FanGraphs Baseball

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 a midseason list 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.

Matt Cooper, RHP, Chicago AL (Profile)
For the duration of his professional career, Cooper has mostly looked like the sort of polished collegiate pitcher who’s capable of thriving against less refined competition in the lower minors but who lacks the arm speed to succeed against more advanced hitters. In 213.0 innings as a professional, the right-hander has produced strikeout and walk rates of 33.3% and 6.8%, respectively. Statistically, that renders him the minor-league equivalent of Max Scherzer or Noah Syndergaard — except for that Cooper (a) recorded many of those innings in a relief capacity and (b) has typically thrown a fastball that travels about 10 mph slower than either Scherzer or Syndergaard’s.

As I say, he’s typically thrown such a fastball. At midseason of last year, however, reports suggested that he’d added a bit of velocity, sitting more comfortably in the low 90s. And, promisingly, he’s proved capable of surviving thus far against Double-A competition. After a successful run as a reliever in the Southern League last year, the former 16th-round pick has recorded strikeout and walk rates of 47.1% and 5.9%, respectively, over the course of two starts so far in 2017.

Here’s video from last season of what appears to be Cooper’s changeup thrown from a very high arm slot:

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Previously
Changeup: AL Starters / NL Starters.
Curveball: AL Starters.

We’re almost three weeks into the regular season, with sample sizes mounting but still not to a level worthy of significant analysis, Eric Thames notwithstanding. We’ll take the opportunity to continue our look back at 2016 pitch quality. We looked at AL ERA qualifiers’ curveballs earlier this week; today, we turn our attention to the senior circuit.

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So far, Mitch Haniger has been one of the best hitters in baseball. He’s not alone — Freddie Freeman has also been one of the best hitters in baseball. Eric Thames and Francisco Lindor and Khris Davis have been some of the best hitters in baseball. By definition, we’re talking in pluralities, but Haniger is one of a small group, and I would like to write about him. This is what that is. Yesterday, Haniger batted five times against the Marlins. What did he do? Here’s the first plate appearance.

(That’s a walk.)

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Once someone who’s erred has done his time, apologized, and satisfied society institutionally, there’s the matter of going on with life. This is true with every crime, however horrible, and the things Matt Bush did were horrible. He’s served his time — 39 months — and hopes we can forgive him. But that’s almost of secondary concern to him, at this point: life, and living, remains.

And Matt Bush, now perhaps the closer for the Texas Rangers, is doing his best to be a good baseball player because that’s the path in front of him. He believes any success he experiences in that role is due to the help he’s gotten. “Our pitching coaches are great, man, really great,” he suggested multiple times in our talk before a game against the Athletics this week.

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Caleb Joseph is a classic example of a catcher whose value extends well beyond his raw stats. The 30-year-old Baltimore Orioles backstop isn’t much of a hitter, and while his defensive numbers are good — he’s an above-average pitch-framer and has a solid success rate throwing out runners — they’re by no means elite.

More than anything, Joseph is a game-manager and a psychologist. The gear he wears is often referred to as the tools of ignorance, but that might be baseball’s most-misleading slang term. Catchers know the game, and Joseph knows it better than most. The ability to help a pitcher, especially an inexperienced pitcher, navigate from Point A to Point B isn’t something you can quantify. It does make you a huge asset to a major-league baseball team.

I recently approached Joseph to get his perspective on how young pitchers mature. Our conversation didn’t end there. We also delved into the development of young catchers.

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Joseph on the maturation process for pitchers and catchers: “You don’t see many youngsters figure everything out right away. What we’re seeing now is a lot of power arms coming up. The stuff and the action, the power behind the fastball, is all there, and the location is secondary. You do have guys who are 89-92 with incredible command — they rely completely on that — but more times than not, you’re seeing the power.

“You get these young arms who dominated in high school, and they dominated in college, and it was mostly because of their stuff. They could miss in the middle of the plate. Then they got to the minor leagues and a lot of them could dominate at the lower levels there. But when you get to the big leagues, you have to mature in order to succeed. And there are a lot of different aspects to that maturity.

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Up until last year, Freddie Freeman was an example of just how good a hitter a player could be without top-shelf power. From 2013 to 2015, he was the only player in MLB to run a 140 or better wRC+ while posting an ISO below .200. He put up the same wRC+ as David Ortiz despite being out-homered by Big Papi 102 to 59, as his .351 BABIP helped him offset the relatively lower number of balls leaving the park. With a bunch of line drives and enough walks to keep the OBP up, Freeman became about as good a hitter as one can be while hitting 20 homers a year.

Last year, though, Freeman found his power stroke, launching 34 home runs and running a .267 ISO, eighth-best in baseball. While he sacrificed a little bit of contact to get there, raising his strikeout rate to 25% in the process, he continued to torch the baseball even when it didn’t leave the field, allowing him to run a .370 BABIP that kept his BA and OBP up even while the strikeouts increased a little bit. His 152 wRC+ was the best of his career and tied him with Miguel Cabrera for the sixth-highest mark of any hitter in 2016. And after the first couple of weeks of 2017, that looks less like a career year and more like what we should start to expect from Freeman going forward.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jason Benetti, Andrew Triggs, Addison Reed and Odubel Herrera, C.B. Bucknor’s bad day, and Starling Marte’s suspension, then answer listener emails about the nature of fandom, dominance against a division rival, a billion-dollar payroll, Eric Thames’s hot start, transplanting an NPB team, catching up to favorite players from childhood, Mookie Betts’s strikeout-less streak, an RBI record, an unusual replay-review scenario, an extreme shift suggestion, and more.

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Aaron Judge is large. He’s 6-foot-7 and 275 pounds of human. A lean, mean slugging machine. He is one of, if not the, largest players in the game right now, and we are blessed to be able to watch him ply his craft in the big leagues. It doesn’t hurt that he plays in Yankee Stadium, which is essentially the size of a thimble, but Judge doesn’t exactly need shallow walls to do his thing.

That’s 443 feet of dinger. You can fit 67.3 Aaron Judges into that distance. It’s easy power from an easy swing, because turning baseballs into FAA-sanctioned aircrafts is one of the perks of being the size of the Incredible Hulk. It’s also worth noting that Judge did this on a cold, damp night. That’s not an environment that’s conducive to monster bombs. The ball tends to fly further when it’s warm out. This leads us to a very important question: what the hell is Aaron Judge going to be doing a month from now? Are the Yankees going to need to install some sort of protective awning over the bleachers? Is he going to be peppering the middle of the upper deck? Is that beer stand in danger?

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Few people benefit in Pittsburgh from Starling Marte’s 80-game steroid suspension, but Andrew McCutchen could be one of them.

After McCutchen logged the first eight seasons and 10,317.1 innings of his defensive career exclusively in center field, the Pirates elected to move him — against his wishes — to right field this year. The idea? To accommodate the more able glove and fleeter feet of Marte in center field. While moving a Face of the Franchise off a position at age 30 is unusual — just a reminder that Derek Jeter never moved to second base — consider McCutchen’s four-year Defensive Runs Saved numbers: 2013 (5), 2014 (-13), 2015 (-8), 2016 (-28).

The -28 was an MLB worst last season.

The right-field experiment had worked out reasonably well early this season, even if McCutchen’s heart wasn’t into it. But that experiment is on hold now, as McCutchen receives a second — and perhaps a last — chance in center field. McCutchen seemed pleased to return there when speaking with my former employer, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“Center field is where I need to play. It’s where I want to be at. If I’ve got to show a couple people that — show I can do what I need to do — that’s what I’m going to do.”

During his stunning age-29 season, stunning for the extent to his production collapsed, McCutchen claimed he was healthy. But teammate Gregory Polanco appeared to suggest that McCutchen actually wasn’t. “He seems faster than last year,” said Polanco. “His knee is healthy again and he’s flying.”

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