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 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.

*****Rookie Davis, RHP, Cincinnati (Profile)
Davis was a fixture among the Five last year, tying for 11th on the arbitrarily calculated Scoreboard by way both of an excellent strikeout- and walk-rate profile at High-A and a fastball that sits at 93-95 mph. Traded to Cincinnati this offseason as part of the deal that sent Aroldis Chapman to the Yankees, Davis has stalled a bit — so far as his statistical indicators are concerned, at least. His most recent starts have been encouraging, however: the right-hander has produced a 13:1 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 39 batters over his last 11.0 innings.

Why he appears here now, though, is because of a different leaderboard on which he’s recently appeared — namely, the secret and proprietary one the author utilizes to track each minor league’s top fringe batters. Through his first 20 plate appearances this year — which also represent the first 20 plate appearances of his career in affiliated baseball — Davis has recorded a walk, two strikeouts, and four extra bases (essentially, extra bases minus hits). That’s a 20% extra-base rate versus only a 10% strikeout rate. For context, between 2011 and -15, only 43 batters produced even a positive differential between extra-base rate and strikeout rate — out of 335 qualified batters total during that interval.

Here are the top-10 batters by that measure between 2011 and 2015:

That’s a collection of basically the league’s top batters. The bottom of the list, meanwhile, includes most of the league’s worst ones. A combination of extra bases and strikeouts serves as a good proxy for success — and each has the benefit of stabilizing long before the typical slash stats.

It’s improbable, of course, that Davis will continue hitting like one of the top batters, literally, of the last half-decade. He needn’t do anything of the sort, of course, to offer some value. Madison Bumgarner and Zack Greinke, for example, have both produced more than three extra wins over the last five years on the basis of their offensive contributions alone — each while batting roughly 50% worse than a league-average hitter.

Tim Locastro, 2B/SS, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
The author is quoting himself when he states that the purpose of this weekly exercise is “to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.” With regard to Locastro, he was identified as a candidate for this column last year when, following a trade from the Blue Jays to Dodgers, he was promoted to High-A. Like a number of the players who appear here, Locastro exhibited a profile featuring above-average contact ability, non-negligible power, and defensive acumen — a profile that he’s mostly preserved in 2016.

His appearance here is product of the author’s intent to continue monitoring such players. Those with a vested interest in Locastro’s future will have noted that he was promoted to Double-A Tulsa this past week. The early returns are positive: despite an unimpressive line (.235/.235/.353), Locastro has recorded 17 plate appearances for the Drillers without a strikeout — while also starting his first four games with the club at shortstop. That combination of contact ability and defensive promise is more predictive of future performance than a slash line based on half a week of data. And once again, this is the product of a bucolic liberal arts college in upstate New York.

Bruce Maxwell, C, Oakland (Profile)
Selected by Oakland in the second round of the 2012 draft out of Birmingham-Southern College, Maxwell recorded 15 home runs over the first 1,630 plate appearances of his affiliated career. Over his most recent 112 plate appearances — which is to say, something like 6% of his career total — he’s increased his overall home-run mark by two-thirds, hitting 10 of them since the beginning of June — and five since last Thursday alone, a span of just 26 PAs.

Maxwell is a catcher, which poses some difficulty for the purposes of a dirty weblogger, sitting at his home, contemplating the future value of Bruce Maxwell. Because, consider: some minor-league catchers actually have facility with the position; others, meanwhile, remain there simply because they’re large and hirsute. And the next stop for those who can’t play catcher adequately is typically first base, situtated on almost the entire other end of the defensive spectrum in terms of positional-adjustment runs. Here’s encouraging news, though: according to the methodology used by Baseball Prospectus, Maxwell has rated as a distinctly above-average catcher, recording about 15 fielding runs above average last year and another 12 more so far this season.

The qualitative data appears promising, as well. Ryan Christenson was Maxwell’s manager last year at Double-A Midland. He discussed Maxwell’s ability as a catcher in a piece by Susan Slusser from this past March:

“Bruce has turned himself into a really good receiver. He has really good framing ability. His throwing is a lot better,” Christenson said. “He handles meetings well, he’s very prepared, he executes the game plan really well, has a good rapport with umpires, all the things you’d like to see a catcher do.

Luis Urias, 2B/3B/SS, San Diego (Profile)
This represents Urias’s second consecutive week among the Five. He debuted last Friday following not only a successful cameo at the Triple-A level in place of Carlos Asuaje (a middle infielder who was invited to the Futures Game) but also on the strength of an unprecedented exhibition of power. As of last Friday, Urias had recorded three home runs, 10 walks, and just a lone strikeout over his most recent 38 plate appearances. In the 30 plate appearances he’s cobbled together since last Friday, the results have been almost as impressive, consisting of another home run, three walks, and (again) just a single strikeout — plus also four doubles, bringing his week-long isolated-slugging mark up to .269. Just 19 years old, Urias has recorded the lowest strikeout rate among all qualified High-A batters — this while also producing a nearly league-average ISO figure and playing second, third, and short exclusively.

Ildemaro Vargas, 2B/SS, Arizona (Profile)
Like Tim Locastro above, Vargas was recently promoted — in this case from the D-backs’ Double-A affiliate in Mobile to Triple-A Reno. As in the case of Locastro — and as in the case of any prospect, really — the promotion is significant for a couple reasons. First, and perhaps most importantly, it serves as a vote of confidence by the club. At some level, the promotion implies that, in the organization’s opinion, the relevant player is unlikely to fail miserably. That’s important: no other entity possesses as much information regarding Vargas as the club that employs him. If they’re encouraged by his progress, dumb webloggers such as the author probably ought to be, as well.

Beyond the organizational considerations, a promotion also facilitates the opportunity to begin assessing the relevant player’s outcomes against more advanced competition. And, in the case of this second point, everything is encouraging thus far. Recall that, at the heart of Vargas’s skill set, is an elite capacity for contact. Last year, he produced the lowest strikeout rate (4.8%) among 147 qualified batters across Low-A. This year, following an aggressive promotion to Double-A, he’s produced the second-lowest strikeout rate (6.8%) among 172 batters at that level. Now, through his first 19 plate appearances in the Pacific Coast League, Vargas has recorded zero strikeouts so far — pretty close, in other words, to the lowest possible amount.

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

Greg Allen, OF, Cleveland (High-A Carolina League)
Sherman Johnson, 2B/3B, Los Angeles AL (Triple-A Pacific Coast League)
Max Schrock, 2B, Washington (High-A Carolina League)
Brock Stewart, RHP, Los Angeles NL (Triple-A Pacific Coast League)
LaMonte Wade, OF, Minnesota (High-A Florida State 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.