Generally, the theory is that even top prospects bust. Byron Buxton is the toppest of top prospects, but even that distinction can’t protect him from failure of one kind or another. Exploring that theory is much more difficult when you’re the player himself. Or the writer asking that player about those expectations and the difficulties he’s been having so far. “You’re going to have a stamp on you wherever you are, but I try to put it to the side,” the struggling Twin said recently before a game with the Athletics. It’s hard not to empathize.

The theory with Buxton is that the tools are there but that he needs to make an adjustment to major-league pitching. It’s looked bad, but the talent is in there.

In 195 major-league plate appearances so far, Buxton has struck out 36% of the time and walked just 4% of the time, for a 32-point differential between his strikeout and walk rates. It’s a toxic combination. And rare. Consider: among 106 top-10 prospects since 1990, only Javier Baez has recorded a worse strikeout- minus walk-rate differential in his first 200 plate appearances.

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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)
Allen debuted among the Five proper last week as a result not merely of his promising statistical indicators and strong collection of tools, but also for the manner in which his profile, in its entirely, caused — and continues to cause — the present author’s intuitive faculties to become illuminated. Certain readers might suggest that the author is working here merely on the promise of a “hunch.” This is impossible, of course: a brief examination of the literature reveals that the only demographic capable of channeling “hunches” are hard-boiled television police detectives burdened with the responsibility of bringing the plot of a weekly procedural show to its final act. No, what the author has experienced more closely resembles certain of the qualities described by F.C. Happold in Mysticism: A Study and an Anthology in the chapter regarding characteristics of mystical states. Whatever the precise vehicle, one finds that Allen’s past week has been excellent. Over his last 32 plate appearances, the 23-year-old center fielder has produced a a 6:5 walk-to-strikeout ratio, nearly a .200 isolated-power mark, and a 4-for-4 stolen-base record.

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Over the last few years, sports conferences have become a popular endeavor. Inspired mostly by the success of the Sloan Sports and Analytics Conference held each spring, others have seen an opportunity to gather a bunch of interesting speakers and host a series of Q&As, and you now have a host of options to pick from if you want to attend one of these shindigs throughout the year.

But for baseball fans who are reading FanGraphs on a Friday in June, there’s one conference that remains the gold standard: The Saber Seminar.

The official name of the event is Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball, and the two-day conference lives up to that title, providing speakers from a wide range of backgrounds, including team executives, analysts, and scouts, independent researchers, academics, members of the media, and people just breaking into the realm of trying to discover truths about the game. Over the course of a weekend, the event provides a wide range of different talks, spanning just about every type of analysis there is in baseball. It is, without fail, one of my favorite weekends of the year.

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Can you name the starting pitcher with the lowest ERA in the month of May this year? If you paid attention to the Pitcher of the Month awards announcements yesterday, you might know the answer. If you’ve been paying attention to Major League Baseball at all over the past five years, you can definitely guess it. The answer, to nobody’s surprise, is Clayton Kershaw, who posted a ridiculous 0.91 ERA over six starts. What’s infinitely less intuitive and more thought-provoking is the identity of the pitcher who is second on the May ERA leaderboard: CC Sabathia.

In the interest of full disclosure, a bit of leaderboard manipulation is necessary in order to find Sabathia’s ERA ranked ahead of every pitcher not named Kershaw. A groin strain sent Sabathia to the disabled list after his start on May 4th and limited him to just four starts and 26 innings pitched for the month. So, if we’re being technical, Sabathia’s 1.04 ERA was second in the majors among starting pitchers with a minimum of 20 innings pitched. But the arbitrary nature of month-long splits isn’t why we need to talk about Sabathia. We need to talk about Sabathia because that great month contributed to his ERA doing this:

Sabathia closed out his 2015 season with a 2.86 ERA over his final nine starts. The difficulties he experienced off the field — and which immediately followed that impressive run — have been well-documented and are outside the scope of this analysis. Let’s focus entirely on what we know has happened on the field, which is that Sabathia has picked up right where he left off, recording a 2.85 ERA through his first eight starts of 2016. Considering Sabathia turns 36 years old next month and is coming off a disappointing three-year stretch during which he posted a 4.81 ERA, there are two obvious questions here. First: how did this happen? And second: will it last?

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I know it’s obvious, but it’s worth a reminder. The most important thing to consider before serving up a Julio Urias take is that he is 19 years old. Think about what you were doing as a 19-year-old. Think about what Julio Urias is doing as a 19-year-old. When Stephen Strasburg was 19, his competition was the Mountain West Conference. When Jacob deGrom was 19, he was a shortstop at Stetson University. Julio Urias has already struck out seven major league batters. He’s 19! That’s more strikeouts than literally every other active major league pitcher had when they were 19, aside from Felix Hernandez who may one day be enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

So Julio Urias is 19, and we must always keep that in mind, but he’s now been tasked twice with getting major league hitters out, and he hasn’t done a great job. He can be both unfathomably young and also ineffective at the same time — they aren’t mutually exclusive. The age isn’t an excuse; it just serves as context.

But we can have more context than age and results! How about the process? How’s the stuff? Ultimately, it’s the process that matters; the age will change and results can be wonky. Execute the process enough times and the results will follow. There’s still only so much we can learn from two games, but at the very least it gives us an excuse to analyze Julio Urias, which we’ve all been waiting for, and maybe we’ll see something to help quiet some of the alarm bells currently going off in Dodger Nation. We’ll observe some good, and we’ll observe some bad. We shouldn’t come way with a much different opinion of Urias’ future — two starts shouldn’t have moved the needle anyhow — but we’ll certainly come away with more information.

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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
Seattle at Texas | 20:05 ET
Walker (54.1 IP, 90 xFIP-) vs. Darvish (5.0 IP, 38 xFIP-)
Darvish returned this past Saturday from a Tommy John procedure and the subsequent rehab, recording his first major-league appearance since August of 2014. The results were almost embarrassingly positive. The right-hander produced a 7:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio against just 19 batters over 5.0 innings while also posting an average fastball velocity more than 1 mph harder than his previously established levels. With a view towards best representing the sort of pleasures facilitated by Yu Darvish, the remainder of this brief entry will be delivered by means of video footage — a medium the reader will recognize as easier to consume and largely better than dumb words.

Readers’ Preferred Television Broadcast: Seattle.

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Madison Bumgarner hit another home run. Sure, it was against Aaron Blair, and sure, this just keeps Bumgarner tied with Jason Heyward, but, Aaron Blair is a quality prospect in the major leagues, and this keeps Bumgarner tied with Jason Heyward. Bumgarner apparently figured out hitting in 2014. Maybe he got bored because he’d already mastered pitching. Since then, over just shy of 200 trips to the plate, Bumgarner has batted .234/.265/.451, good for a 101 wRC+. The next-best offensive pitcher has been Zack Greinke, with a wRC+ of 65. On the mound, Madison Bumgarner is Madison Bumgarner, and at the plate, Madison Bumgarner is Jonathan Schoop. The Giants’ advantage is that no other pitcher hits like a powerful second baseman.

This table is funny to me:

The name right after Bumgarner is Kyle Schwarber. When Bumgarner has hit a ball between the lines, he’s had basically the same rate of home runs as Kyle Schwarber. You know the image you have of Kyle Schwarber. Bumgarner has made that kind of contact.

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The worry is always the same whenever an Asian hitter comes over. The hitter wouldn’t be getting the chance in the first place were it not for an outstanding performance, but there’s always the question of how the hitter is going to handle major-league fastballs. In part, this might just come from arrogance, but it’s not without its legitimacy. Many Asian hitters have high leg kicks that work as timing mechanisms, and more importantly, there just isn’t a lot of big velocity in South Korea or Japan. The hitters are mostly unproven against the stuff you find in almost every big-league bullpen. So, it’s fair to wonder how a player might adjust.

What we already knew from last season: Overall, Jung Ho Kang adjusted. Kang was so successful, in fact, opportunities have been given to other Korean hitters. Because Kang did so well, it won’t surprise you to learn he did well against fastballs. I’m only writing this because of how Kang has been pitched this year since coming back from injury. Kang has worked beyond the fastball test. Pitchers would rather let him see almost anything else.

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