing more than one inning at a time (averaging, this season, about 1.5 innings in his 30 appearances and on five occasions going at least three) and that his 5.1% walk rate is among the very best in the game. The Cubs had two problems with their relievers, and Jesse Chavez helps to address both. Joe Maddon has not particularly enjoyed having to cast about, each game, for a reliever to bridge the gap from the fifth inning to the seventh, and in Chavez he probably has someone who can take a little bit of the pressure off of folks like Wilson, Anthony Bass, Brian Duensing, and Randy Rosario early in games.

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So far this season, Cubs starters rank 10th in WAR as a group. For a club hoping to win a tough Central division, that might be less than ideal. Still, it seems workable. Fine for a contending club.

Unfortunately for Chicago, 10th is not the rotation’s rank relative to other rotations — by that measure, they place 24th — but rather compared to other, individual starters. Stated differently: as a group, Cubs starters have been outperformed by nine major-league pitchers. That seems less workable. Less fine for a contending club.

Only six clubs (the Orioles, Padres, Rangers, Reds, Royals, and White Sox) have received less production from their rotation and none of them are threatening to win a championship this year. It’s true that the Cubs have some pretty good starters — Yu Darvish, Kyle Hendricks, Jon Lester, and Jose Quintana have all authored multiple above-average seasons — but Darvish has been hurt or pitched poorly, Hendricks and Quintana have been inconsistent, and Lester appears to be benefiting from a combination of luck and defense rather than his own skill. Mike Montgomery has been solid as a fill-in, but free-agent signee Tyler Chatwood has been a disaster, with nearly as many walks as strikeouts.

As it stands now, the Cubs are on pace to field their worst rotation ever. The graph below shows both the Cubs’ pace as well as their projections compared to full-season totals over the last 45 seasons.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about beard grooming, the indy-league exploits of Rafael Palmeiro, Patrick Palmeiro, and the Chinese national team, the Padres-Indians trade involving Brad Hand, Adam Cimber, and Francisco Mejía, the Orioles’ commitment to rebuilding, post-publication regrets about articles, the worst example of umpiring they’ve ever seen, and the state of the standings as the second half starts, then answer listener emails about what (if anything) is wrong with Gary Sánchez, Nick Markakis‘s timing (and fashion choices), calling fractional balls and strikes, round-number bias and the 100-pitch limit, paying Mike Trout for promotion, a .500 team without injuries or fatigue, and why certain teams try to tread water rather than rebuild, plus a Stat Blast about the durability of relievers and a reminder about listener Michael Mountain’s 35-day, 30-ballpark road trip.

Audio intro: David Bowie, "Never Get Old"
Audio outro: Smash Mouth, "Road Man"

Link to article about the Texas AirHogs
Link to Dan Duquette quotes
Link to video of awful umpire call
Link to Ben’s article about the playoff field
Link to Markakis’s outfit
Link to original interview about ballpark road trip

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Not all opponents are created equal, nor has that ever been truer than in baseball’s current era of imbalanced schedules and interleague play. While strength of schedule can be a modest factor for a club, it has the potential to influence rest-of-season results. Now, with the All-Star break about to conclude, seems like an appropriate time to check in and see which teams can expect scheduling headwinds and tailwinds in the second half.

Many in the audience are probably familiar with FanGraphs’ projected standings and playoff odds. Many might also wonder what the difference is between the two. Briefly stated, the latter accounts for strength of schedule, while the former is presented independently of scheduling. The projected standings attempt to measure true talent based upon projections and our best guesses at playing-time distributions. Art and science. Click here for a full explanation of the secret sauce.

To understand what kind of bump teams can expect from schedule strength in the second half relative to their present level of talent, we can simply calculate the difference between the rest-of-season, projected-standings wins and rest-of-season projected wins from the playoff odds. That difference is presented in the following chart. (Note: data doesn’t reflect the Manny Machado or Brad Hand trades, so numbers might vary slightly now.)

While these projected-win advantages are relatively modest and most strength-of-schedule adjustments don’t exceed a single win in either direction, scheduling often has a bigger impact on second-half performance than any trade-deadline addition. The impact of the trade deadline is often overrated. The deadline quite possibly matters less than ever. There have been only seven players traded over the past five seasons who have added two or more wins to their new clubs in the second half. Not all of them are negligible, of course. The addition of Justin Verlander last fall was integral to the Astros’ world-championship season. The quality of competition is typically a significant factor, however.

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As is the annual tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the week of the All-Star Game — while (some of) the industry pauses for a metaphorical breather — to take stock of the top-50 trade assets in the sport. For more context on exactly what we’re trying to do here, see the honorable-mentions post linked at the top of the page.

For this post and the others in this series, I’ve presented a graphic (by way of the wizard Sean Dolinar) breaking down each player’s objective skill level (represented, in this case, by a five-year WAR projection from ZiPS), contract/team-control details, rank in last year’s series, and then year-by-year details of age/WAR/contract through 2023, although a couple players have control beyond those five years. For those readers who are partial to spreadsheets rather than blocks of text, I’ve also included all the players we’ve ranked so far are in grid format at the bottom of the post.

The ZiPS WAR forecasts did influence the rankings a bit: for players who were bunched together, it acted as an impartial tiebreaker of sorts, but the industry opinions I solicited drove the rankings.

With that said, let’s get to the top 10 spots on the Trade Value list this year.

Severino bests Kluber for the top spot amongst pitchers on this year’s list. He is eight years younger than Kluber with an additional year of control and has been at least as good as the Cleveland right-hander this season, depending on how you measure it. Predictably, though, execs are concerned — as they are with basically any pitcher — that Severino’s next pitch could lead to a year-long DL stint and uncertainty after that. As a 24-year-old who averages 97.7 mph on his fastball, Severino is still a bit of a risky bet compared to comparable hitters. There’s a tier here from Nos. 7 to 13 that you could shuffle in a few different orders depending on your personal preferences or evals of these players.

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