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 in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above who (a) received a future value grade of 45 or less from Dan Farnsworth during the course of his organizational lists and who (b) was omitted from the preseason prospect lists produced by Baseball America, Baseball Prospectus, MLB.com’s Jonathan Mayo, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on a midseason list or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft will also be excluded from eligibility.

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.

Greg Allen, OF, Cleveland (Profile)
Much like it’s impossible not to think of elephants once the subject of elephants has been broached, it’s nearly impossible to avoid comparing Greg Allen to Mookie Betts once the possibility of a comparison between Greg Allen and Mookie Betts has been suggested. The comparison doesn’t make much sense, of course. Allen is a 23-year-old who’s only recently earned a promotion to Double-A. Betts, meanwhile, is a 23-year-old who’s also a legitimate MVP candidate. The notion that the one resembles the other is absurd. Even after accounting for the similarly elite contact skills and plate discipline, one should avoid saying their names in the same sentence. Or the distinct resemblance in terms of footspeed and athleticism and defensive value — that sort of observation is the province of fools.

Whatever the case, here’s what Allen did over his final week of play: record a 3:3 walk-to-strikeout ratio in 23 plate appearances while also hitting two triples and a home run. With his appearance here today, he finishes second by some margin on the arbitrarily calculated Scoreboard found below.

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Matt Bowman is having a solid rookie season in St. Louis. The 25-year-old right-hander — a Rule-5 pick out of the Mets system — has a 4.06 ERA and a 3.64 FIP in 50 games out of the Cardinals bullpen. He’s admittedly surprised by his success. As he explained to me six weeks ago, “It was a tough year last year.”

The numbers bear that out. Pitching as a starter for the Las Vegas 51s, Bowman went 7-16 with a 5.53 ERA. In 140 innings for New York’s Triple-A affiliate, his WHIP was a whiplash-inducing 1.68.

Bowman doesn’t attribute his turnaround to a mechanical tweak or an alteration of style. Nor does he point to an amended repertoire or an increase in velocity. Those things haven’t changed. What has changed is his environment. Bowman is no longer in a hitter-friendly ballpark in the hitter-friendly Pacific Coast League. It’s often said that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, and for Bowman that meant perplexity and poor performance.

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Bowman on leaving Las Vegas: “From a statistical standpoint, you would look at last year, and then at this year, and wonder how exactly that jump happened. People are usually like, ‘Add on a run for Vegas; that’s really all you need to do. Whatever that was, that’s how good he was.’ I think there’s probably more to Vegas than that.

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Ben, Sam, and Sonoma Stompers GM Theo Fightmaster answer listener emails about the Stompers’ past two seasons and Ben/Sam’s book, The Only Rule Is It Has to Work.

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Way back in May, I wrote a piece here on early-season park factors. Based on 26,650 balls-in-play struck through May 11, park factors were calculated based on granular exit speed/angle data. Yes, the sample was fairly small, but some interesting data was generated. One conclusion reached was that weather seemed to be playing a fairly significant role: the upper Midwest and Northeast corridor clubs with open-air stadiums endured cool, wet springs which had a clear run-suppressing effect.

The article wrapped up by indicating that we’d check back in a couple months to see what effect the higher temperatures of summer would have on those park effects. And here we are. This week and next, we’ll update these park factors through late August. Today, we’ll focus on fly-ball park factors, and next week we’ll take separate looks at AL and NL overall park factors.

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Oakland right-hander Jharel Cotton made his major-league debut on Wednesday. The results were positive: over 6.1 innings, Cotton conceded just a lone run on two hits — the product, that run, of a homer by the Angels’ C.J. Cron. The process, while entirely adequate, was also slightly less positive: over those 6.1 innings and against those same 22 batters, Cotton recorded just three strikeouts.

In a sense, this start was the opposite of the sort which have defined much of Cotton’s season in the Pacific Coast League this year. Despite producing the best strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%) among all 57 Triple-A qualifiers in 2016, Cotton also recorded a 4.31 ERA — which, it turns out, is only the 35th-best ERA at Triple-A and even pretty middling among just PCL starters, too. The home runs were a problem for Cotton. Sequencing was a problem for Cotton. Controlling the strike zone wasn’t.

Apart from the runs he allowed and the runs he might have been expected to allow — whatever the discrepancy there — Cotton exhibited one quality yesterday that he’s exhibited all of this season and all of last season and maybe always since he was just a small child. An excellent changeup, is what. Lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, among others, has described it as a plus-plus pitch — and it’s the presence of that pitch that has largely been credited with allowing Cotton to experience such great success as a professional despite a rather diminutive frame.

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This week, we’re running a series of posts laying out the case for the most compelling candidates for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. These posts are designed to make an affirmative argument for their subject and are not intended to serve as comprehensive looks at every candidate on their own. The authors tasked with writing these posts may not even believe their subject actually deserves to win, but they were brave enough to make the case anyway. The goal of these posts is to lay out the potential reasons for voters to consider a variety of candidates and to allow the readers to decide which argument is most persuasive.

Other cases: Jose Altuve for AL MVP / Mookie Betts for AL MVP / Mike Trout for AL MVP / Manny Machado for AL MVP.

Josh Donaldson was the American League’s Most Valuable Player last season, edging out Mike Trout by receiving 23 of 30 first-place votes and earning 385 vote points, compared to Trout’s 304. Donaldson was the best player on a division-winning team and, by routinely delivering in key moments, led the league in Win Probability Added for his 93-win club.

Donaldson was great, and clutch, and a winner. And this year, he’s arguably gotten better. The wRC+ has gone up. He’s again been one of baseball’s most productive hitters in high-leverage situations. He remains one of the game’s top defensive third basemen. The reigning MVP has, in many ways, built on his award-winning season. But that’s not why he should win it again.

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Last night, the Nationals and Braves played an 11-inning game, and because it happened in September, 17 different pitchers were used between the two clubs. Ninety-nine batters, 17 pitchers: that’s a new pitcher every six batters, essentially. Yes, it went extra innings, and Stephen Strasburg had to leave the start with an injury, forcing the Nationals into an unplanned bullpen game, but 15 pitching changes is still just far too many for a Major League game. It’s a problem the league faces every September, when teams are able to carry everyone on their 40-man roster as active players if they so choose; the Nationals currently have 37 active players.

Of course, neither the individual teams nor the players are all that incentivized to change the system. Since the minor-league season ends around Labor Day, the roster expansion gives teams a chance to give their best prospects something to do in September, and gets them some valuable experience in the big leagues. Players like it, of course, because the promotion to the active roster comes with a big improvement in salary, and so guys who have been making minor-league wages are essentially rewarded with a significant end-of-season bonus. It’s hard to imagine either side is going to push hard to limit September roster sizes in the current CBA negotiations, as they both benefit from the current system, and the burden of longer, less enjoyable games are mostly carried by the fans, who don’t have a seat at the bargaining table.

But as the Braves and Nationals showed last night, there has to be a better way than this. Let’s run through a few options.

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