A Fringy Newsletter
In the first newsletter I sent out to the world I mentioned I wasn’t a particular fan of calling it “The Carlos Collazo Newsletter.” It always felt a bit arrogant and a bit more boring. But it worked as a placeholder.
That’s changing today: welcome to Fringe Average.
It’s the same newsletter you’ve been getting except with—at least in my opinion—a more fun and relevant title. For those who don’t immediately get the reference, let me give you some context on what Fringe Average even means.
It comes from the 20-80 scout scale, which is the industry standard for how scouts and teams grade players and their toolsets. While I’m not a scout, and none of us at Baseball America are, we’ve adopted that terminology for years in an attempt to capture how the scouting industry views players.
The piece linked above will give you a full breakdown of the 20-80 scale, but I’ll give you the basic 20-80 table with the associated verbiage we use for each grade:
20: poor, bottom-of-the-scale
30: well below average
40: below average
45: fringe-average, fringy
50: average
55: above-average
60: plus
70: plus-plus, well above average
80: elite, top-of-the-scale
We all love up a tooled-up, massively talented player with no shortage of plus tools all over the scout card but there’s also something about a player who doesn’t have those elite physical attributes but winds up carving out a great big league career anyways. A player with perhaps no single above-average tool but who manages to become greater than the sum of his parts through some combination of hard work, baseball IQ and skill development.
A David Eckstein type, if you will. When I asked our slack channel for modern examples of this sort of player Matt Eddy suggested Luis Arraez or Jeff McNeil or Steven Kwan.1
It’s fun when those sorts of fringy tools players find success. I also like the way “fringe average” rolls off the tongue. It just sounds like a baseball phrase. I like to identify with the fringe-average grade because I don’t view myself as some supremely talented, gifted or toolsy writer/reporter/podcaster.
If I had a single carrying tool it might be above-average writing speed. Even then there’s no shortage of beat writers regularly turning around strong copy on tight deadlines. Ultimately I’m just a guy who loves baseball and is lucky enough to watch, write and talk about it for a living.
Thanks for following along.
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Here’s what I’ve done over at BA this week:
My main focus this week was finishing our updated Top 100 draft list for the 2025 class. This update folds in much of the feedback we’re hearing from the industry after the conclusion of the summer showcase period.
Accompanying that rankings update is a piece breaking down what we’ve been hearing about the class. In that I discussed the 1-1 debate between Jace LaViolette and Ethan Holliday, the “West Coast Bias” of the 2025 class and a strong group of arms at the top.
On the draft podcast with Peter Flaherty we got into the weeds a bit more on the 2025 class, litigated the 1-1 debate over audio, talked about some of the demographic strengths and weaknesses of the group and threw out a few dark horse candidates to go first overall.
On Episode 96 of the Future Projection podcast Ben Badler and I talked about our report writing processes, Ben touched on a number of 2024 international signees who have elevated their prospect status this year and then we also wondered about the ramifications for college baseball and recruiting that come with increased scholarships and smaller roster limits.
Josh Norris made the point that from him a non-toolsy player is someone who doesn’t have anything above a 50-grade tool on the card. Each of these three players have cases for plus hit tools or better and he wouldn’t put them in that tier. Josh recommends poor hitting catchers who don’t do much more than handle a staff well and wind up having a lengthy career, ala Jeff Mathis. Spencer Steer came to mind for me but he’s also one of just 15 players with a 20-20 season and is a better runner than I remembered so he’s probably too toolsy as well. Other recommendations from the BA staff included Chris Taylor and Nico Hoerner. Who’s your example for a non-toolsy but still successful big leaguer?