Within the next week -- Sept. 1, to be specific -- major league rosters will expand by two, which is bound to bring about more prospect call-ups. Most teams will choose to add a reliever in one of those spots, seeing as the pitcher maximum is also increasing from 13 to 14. Some will then use their second spot on a third catcher or a utility player, maybe someone who's just coming off the IL or has spent most of the year shuttling to and from Triple-A.
But there will be some prospects that we see for the first time, and as always, the first half of this article is dedicated to identifying those prospects, albeit with some caveats. The term "prospect," you may have noticed, is rather broad. At its broadest, it refers to any player who hasn't exhausted his rookie eligibility yet, but people like to add their own qualifiers.
A common one is that the player has to be highly regarded, showing up on all the rank lists and projecting for a significant role in the majors. That's never been a qualifier for this article, which sometimes even expands the definition of prospect to special cases like Noelvi Marte, but an idea inherent to the first half of the list, the Five on the Verge, is that the player has to be worth stashing ahead of time. Some of the prospects likely to be promoted Sept. 1 are worth commenting on but not necessarily worth stashing.
I'd like to highlight a couple of those here. Let's name him for the last two structures I unlocked in SimCity! That's how I imagine Parks Harber, born in 2001, came to be, but the 24-year-old has worked hard to make sure that's not the most noteworthy detail about him.
He has routinely put up good numbers as he's ascended the minor league ranks, first in the Yankees organization and now in the Giants. In 99 games between Double- and Triple-A this year, he's slashed .290/.376/.497, homering 17 times. The data doesn't jump out at you, but his exit velocity readings, both average and max, as well as his strikeout rate, walk rate, pull-air rate, chase rate and zone-contact rate are in the 50-70th percentile range, which is to say that none are prohibitive.
The whole may be greater than the sum of the parts here, and because Harber plays third base, where the Giants have lost Matt Chapman for the rest of the season, now would be the perfect time to give him a whirl. Michael Arroyo, meanwhile, actually does show up on some top 100 lists, but he doesn't have the loudest toolset for Fantasy, delivering modest exit velocities with an elevated chase rate at Triple-A. He's also been more good than great between the top two levels this year, slashing .281/.357/.459 with 17 home runs and 16 stolen bases in 105 games, and doesn't have as neat of a path as Harber.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
