Late Thursday afternoon, Major League Baseball announced it was suspending Yordano Ventura for nine games, and Manny Machado for four games, for their respective involvement in Tuesday night’s brawl between the Kansas City Royals and Baltimore Orioles. As is often the case in these situations, many quickly criticized the seemingly lax punishment doled out to Ventura in particular, who will effectively miss only a single start despite having similarly instigated fights on several prior occasions. Indeed, on Wednesday, FanGraphs’ own Dave Cameron had called for Ventura to be suspended for 30 games due to his status as a repeat violator.

Even if MLB wanted to throw the book at Ventura in this case, though, its hands were largely tied. As I’ve previously noted, under Article XII of MLB’s collective bargaining agreement, any disciplinary action that the league takes against a player for on-field conduct must be based on “just cause.” Not only does this standard require that the punishment fit the crime, but also — perhaps more importantly here — that the disciplinary action be consistent with prior penalties doled out by the league for similar conduct.

This presented a problem for MLB in Ventura’s case because pitchers who were previously found to have intentionally thrown at a batter have historically only faced a suspension somewhere on the order of seven to 10 games. While MLB may have been able to justify suspending Ventura a bit longer than that, given his repeat-offender status, any suspension of much more than 12 or 13 games may very well have been overturned by an arbitrator on appeal.

This means that even if MLB would like to take greater steps to crack down on beanballs, it will be hard pressed to do so without the approval of the Major League Baseball Players Association.

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Here’s the quickest way to understand what’s gone on in the field for the Oakland Athletics this season: Marcus Semien has arguably been their best defensive player. Yep. That’s the one. The same Marcus Semien who committed 35 errors as Oakland’s everyday shortstop last year. That’s not being totally fair to Semien, who has legitimately improved at short, but he’s still been average (at best) at shortstop, and in the field for the Oakland A’s this year, average at best is as good as it gets.

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Bartolo Colon has been a major league pitcher for longer than the high school kids being drafted this weekend have been alive. It’s likely that he has seen and done more in his major league career than any of these draftees will ever have the opportunity to see and do. He’s pitched in All-Star Games and the postseason. He’s played in 42 different major league parks – 42! He’s won a Cy Young Award and struck out 2,285 batters. He hit a home run! He’s had about as full and productive a career as one can have without being deemed Hall of Fame worthy.

Of course, there are still a few things Colon hasn’t done in his career. He’s never won a World Series or thrown a no-hitter, for instance. But plenty of illustrious careers end without those achievements being added to a resume. There is one glaring and unique empty statistical category remaining on Bartolo Colon’s career stat sheet, though: he has never drawn a walk in his career. In fact, after his two strikeout, one sac bunt performance against Brewers pitching last night, Bartolo Colon now holds the record for most career plate appearances without drawing a single walk.

Although much of Colon’s career has occurred in the designated hitter league, he has now stepped to the plate 260 times in his career dating back to his first career plate appearance in 1997 against the Cardinals’ Andy Benes. From Terry Adams to Jordan Zimmermann, Colon has faced 131 different pitchers and not a single one has yielded ball four.

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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, and John Sickels, and also who (c) is currently absent from a major-league roster. Players appearing on an updated prospect 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, CF, Cleveland (Profile)
Between last Friday (the day on which the previous edition of the Five was published) and yesterday afternoon (when the author composed the bulk of the present document), Allen produced a line that was simultaneously promising and underwhelming. Promising like this: over 17 plate appearances, Allen recorded a 3:3 walk-to-strikeout ratio while also reaching base twice by means of a hit-by-pitch. Which is to say, even before accounting for batted balls, Allen had already reached base on 29% of his plate appearances. Unfortunately, after accounting for batted balls, his numbers didn’t improve by much. One hit over 10 official at-bats led to a slash line of .100/.400/.100 for Allen. So far as outcomes are concerend, that’s not great. But outcomes at High-A are much less important than the process by which they’re produced. And Allen’s process is marked by a variety of skills, including contact and discipline and speed and defense and modest power. Whatever the process, it led to a very impressive outcome on Thursday night. Batting leadoff against the Cubs’ High-A affiliate, Allen recorded four hits — including a double and home run — in five plate appearances (box).

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric nobleman Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Boston at Minnesota | 20:10 ET
Wright (74.2 IP, 105 xFIP-) vs. Duffey (47.0 IP, 86 xFIP-)
The author’s dumb NERD metric is essentially the product of an attempt to reverse engineer, and reconstruct by way of objective measures, the tastes of those who’d read a site like FanGraphs. In most cases, the dumb NERD metric works sufficiently well. On Wednesday, for example, Noah Syndergaard faced Jameson Taillon in an encounter that represented the latter’s major-league debut. That game received the highest NERD score for the day by a reasonable margin. This would appear to represent an argument on behalf of the byzantine algorithm which produces NERD.

Conceiving of a scenario, however, in which this Boston-Minnesota contest facilitates more pleasure than the sort likely to be provided by the Dodgers-Giants game later in the evening — a game which features Clayton Kershaw, for example — poses greater challenges. Fortunately for everyone involved, the consequences of such a thing are basically non-extant.

In any case, the reasons for the relative optimism concerning the Red Sox-Twins game are twofold. First, one finds in the Red Sox a club that has produced the best adjusted batting line since the 1931 Yankees. Regression is bound to temper their achievement over a full season. Still, the point remains: few clubs hit at this level as a collective group. Also of some interest is Tyler Duffey, a former fifth-rounder with below-average arm speed who’s nevertheless recorded fielding-independent numbers about 15% better than average.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Boston.

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As you’re probably aware, the first two rounds of Major League Baseball’s amateur draft took place last night. With the first 77 picks off the board, let’s take a look at what my KATOH projection system has to say about the college players from the major conferences who were taken thus far. I’ll be back with projections for the remaining players once we know where they’re going.

These projections are far from gospel. Scouting the stat line is always dangerous. It’s even more dangerous than usual at the college level, where the samples are small, the players are raw, and the quality of opposing pitching runs the gamut. Nonetheless, performance is often an overlooked component of prospect evaluation, and the players who outperform expectations in college and the minors often go on to do the same in the big leagues.

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As you’ve probably heard before, there’s not a lot of rooting in this job. Not, at least, rooting of the conventional sort, for a particular team against a particular opponent. What there’s more of is rooting for particular stories, or particular trends. That’s where I found myself earlier — rooting for the Astros bullpen against the Rangers on Thursday, because I knew I wanted to write about it. It was going well, too, until Rougned Odor went deep off of Scott Feldman in the eighth. The Astros never rallied. Still, the bullpen yielded just the one run in more than four innings of work. It did its job, which makes this a decent time to point out it’s rather consistently been doing its job.

The offseason past was the offseason of relievers, and upon its completion, people couldn’t wait to see what the Yankees had assembled in action. The Astros by no means sat the offseason out, but there hasn’t been so much talk about them, what with the disappointing start. And if you think about the Astros bullpen, you might immediately think of the early struggles from Ken Giles. You might think about Luke Gregerson losing his closing gig. Not everything has gone smoothly, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Astros bullpen has been so dominant.

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If you’d kind of forgotten about Ichiro Suzuki, I totally get it. I mean, he’s undeniably been an icon, but as far as his remaining a major-leaguer goes, he’s in his 40s, and he’s spent time on the bench for a team that doesn’t get a lot of attention. The league is awash with young, premium talent, and in the Marlins’ own outfield, Ichiro’s behind three young players of considerable ability. And, you know, there was this:

The wizardry had become less and less apparent. I assume that, once you’re a wizard, you’re always a wizard, but Ichiro had perhaps grown weary of using his magic. Or maybe it just takes him longer to recover his mana. He’s been chasing 3,000 big-league hits, and that’s a hell of a milestone, but when the Marlins elected to bring Ichiro back, many figured it was just a publicity stunt, a way to squeeze some profit out of a deteriorating player’s pursuit of history. That tells you something about how people see the Marlins, but that also tells you something about how people saw Ichiro.

I’m now going to embed the same plot as above, only with one extra line segment. Ichiro! is re-earning his exclamation point.

42 years old. The gap between Ichiro and Christian Yelich is old enough to vote.

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Starting pitchers get the job done in various ways; some excel at bat-missing and/or command. Others are more adept at managing contact on balls in play. The very best are able to clear the bar in all three areas. Sample sizes for the 2016 season have increased in size to the point that we actually should begin paying attention. Last week, we checked in with NL ERA qualifiers regarding their early-season contact-management performance; this week, it’s the AL’s turn.

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