Andrelton Simmons draws comparisons to Ozzie Smith for his defensive prowess. Both players are recognized as once-in-a-generation all-time greats at their positions, though Simmons has yet rival Smith’s Hall of Fame career.

Apart from the defensive skills, similarities have emerged between Smith and Simmons offensively, as well. Consider that, through the 2016 season, Simmons had taken roughly 2,500 plate appearances and put up a weak 85 wRC+. Compare that to Smith’s first seven seasons, through 1983, when he put up an even worse 74 wRC+ in more than 3,500 plate appearances.

Smith eventually turned his career around offensively, however, putting up a 103 wRC+ from 1984 through 1992 while producing 37 runs by means of the stolen base, a total which might even understate his total offensive value. Smith was bad on offense for quite some time, then he improved and was a good offensive player for a decent portion of his career. It’s possible we are seeing the same type of transformation from Simmons. The Angels shortstop put a 103 wRC+ last season at 27 years old; thus far this season, he’s doing considerably better, with a 143 wRC+ on the strength of his .331/.402/.466 batting line. Most remarkable about Simmons’ hitting numbers are the strikeouts — or lack thereof, rather — as Simmons has struck out in just 10 of his 200 plate appearances.

In 1998, Tony Gwynn stepped up to bat 505 times and struck out on just 18 occasions. The league-average strikeout rate of 17% at that point was nearly five times Gwynn’s 3.6% mark. Preston Wilson made his debut that season and struck out more times than Gwynn despite receiving only 60 plate appearances. Gwynn’s 3.6% strikeout rate isn’t the greatest of all-time. Joe Sewell struck out in under 1% of his plate appearances five times, while 68 players between 1919 and 1951 had qualified seasons with rates lower than 2%. There were 413 seasons during that time where a player’s strikeout rate was lower than Gwynn’s in that 1998 campaign. Gwynn himself even had four seasons with a lower strikeout rate than 1998, but when considering the overall context of strikeouts in the game, Gwynn’s 1998 season is probably the best of all-time. If Andrelton Simmons can keep this up, his season is going to be better.

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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 on any updated, midseason-type list will also be excluded from eligibility.

*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)
Much of Cavan Biggio’s season thus far has been marked by an unprecedented display of power. With 12 home runs, the 23-year-old not only shares the Eastern League lead by that measure but has already surpassed the career total of homers with which he entered the season (in over 800 plate appearances).

Cavan Biggio’s past week-plus has been marked less by homers, however, and more by a different sort of true outcome, as the following video footage illustrates.

https://gfycat.com/SomberCookedFrenchbulldog

Those five walks are a product merely of Biggio’s last three games. Since last week’s edition of the Five, Biggio has recorded nine free passes in 30 plate appearances, recording walk and strikeout rates of 30.0% and 16.7%, respectively, during that interval. Walks themselves are not a great indicator of major-league success. In this particular case, though, it quite possibly represents an effort among Double-A pitchers to avoid Biggio’s barrel, as well as Biggio’s capacity to pass on pitches he can’t drive.

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Baseball goes through its trends like about any other industry. Just about everything goes through a constant flow of peaks ebbing to lulls and then back to peaks agains.

Pitch types, for example, go through cycles of popularity. The curveball was out of fashion and now it is back. There are years where different pitches are more prominent than others. Different pitches do different things. They dart left, right, down, and appear to rise. They have different shapes, breaking in different depths. Their usage is tied to the swing plane, philosophies, and ball properties of the day.

You are probably aware that the two-seam/sinker has fallen out of favor in recent years.

While the fastball is generally losing market share in favor of breaking pitches, the four-seam fastball has actually enjoyed an uptick in popularity in recent years as pitchers take advantage of their newly quantified spin rates to better get over the swing planes of batters, who have adapted to hammer the low pitch, as Jeff Sullivan observed prior to last season.

In 2010, two-seam/sinker usage was at its peak of 22.5%, according to Pitch Info data. Four-seam fastball usage was at a pitch-tracking-era low of 34.8%. This season, two-seam/sinker usage is at a pitch-tracking-era low of 17.8%, its sixth consecutive year of decline. Four-seam usage is up to 37.6%.

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On April 18, I wrote an article titled “How Mookie Betts Has Been Baseball’s Best Hitter.” It was true — through to that point, Betts was first among all players in wRC+. Doesn’t get much more meaningful than wRC+. Betts opened the season on an absolute tear.

The way this usually goes, we write about a white-hot player, and then the player begins to regress. This is just an unavoidable fact of how writing works; we notice when players are doing something extreme, but extreme performances are unsustainable. Sure enough, since April 18, Betts no longer ranks first among all players in wRC+. He’s ranked second among all players in wRC+, only slightly behind teammate J.D. Martinez. In one way, Betts has cooled off. In another way, he’s done nothing of the sort.

Through roughly two months, Betts has been a better overall player than anyone else. I wrote in April about how he’s been able to lift so many balls to the pull side. That’s kept up — Betts knows he’s best as a pull hitter, and he’s getting more balls in the air. Yet there’s also something else going on. There’s been one other situational change, that’s paying off in a staggering way. I still have trouble believing the numbers, and I’ve already conducted all the research.

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*Or would be, if the season ended today.

We know the Astros’ pitching staff has been absurdly dominant.

The truth is, they’re historically dominant at the moment.

Just a season after the Indians became the first team to strike out 10 batters per nine innings, set a record with a 27.5% strikeout rate, and finish with the highest pitching WAR total of all time (31.7), the Astros are a threat to top those marks.

The Astros have already recorded 11 WAR this season, while the next closest pitching staff, that of the Red Sox, has 7.9. The Astros are on pace to shatter the Indians’ WAR mark, and their 10.35 strikeouts per nine and 29.6% strikeout rate would also be records. Gerrit Cole, Charlie Morton, and Justin Verlander — who was outstanding against Wednesday — all have sub-2.00 ERAs.

(The Astros and Indians met last weekend, with the Astros taking two of three games, and Houston travels to Cleveland for a four-game series beginning Thursday. Get your popcorn ready.) Read the rest of this entry »

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When the Yankees promoted Gleyber Torres in late April, they envisioned him helping them on both sides of the ball, replacing an underwhelming Ronald Torreyes/Tyler Wade platoon that was admittedly nothing more than a stopgap, a temporary solution to an infield logjam. Even so, they probably didn’t expect the kind of power outburst that Torres has provided. After going homerless in his first 12 games, the 21-year-old rookie second baseman has clubbed eight homers in his most recent 15. His total leads the team in the month of May — and that’s a team on pace to break the major-league record for home runs in a season.

Though he’s listed at 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, Torres did not show a ton of in-game power coming up through the minors. His season high of 11 homers was set in 2016, when he was 19 years old and playing at the High-A stops of the Cubs and Yankees. To be fair, with seven homers in 55 games last year, he probably would have surpassed that total had he not torn his left UCL and required season-ending Tommy John surgery in June. The prospect hounds at Baseball America and MLB Pipeline both graded his power as a 55 (above average), with the latter suggesting 20-plus homers annually; our own Kiley McDaniel graded his raw power at 55/60 (present/future) and his game power at 40/55. The 55 is here, at the very least.

From Baseball Prospectus senior prospect writer Jarrett Seidler:

Y’all undersold Gleyber’s power because he didn’t dong a lot in bad parks while he was growing into his brick shithouse body

— Jarrett Seidler (@jaseidler) May 24, 2018

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Jose Quintana’s season is a little difficult to figure out. In three of his first four starts, he allowed 17 runs combined; in that fourth appearance, he pitched six shutout innings. Over four of his past five starts, meanwhile, he’s conceded one run total; he allowed six runs in the other.

Is he improving as the season goes on? He struck out 16 batters against 11 walks in 19.2 innings in those first four starts and struck out 29 hitters and walked 14 in 28.2 innings over the past five outings. His ERA is much lower in the latter of those two periods, but his FIP hasn’t moved a great deal, going from 5.15 to 4.37. These samples are small enough that it would be fair to conclude little to nothing had changed at all, but given his excellent track record, there has to be something to Quintana’s struggles.

A year ago at this time, there were some questions about Quintana’s trade value for the White Sox after the left-hander started slowly. Over his first 11 outings last season, Quintana had authored a 5.60 ERA and 4.40 FIP. Most of Quintana’s issues in terms of ERA stemmed from an increase in homers and a poor left-on-base percentage. After investigating Quintana’s numbers, I felt that most of Quintana’s issues were probably luck-based and unlikely to continue. Brushing off those concerns looks pretty good in hindsight, as Quintana put up a 3.30 FIP and 3.40 ERA and allowed just under one homer per nine innings the rest of the way, eventually helping a Cubs teams desperate for quality starter innings. This season, Quintana’s issues aren’t as easy to brush off.

While Quintana’s current FIP might resemble last year’s figure at roughly the same point in the season, his 4.68 FIP is nearly 20% worse than league average after accounting for the change in league and park. Additionally, there isn’t a gap in contact quality that suggests perhaps Quintana is just getting unlucky. So far, Quintana is giving up home runs because he has deserved to give up home runs. He’s striking out fewer batters than he did a year ago while his walks have gone way up. These are all bad things.

If there’s any cause for hope, it is twofold. One, Quintana has shown some flashes of being the very good pitcher he was before the season started, putting up four starts of at least six innings and zero or one run with at least five strikeouts. The second reason for optimism is that Quintana is still tinkering.

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