Chris Davis has had power for as long as he’s been a professional, and probably longer. His first year, in Low-A, he slugged .534. The next year he slugged .598. In Triple-A he slugged over .600. The power is what got Davis to the majors. But Davis now is taking things to new levels. It wouldn’t be right to say Davis has been hitting everything, because he’s missed quite a lot. But he’s hit more things than he used to, and that’s why he’s currently leading the majors in home runs, with 20. His isolated slugging percentage is more than double Adrian Beltre‘s career number. It’s more than double Robinson Cano‘s. It’s got 50 points on Babe Ruth’s. If baseballs had snot in them, there would be a lot of snot on Chris Davis’ uniform.

Davis possesses what you might call “easy power.” Several people have characterized it as “effortless.” According to FanGraphs commenter farrpar, “He has the most effortless power in baseball, no doubt about it.” According to this guy, “Wow! Chris Davis! Effortless Grand-slam!!! Go O’s.” According to David Miller, “The thing about Davis is that his swing looks so effortless on homerun balls like the one he hit on Sunday.” According to OsLuvrInKy, “Gotta love it. His swings just look so effortless.” Last season, in fact, Davis hit a home run on a broken bat. Because Davis is all the some of the rage right now, I’ve decided to prepare a top-five list of his most effortless home-run swings of the 2013 season so far. One way to measure effortlessness would be biomechanical examination. Another way would be guessing.

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Here is a true sentence about Mariano Rivera. Though, for his career, he’s managed to strike out the same rate of batters as Arthur Rhodes, he’s issued a higher rate of walks than Carl Pavano, and he’s allowed the same BABIP as Armando Galarraga. Based on one’s associations, one might not read that sentence and conclude that Rivera is amazing. But then, who’s familiar with Pavano and Galarraga, and not Rivera? Rivera is amazing, for all of the reasons you know, and for additional reasons we haven’t yet even discovered. Rivera’s going to retire soon, at 43, and his ERA’s under 2. He’s walked as many batters this year as Shawn Tolleson, who has faced two batters.

Though Rivera didn’t invent the cut fastball, he made it a somebody. In Rivera’s hands, the cutter became a pitch with which everyone’s familiar. Rivera knows how to throw lots of other pitches, but he doesn’t take them into games. He just leans on the one pitch, and if another pitcher in baseball leans heavily on one pitch, we say he’s being Rivera-esque, at least in approach. It’s rare that a pitcher can have Rivera’s success, and it’s rarer still to be able to do it with one weapon — the list of such pitchers basically reads “Mariano Rivera.” Clearly, in order to do what he’s done, Rivera’s had to have impeccable command.

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Sunday afternoon, Domonic Brown did something he’s been doing a lot of lately. Brown faced Mike Fiers in the bottom of the first, with two on and two out. After a first-pitch curveball found the zone, Fiers missed three straight times, with a heater and a couple changeups. Brown scooted up in the box, and Fiers came inside with a cutter, or a slider, as if that detail’s important. Brown saw it, swung at it, and blasted it, way out to right field for a three-run dinger. It was Brown’s 14th home run in 32 starts. It was his 16th home run of the season. Brown is the National League leader in that category, after a spring in which people were concerned he might not find enough playing time.

Sunday afternoon, Domonic Brown did something he hadn’t done for a while. Brown faced Tom Gorzelanny in the bottom of the seventh, with one on and two out. After a first-pitch slider found the zone, Gorzelanny missed three straight times, with a slider and a couple heaters. The 3-and-1 pitch was a fastball that Brown went after and tipped for a strike. The next and final pitch was a slider that just missed, a little low and a little away. Brown watched it, and Brown walked — unintentionally — for the first time since April 30. Brown had just walked the day before, too, but that one was done on purpose.

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Hey there, people I’ve almost certainly never met before in my life, and welcome to the second part of the eighth edition of The Worst Of The Best. This right here is a link to the second part of the seventh edition, from last Friday. Here’s a link to all of the posts in the series, if you want something organized. In the earlier post today, a probably attractive commenter asked why I even bother with these introductions, instead of just getting right to the list. There are a few reasons! One, these posts include HTML jumps, and we don’t want to have .gifs right on the FanGraphs front page. We actually do care about load times. Two, because I never like to repeat introductions, I’m curious to see how I’ll be starting these things in September. I’m experimenting on myself. And three, it’s convenient to have a little explanation of what’s going on in each post, just in case someone is new to the series. Sure, I could just post a link to an explanation, but I hate links. The Internet relies too heavily on links. It’s more reader-friendly to provide all the necessary details in the same place. I care about you. We care about you.

We’re going to talk about wild swings, or swings at pitches that weren’t close to being strikes. What you see below will be a top-five list of the wildest swings, from between May 24 – May 30. It’s based on PITCHf/x and there are screenshots and .gifs, albeit fewer images than in the wildest-pitches post. Eliminated are checked swings and swings on hit-and-runs, because I’m a scientist and these were scientific determinations. This week, I’m also providing for you a bonus! That’s one fewer bonus than last week, but one more bonus than you should rightfully expect. Cherish this. Off we go.

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Hey there everybody, and welcome to this week’s edition of The World’s Most Zaniest Desks, wherein we discuss outlandish desks of all shapes and sizes. You “wood” “knot” believe what we have in store! I’m just kidding, this is the first part of the eighth edition of The Worst Of The Best. For the first part of the seventh edition, from last Friday afternoon, go right here. And then keep on following links until you get all the way back to the first part of the first edition, which is important somehow. If you’d like to read about desks and desk types, here’s this link. I apologize for misleading you before. That was dastardly.

Here we talk about pitches that were far away from the center of the strike zone. You’re going to see five of them, and I eliminate intentional balls, because otherwise you’d just see five intentional balls, and I wouldn’t have anything interesting to say about them. “The pitcher wants to walk this batter intentionally, or ‘on purpose’.” It’s a PITCHf/x-based top five, and I think this time around I have 18 images. So get ready for all of those, if that requires preparation on your part. We’re covering May 24 – May 30. Some pitches that just missed: Cody Allen to Joey Votto on May 28, Gio Gonzalez to Adam Jones on May 27, and Rick Porcello to Clint Barmes on May 28. In Porcello’s defense, you don’t want to pitch Barmes anywhere in the strike zone. The list is coming; won’t you join me?

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Sometimes, when I’m supposed to be working, I read things that don’t have anything to do with baseball. Sometimes I’m able to salvage that lost time by twisting my new information into a vaguely baseball-y angle. So it’s been today, when, this morning, I scanned Erik Klemetti’s Eruptions blog. There’s a good new post up, focusing on the matter of trying to predict earthquakes around the globe. (Hint: don’t do it.) I can’t think of a way to write about baseball-y earthquakes. But within that post, toward the start, is a discussion about patterns, and the perception of them where they sometimes don’t exist. Now this — this could be something to put up on FanGraphs.

Contained within the post is a link to this piece at Scientific American. The author talks about “patternicity,” or, as he puts it, “the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise.” This might be a pretty familiar concept to you, and the author advances an evolutionary argument for its existence. There’s a reason, it’s asserted, that we’re so good at finding patterns. There’s a reason we try to find patterns where no patterns exist.

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Carlos Marmol doesn’t have the highest career walk rate in baseball history. That honor belongs to Mitch Williams, who walked one of every six guys he faced. But Marmol isn’t far behind, and he’s the leader among actives. Marmol has a higher career walk rate than Jason Giambi. He has a higher career walk rate than Brian Giles and Mike Schmidt and Jeff Bagwell. Walks are just part of the package, and Marmol isn’t some kid anymore, so it’s not like they’re about to go away with a mechanical tweak. This is in part due to the fact that Marmol is hard to hit, so he ends up in a lot of deep counts. This is more in part due to the fact that Marmol has had really lousy command.

Control is said to be the ability to throw strikes. Command is said to be the ability to hit spots. We don’t have a measure of command, but we can assume that a guy with Marmol’s walk rate doesn’t list it as a strength on his hypothetical English-language pitcher resume. The walks are part of the reason the Cubs see Marmol as expendable. They’re part of the reason he doesn’t have much of a market, and they’re part of the reason he’s no longer closing. Everybody knows command is a Carlos Marmol weakness. And now we have fun with a quick project.

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Sometimes it’s the things you don’t write that make you look smarter. A few weeks ago, I nearly wrote something celebrating Michael Saunders‘ improved plate discipline. I wasn’t quite feeling it, though, so I went and did something else, and then Saunders embarked on a miserable slump. That’s not the first time something like that has happened. Additionally, there were a few times I wanted to re-visit the Rick Porcello narrative, pointing out that his spring-training strikeouts didn’t lead to regular-season strikeouts. I never wrote anything to that effect, and now Porcello is striking guys out. Again, I look smarter by not looking like an idiot. Over the last 30 days, Porcello’s posted baseball’s third-lowest xFIP. Here’s a selection of strikeout rates over the same span:

• Stephen Strasburg, 27.0%
• Matt Harvey, 26.6%
• Shelby Miller, 26.2%
• Rick Porcello, 26.0%
• Tim Lincecum, 23.9%
• James Shields, 23.7%
• Clayton Kershaw, 20.4%

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One of the most interesting fields of study in baseball over the last few years has been that of pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving, or pitch-stealing, or whatever you want to call it. This is the stuff that’s made Jose Molina nerd-famous, and it’s drawing more attention with every passing month. Framing has been discussed on ESPN. It’s been discussed on MLB Network. It’s been the subject of countless player interviews, and what’s been revealed is that a great amount of thought and technique goes into how a catcher catches a pitch. Catchers don’t just catch the baseball. They catch the baseball with a purpose.

Research has uncovered a few outliers, like Molina and Jonathan Lucroy and, say, Jesus Montero and Ryan Doumit in the other direction. It’s interesting these guys can be given such different strike zones, since the strike zone is supposed to be consistent for everybody. And it’s interesting that, as much as people come up with run values in the dozens, it’s hard to identify the actual effect. For example, Rays pitchers this year have allowed a higher OPS throwing to Molina than when throwing to Jose Lobaton, the other guy. Last year, Molina again had the worst numbers. It reminds me too much of Catcher ERA for my tastes, but you’d think you’d see something. Instead, you see little. Where is the value going?

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Last offseason, the Diamondbacks participated in a three-way trade that brought them shortstop Didi Gregorius, and that cost them Trevor Bauer. Other pieces were involved, but we’re not going to talk about them here. Arizona drew some criticism, as people weren’t sure Gregorius would stick as a regular shortstop, but general manager Kevin Towers saw to it to compare Gregorius to a young Derek Jeter:

“When I saw him, he reminded me of a young Derek Jeter,” Towers said.

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