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: Terribly sorry about that
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: Had a problem with podcast recording
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: Hello friends!
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: Welcome to Friday baseball chat
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: Hey Jeff – did you hear there was a fight yesterday?
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: I heard there were four
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Fringe Five Scoreboards: 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 America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com, John Sickels*, and (most importantly) lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and also who (b) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on any updated list — such as the revised and midseason lists released by Baseball America or BP’s recent midseason top-50 list or Longenhagen’s summer update — will also be excluded from eligibility.
*All 200 names!
In the final analysis, the basic idea is this: to recognize those prospects who are perhaps receiving less notoriety than their talents or performance might otherwise warrant.
Ryan Helsley, RHP, St. Louis (Profile)
With this appearance, Helsley now ascends to first place on the arbitrarily calculated Fringe Five Scoreboard presented at the bottom of this post. He recorded one start since last week’s edition of the Five and was predictably effective, producing a strikeout-to-walk ratio of 7:2 against 21 batters over 5.2 innings (box). Through five starts with Springfield, the right-hander has produced a better strikeout- and walk-rate differential at Double-A (18.1-point K-BB%) than he did at High-A (16.3).
In that most recent appearance, Helsley exhibited both the plus fastball and effective breaking-ball combinations that’s typical for him. Here’s an example of three pitches in the cutter/curveball continuum, all to the back foot of a left-handed batter:
Back in 2014, the average baseball team scored 4.07 runs per game. That was down only a tenth of a run from the year before, which was down only a little more than a tenth of a run from the year before that, but a definite trend was emerging. An average of 4.07 was the league’s lowest mark since 1981, and there were gathering concerns that offense was being suffocated. No one really knows how low is too low, but Rob Manfred considered various ideas that might re-inject some hitting. This is why conspiracy theories persist to this day.
Rather conveniently, see, offense bounced back in 2015. It surged again in 2016, and it’s surged only more over the past five months. The average team now is up to 4.68 runs per game, which feels more familiar. The surge has been powered by a well-publicized and well-examined home-run spike, but at the end of the day, offense is offense, right?
It is, and it’s good that hitters again have a chance. The balance of power had felt like it was shifted too far. But in a certain sense, you could argue that this offensive surge is artificial. For a variety of reasons, home runs are up, and they’ve gone up right when they needed to. But offenses now are so very home-run reliant. Everything to follow is probably obvious, but I might as well explicitly lay it out. Home runs are taking over the game.
Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Rich Hill’s heartbreaking no-hit bid and the new and not-improved Carter Capps, follow up on Albert Pujols and player nicknames, and answer listener emails about what constitutes a “journeyman,” Ryan Braun and the Hall of Fame, Ryan Goins’ new type of small-sample success, what would happen if teams played all of their games against each opponent in a single extended series, Harvey Haddix and the best starts ever, a pitcher’s single-minded pursuit of no-hitters, the uniqueness of Joey Gallo, Boston’s mysteriously league-leading intentional-walk total, how to talk to players, and more.
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Daily notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.
Mike O’Reilly, RHP, St. Louis (Profile)
Level: Hi-A Age: 22 Org Rank: NR Top 100: NR
Line: 6 IP, 9 H, 0 BB, 2 R, 7 K
Notes
A 27th rounder out of Flagler College last year, O’Reilly was promoted to High-A Palm Beach in late July after a dominant four-game stretch of Midwest League starts that included a complete game, one-hit, 12-strikeout performance. O’Reilly doesn’t throw all that hard, sitting 88-91, but he’s deceptive, he can locate his breaking ball for strikes, and he flashes a plus changeup. There’s some risk that O’Reilly’s fastball won’t be effective against upper-level hitters, but he has quality secondary stuff, throws strikes, and overall has a profile in line with valuable upper-level pitching depth.
A few days ago, the Cubs rallied to beat the Blue Jays in 10 innings. It was the 10th inning that was the most dramatic, but the Cubs had a chance to finish things off the frame before. In a tie game in the bottom of the ninth, Kris Bryant batted with two on and one out, against Ryan Tepera. It was one of the highest-leverage plate appearances for Bryant on the year, and he quickly found himself behind 0-and-2. A borderline ball call extended the at-bat, but then Tepera threw a pitch outside. The screenshot says everything you need to know about what happened next.
Kris Bryant is one of the best players in baseball, and he might well be the best player in the National League. Of that, there’s no question, and before we get any deeper, I want to try to get one simple point across. It’s probably futile, but, anyway: There’s a difference between saying a player is unclutch, and saying a player has been unclutch. The former would be a hell of a statement. The latter is easy enough to demonstrate with evidence. Clutch performance tends to be volatile; it hasn’t been shown to be a sticky attribute. It is not my belief that Kris Bryant is actually, naturally, unclutch.
But Kris Bryant has been incredibly unclutch. Historically unclutch. It’s the one place where he’s come up short. As much as I love the things he can do, the data he’s assembled is stunning.
Nicky Delmonico demands our attention, if only for a moment.
In the midst of an all-in rebuild of the Chicago White Sox, general manager Rick Hahn has focused on acquiring high-upside, high-risk assets who could help the club in future seasons. Delmonico is not that. He was signed to a minor-league deal after being released by the Brewers in 2015, having failed to reach even Double-A.
Now, three years later, Delmonico is living a charmed life. Over his first 87 career major-league plate appearances, he owns a .315/.425/.589 slash line and .427 wOBA — a figure that’s 70% better than league average. He even hit his first home run in Fenway Park, against the club for which he grew up rooting.
Not surprisingly, there’s a lot to suggest the fun won’t continue — at least not to this degree. According to Baseball Savant, Delmonico has been nearly the most fortunate hitter in baseball this season among those who have seen at least 200 pitches. He’s recorded the fifth-highest wOBA relative to his xwOBA of the 474 players in that sample.
The outfielder possesses a pedestrian average exit velocity of 82.9 mph through his first 59 batted balls tracked by Statcast. He’s barreled just 5.1% of those balls in play, another pedestrian figure.
Nor are the underlying skills indicative of a future star. Delmonico was never rated as a top prospect (though he did rank 92nd on the stats-only KATOH top 100 list this year). Confined to the corner outfield, Delmonico has to hit just to be average.
But Delmonico — a former bat boy at the University of Tennessee, where his father coached — doesn’t need to be a star for this to be a success story. Steamer and ZiPS project him to be a league-average bat (99 wRC+) going forward this season.
Last week, I took a look at Statcast data from 2016 and 2017 and attempted to find contact-management skills among pitchers. The basic conclusion of that study? Pitchers might well have skills to manage contact once the ball hits the bat; if they do, however, neither xwOBA nor Statcast classifications seem to reveal it. Quality of contact didn’t hold up from year to year — i.e. last year’s results on contact aren’t likely to inform much of this year’s results on contact.
In the comments section, however, one reader wondered if in-season results might create a different result. That’s what I’d like to examine in this post. Here we go.
Last night, with a 4-3 leading heading into the 9th inning, the Rockies called on Greg Holland to shut down his former team and provide the team with a much-needed win. With the Cardinals already winning, there were now two teams breathing down their neck in the NL Wild Card race, and a big win on the road would help stem the team’s August slide.
Holland began the inning by walking Alex Gordon, who has a 51 wRC+ this year. He then gave up back to back line drives to Whit Merrifield and Lorenzo Cain, both of which were fortunately hit right at his defenders. Melky Cabrera then singled through the left side, putting the winning run on base and bringing Eric Hosmer to the plate. Hosmer did this.
The loss dropped the Rockies to 68-58, the first time they’d only been 10 games over .500 since mid-May. It was their fourth loss in a row, and their ninth loss in their last 12 games. And once again, the team surrendered a ninth inning lead because Holland doesn’t currently look like a guy you want pitching in high-leverage situations.
