The Fringe Five: Baseball’s Most Compelling Fringe Prospects

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 lead prospect analyst 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.

*****
Jonah Heim, C, Baltimore (Profile)
Were one to summon the requisite energy to examine such a thing, he or she would likely find that catchers compose a disproportionately small percentage of the players who appear among the Five. And it’s almost certainly not due to a lack of interesting candidates. In fact, there are quite a few catchers each year who record offensive numbers which would offer considerable value relative to the position. The question always with catchers, though, is whether they possess the requisite skills to remain at the position. Because, unlike a below-average shortstop who merely slides one notch down the defensive spectrum to second or third base, a below-average catcher is typically relegated to first base. The difference in the positional adjustment between short and second is only about five runs; between catcher and first, more like 20 or 25. And while there are those qualified to project catcher defensive skill, the present author isn’t among that demographic. The 20-year-old Heim appears in spite of all this. First, because of how well he’s hit. Over his first 99 plate appearances at High-A Frederick, he’s produced walk and strikeout rates of 16.2% and 10.1%, respectively, and an isolated-power figure approaching .200 — all of which figures are wildly better than league average. Moreover, the defensive reports are encouraging.

What this video footage from 2014 fails to reveal about Heim himself, it compensates for by documenting the wild pleasures of minor-league broadcasting:

Chih-Wei Hu, RHP, Tampa Bay (Profile)
Tampa Bay currently offers a surfeit of compelling fringe-type pitchers. Right-hander Jaime Schultz, for example, appeared among the Five proper twice already this year and currently resides near the top of the arbitrarily calculated Fringe Five Scoreboard. University of Arkansas product Ryne Stanek, meanwhile, has produced one of the best strikeout rates among all Double-A pitchers. And finally, Austin Pruitt has been unambiguously one of the top pitchers at Triple-A this year. Among them all, Hu offers the most promising combination of actual performance success and age relative to level. In just his age-22 season, the Taiwanese right-hander has handled basic every level of competition with varying degrees of ease. Moreover, he features enough arm speed/stuff to suggest it’s more than a fluke. His most recent start was a typically strong one. Against Cubs affiliate Tennessee, Hu faced 23 batters over 6.0 innings, recording a 6:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio while conceding just a single run (box).

Here’s full video of the sixth strikeout from that start, completed by an impressive changeup:

Sherman Johnson, 2B/3B, Los Angeles AL (Profile)
If this weekly column existed in 2006, it’s almost certain that Ben Zobrist would have been a fixture within it. That version of Zobrist amounted to little more than the Platonic Ideal of fringe excellence. He was, first of all, a 25-year-old just receiving his first exposure to Double-A. Meanwhile, not unlike the Zobrist with whom one has become acquainted over the last decade, he offered a broad base of average or above-average skills: excellent control of the strike zone, non-negligible power and speed, considerable defensive value. It’s clear now that those skills translated well to the majors, whatever Zobrist’s lack of pedigree. They didn’t translate immediately, however. Not at all, really. He debuted in 2006 for the then-Devil Ray. He played some in 2007, as well. The result of all that? A sample of 303 plate appearances over which he recorded a 27 wRC+ and -1.9 WAR. Zobrist entered his age-27 season having stolen roughly two wins from his team. In the ensuring eight-plus years, he’d return 40 of them. Which, how that relates to Sherman Johnson is, is Johnson was recently promoted to Triple-A Salt Lake. His numbers don’t resemble the ones he’s produced hitherto in his minor-league career. He remains a promising ballplayer.

Tim Locastro, 2B/SS, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
Including one which occurred towards the end of last season, this represents Locastro’s fourth appearance among the Five proper. For each of those appearances — including this one, it’s immediately turning out — the author has felt compelled, at the very least, to note how Locastro is a product of Division III school Ithaca College. And not for nothing, either. Because compared to Ithaca, crosstown school Cornell University is an indefatigable baseball factory. The point of the current entry, however, is that the question of Locastro’s pedigree is becoming less relevant to his inclusion among the Five. Because his performances haven’t been good merely for a former member of the Empire Eight Conference, but just actually good for a regular member of the California League. In 134 plate appearances this year, he’s recorded the fifth-lowest strikeout rate (9.0%) among qualified High-A batters. The only hitter within that group of five to produce a higher isolated-power figure than Locastro is Boston outfield prospect Andrew Benintendi, who was selected seventh overall in last year’s draft after defeating the SEC. Locastro’s past week has been particularly impressive, over which interval he recorded five extra-base hits in 30 plate appearances, posting a .286 ISO — this, while making all his defensive starts at either short or second.

Yairo Munoz, SS, Oakland (Profile)
Munoz represents an unusual case. He possesses the sort of profile one typically finds among a top-100 prospect: average-or-better power and speed, the ability to remain at shortstop, youth relative to his levels. All that. Yet, as exhibited by his eligibility for this exercise, he hasn’t actually been designated as a top-100 prospect. Or, not by a human person, at least. Because actually, Chris Mitchell’s computer — in the form of his KATOH prospect projection system — did rank Munoz among its top-100 prospects, at 88th overall, owing to many of the reasons cited above, probably. Whatever the case, Munoz has produced an excellent start to his 2016 campaign. Following nearly a month at extended spring training (where he was recovering from a foot/heel injury) and then an aggressive promotion to Double-A, Munoz has recorded a .333 ISO (including four home runs) and just a 14% strikeout rate over his first 42 plate appearances.

Here’s improving footage which depicts not only the most recent of his home runs, but an extended shot of the pitcher who conceded that home run:

The Next Five
These are players on whom the author might potentially become fixated.

Greg Allen, CF, Cleveland (High-A Carolina League)
Pedro Fernandez, RHP, Kansas City (High-A Carolina League)
C.J. Hinojosa, SS, San Francisco (High-A California League)
Jaime Schultz, RHP, Tampa Bay (Triple-A International League)
Matthew Strahm, LHP, Kansas City (Double-A Texas League)

Fringe Five Scoreboard
Here are the top-10 the players to have appeared among either the Fringe Five (FF) or Next Five (NF) so far this season (which is to say, today). For mostly arbitrary reasons, players are assessed three points for each week they’ve appeared among the Fringe Five; a single point, for each week among the Next Five.