Behold! Another installment of Peripheral Prospects, the low-price, off-brand fantasy baseball version of Fringe Five. Brad Johnson and I have brought something on the order of five minor leaguers per week who make us feel — like, really feel. These players tend to be unloved and unheralded but very much deserving of love and, uh, herald, not unlike the two authors of this series.
Some quick housekeeping, per usual:
Another week, another installment of Peripheral Prospects. Through six weeks — three from me, three from esteemed colleague Brad Johnson — we have featured 26 different players with whom one or both of us express(es) some degree of infatuation.
The aim is simple: identify players who (1) have little to no hype as a prospect, having missed all major top-100 lists; (2) have not exhausted their rookie eligibility yet; and (3) are reasonably close to the majors, such that you’re not dreaming on talent that projects dubiously from the low minors. The rules are not hard-and-fast; it would be a shame to not mention certain players who we think exceed the credit they’ve been given. Accordingly, we will relax the constraints every now and then to make accommodations.
Before I dive into my weekly five, some quick housekeeping, per usual:
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This is the Fantasy Fringe Five, but is no longer named as such. This is the last time you’ll see Brad or me use that alliterative phrase to describe this series. And that’s it! Keepin’ it cryptic. This is now, until or unless we come up with something better, Peripheral Prospects. (We welcome recommendations! Leave a comment.)
That said, we might start steering this ship more deliberately in our own direction. In the spirit of Carson Cistulli’s series after which this is now loosely modeled, we will sometimes follow its self-imposed restrictions and other times elect to deviate from them — most probably, the one underlined below:
In light of same, eligibility for The Fringe Five will require (for the present, at least) the following:
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Consider this the low-hanging fruit Fantasy Fringe Five (FFF). I’ll endeavor to make future installments more fringy. However, given the circumstances — namely, that the season started and folks are already thinking about future waiver wire pursuits — I wanted to highlight some MLB-ready fringe prospects for your dynasty (and potential redraft) consumption. One (or more?) of these guys check the box of almost too good to not be top prospects, which, uh, I guess is the entire premise of this series.
But first, some housekeeping:
You may recognize this, the Fringe Five, as an exercise Carson Cistulli once established and, weekly, pursued at the main FanGraphs site. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I may have an idea. We — Brad Johnson and I, we — don’t expect or even want to replace Cistulli, nor do we intend to replicate or imitate what he could achieve with the written word. What a colossal mistake that would be. I would be lying if I said I never tried. I can sing his praises for days. He was my favorite, and he was probably yours, too.
What we do intend to replicate, however, is Cistulli’s ability to identify market inefficiencies. Fringe Five, while quintessentially Cistullian, was an ongoing exercise in doing so, often successfully, unearthing a list of prominent names that includes Mookie Betts and Charlie Blackmon (and, maybe, one day, Max Schrock). I’m not sure Cistulli would have ever divulged his exact process; in introducing Fringe Five, he only went as far as to say, with emphasis added editorially, the following:
