The Fringe Five: Baseball’s Most Compelling Fringe Prospects

The Fringe Five is a weekly regular-season exercise, begun in April of 2013 by the present author, wherein that same dumb author utilizes regressed stats, scouting reports, and also his own intution to identify and/or continue monitoring the most compelling fringe prospects in all of baseball.

For the purposes of the column, generally, a fringe prospect (and therefore one eligible for inclusion in the Five) is any rookie-eligible player at High-A or above both (a) absent from a small collection of notable preseason top-100 prospect lists and also (b) not currently playing in the majors. Players appearing on the midseason prospect lists produced by those same notable sources or, otherwise, selected in the first round of the current season’s amateur draft have also, typically, been excluded from eligibility.

For the purposes of this edition of the Fringe Five, however, I’ve altered the rules for eligibility. Owing to lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel’s excellent and ambitious organizational prospect lists, which have appeared at FanGraphs all fall and winter, readers have access to useful reports on basically every prospect with a 40-or-better future-value grade. Rather than merely regurgitate McDaniel’s work, then, what I’ve instead attempted to do here is assemble a list featuring the 10-best actual fringe prospects — which is to say, the 10 most compelling prospects to have been omitted entirely from the numbered portion of McDaniel’s organizational lists.

In the research for and assembly of this edition of the Five, I’ve also benefited from Chris Mitchell’s work on his KATOH methodology both for hitters and pitchers, the results of which advance the community’s understanding of which metrics at the minor-league level correlate most highly with major-league success.

*****

Adam Duvall, 3B, San Francisco (Profile)
Prorated to a full season, Steamer projects neither Brandon Belt nor Hunter Pence nor Buster Posey, but rather Adam Duvall, to lead the San Francisco Giants in home runs in 2015, with 21 of them over 600 plate appearances. The probability of Duvall receiving that sort of playing time is low: first baseman Brandon Belt is healthy entering the season, while the newly acquired Casey McGehee is expected to begin the season as the club’s starting third baseman. That said, there’s never been an instance during his professional career during which Duvall has failed, really. With the exception of 200 uninsipring plate appearances following his selection during the 2010 draft, Duvall has routinely produced strikeout and walk rates in the vicinity of league average while also hitting home runs at an above-average rate. Moreover, he’s made more than 80% of his defensive starts as a professional at third base. That combination of offensive and defensive profiles isn’t a wholly common one. Indeed, if WAR existed for minor leaguers, Duvall would have recorded one of the best of those among PCL batters. He’ll likely never do that among MLB batters, but that distinction suggests that he might have some use.

Carlos Frias, RHP, Los Angeles NL (Profile)
In 2011, then-rookie right-hander Michael Pineda parlayed a repertoire consisting almost exclusively of just a fastball and slider into one of the league’s top pitching lines. His strengths: the ability to throw hard (his average fastball was 94.7 mph) while also exhibiting reasonable control (he walked just 7.9% of opposing batters). A study conducted by the present author suggested that, among the pitchers who passed the majority of the 2011 season at either Double- or Triple-A, that Angels prospect Garrett Richards most resembled Pineda. Richards required a couple more years of development, but emerged in 2014 as one of the league’s top starters. Now an updated version of the study — in this case accounting for 2014’s stats and scouting reports — reveals that, among the game’s rookie-eligible pitchers in the high minors, that the 25-year-old Frias most closely exhibits the Pineda/Richards skill set. Indeed, Frias exhibited it at the major-league level in 2014, sitting at 94.4 mph with his fastball and walking just 5% of batters over 32.1 innings. The results, in terms of run prevention, weren’t excellent (Frias posted a 6.12 ERA), but the fielding-independent numbers were all encouraging.

Jared Hoying, OF, Texas (Profile)
Javier Baez has been one of the most celebrated young players in baseball since his selection ninth overall by the Cubs in the 2011 draft. Jared Hoying has been something less than that. That said, the two produced almost identical lines in the Pacific Coast League last year, as the following small table is designed to illustrate.

Player PA BB% K% AVG OBP SLG BABIP wRC+ HR SB CS WAR*
Javier Baez 434 7.8% 30.0% .260 .323 .510 .322 108 23 16 8 2.7
Jared Hoying 555 7.2% 25.2% .271 .325 .517 .324 112 26 20 7 3.5

*Minor-league WAR, if minor-league WAR existed.

This small table is accompanied by multiple caveats. For example: Baez is four years younger than Hoying. And for other example: Hoying’s ballpark featured a greater (although not markedly greater) run environment than Baez’s. And finally: Hoying’s production represented a departure from his previously established levels, while Baez’s didn’t. Hoying has traditionally produced acceptable strikeout rates, however, and has also demonstrated the ability to play center field, receiving 113 of his 129 starts there in 2014. Also of interest with regard to Hoying: with the Rangers’ lack of an obvious starter in left field, there’s a non-zero chance he’ll find playing time at the major-league level.

Sherman Johnson, 2B/3B, Los Angeles AL (Profile)
Entering the 2012 draft, Johnson had distinguished himself at Florida State largely for his ability to draw a walk, leading not merely his team nor the very competitive SEC by that measure, but all of Division I college baseball, with 69 of them in 67 games. While Johnson’s skill set was of considerable value to that FSU team, which advanced to the semifinals of the College World Series before losing to eventual champions Arizona, his lack of tools made him less appealing to professional clubs and he was selected in only the 14th round that year — which is to say, a spot at which very few future major leaguers are taken. Johnson has played second, third, and shortstop with the Angels’ minor-league clubs, however, and produced the equivalent of roughly 4.0 WAR in 2014 with High-A Inland Empire. Like Rob Refsnyder or Devon Travis — both of whom, like Johnson, were named to the 2012 College World Series’ All-Tournament Team — Johnson has the potential to develop into a major leaguer based more on his skills and feel for the game than on any one carrying tool.

Also of note with regard to Johnson — more for its aesthetic than performance-related consequences — is how relaxed he remains even as the pitcher begins his delivery, which quality the following GIF illustrates of Johnson hitting a triple in 2014.

Johnson Swing

Blayne Weller, RHP, Arizona (Profile)
Broadly speaking, one is able to separate any given pitcher’s prospect status into three categories: pedigree, performance, and stuff. Weller acquitted himself nicely by the latter two those qualities in 2014, parlaying a 94-95 mph fastball and effective 12-to-6 curveball into strikeout and walk rates of 28.2% and 8.2%, respectively, over 140 innings between Class- and High-A. What Weller conspicuously lacks, however, is pedigree. Originally a 14th-round selection by Minnesota out of a Florida high school in the 2008 draft, he was released by that same club during spring training of 2012. He spent the entirety of that season with Windy City of the independent Frontier League, eventually returning to affiliated ball with Arizona in May of 2013. Some elevated batting average on balls in play figures obscured the achievement of his 2014 season, but the strikeout figures, in particular, are encouraging — both because strikeout rate correlates strongly with future run prevention and because, as work by Chris Mitchell illustrates, it’s also the stat most predictive of future major league success for lower minor leaguers.

*****

The Next Five
Hanser Alberto, SS, Texas (Profile)
Beginning in middle of last August, Detroit shortstop prospect Dixon Machado became a fixture among the Fringe Five, appearing in the final four editions of that column. Already recognized for his defensive talents, Machado began during that month to aggregate all of the offensive skills he’d shown at various points in the past. Alberto, for his part, also has a reputation as a glove-first shortstop. That said, he’s also recorded just an 8.4% strikeout rate in affiliated baseball — this, despite having routinely been two-to-four years younger than his opponents. It’s that skill which allowed him to produce roughly league-average batting lines across two levels in 2014 despite a considerable lack of present power.

Alex Claudio, LHP, Texas (Profile)
In over 260 minor-league innings (as both a starter and reliever), Claudio has produced strikeout and walk rates of 27.1% and 5.2%, respectively. In 12.1 innings as a major-leaguer (only in relief, in this case), Claudio has produced strikeout and walk rates of 25.9% and 7.4%, respectively — with a markedly above-average 58.3% ground-ball rate, too. He enters just his age-23 season, does Claudio, and he’s a left-hander whose best pitch (a changeup) is designed to neutralize right-handers’ platoon advantage. There’s a lot to suggest that the Rangers might benefit from experimenting with Claudio as a starter. What makes it less likely that they will, however, is his velocity: Claudio sat at just 84.3 mph during his brief major-league stint last year. Outside of knuckleballers and Mark Buehrle, there are few starters who possess so little arm speed. There’s little doubt, however, that watching his slow-motion changeup (embedded below) would, at the very least, spread joy like a virus.

Claudio CH

Ryan Cordell, OF, Texas (Profile)
Likely owing to his size (he’s listed at 6-foot-4 and 205 pounds), Cordell doesn’t always exhibit entirely fluid actions in the field. And likely owing to his pedigree (he was taken in the 11th round out of Liberty), he hasn’t yet received much in the way of attention as a prospect. That said, his swing is sufficiently compact to have produced better-than-average strikeout rates in both the Class-A Sally and High-A Carolina League last year. And he possesses enough speed and athleticism to have stolen 21 based in 25 attempts, as well.

Conrad Gregor, 1B, Houston (Profile)
It’s not unusual for a batter to produce uncharacteristically strong power numbers in the California League, owing to that circuit’s elevated run environment. Indeed, with regard to Gregor, the 12 home runs he hit over just 214 plate appearances did represent an uncharacteristically high total relative to his brief professional resume. To attribute that performance merely to the effects of the league would be short-sighted, however. Regard: among those batters who recorded at least 175 plate appearances (i.e. the threshold at which isolated power begins to become reliable), Gregor produced the fourth-highest park-adjusted ISO figure in the Cal League behind the Padres’ Hunter Renfroe, the Dodgers’ Corey Seager, and the Athletics’ Matt Olson — which is to say, three prospects who rank among the very top prospects in their respective organizations.

Kyle Lloyd, San Diego (Profile)
Four major-league starters in 2014 recorded both 100-plus innings and also a split-finger usage rate above 20%. They were as follows: Hisashi Iwakuma, Hiroki Kuroda, Matt Shoemaker, and Masahiro Tanaka. One of those pitchers was born in Michigan; the three others, in Japan. All of them, however, parlayed their uncommon repertoires — which include merely average fastball velocities (at best) — into better-than-average fielding-independent numbers. Lloyd bears resemblance to this foursome in three ways: his fastball is merely average, he throws an excellent split-finger fastball, and his fielding-independent numbers are excellent. To that last point: among all qualified pitchers in the minors who made even one appearance above rookie-level ball, Lloyd finished with the third-best strikeout rate (30.6% in 119.2 IP).





Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.

One Response to “The Fringe Five: Baseball’s Most Compelling Fringe Prospects”

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  1. brentdaily says:

    Why so many Rangers? Fluke, park factors, or something else contributing to it?