People have expected big things from Freddie Freeman. I know this because Freeman is a professional baseball player, and all of those guys — each and every last one of them — was at one point considered a future star. The backup catcher, the disappointing first baseman, the 36-year-old in triple-A — former superstars, somewhere, thought to have the brightest of futures. Sometimes they fulfill their promise and most of the times they do not.

I know this also because, among professional baseball players, Freeman was and still is highly regarded. He was drafted 78th overall in 2007, two picks after Giancarlo Stanton, and before 2009 he cracked Baseball America’s top-100 list of prospects. Before 2010, he cracked the top-40; before 2011, he cracked the top-20. Freeman debuted in the majors before he turned 21, and he was established as a regular before he turned 22. Players who do that often become good players, relative to the other players, and unbelievably, inconceivably great players, relative to us.

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We begin.

Brett Myers is on the Indians now

On a one-year contract, with a second-year club option. The whole deal is said to be worth $7 million, and Myers will go back to starting after spending all of 2012 in the bullpen. In two bullpens, as it were. Myers has done this before, as he was basically a full-time reliever in 2007, and then a starter between 2008-2011. If the Indians turn out to not like Myers as a starter, they can move him back to relief — he’s their player, after all, and he’s demonstrated his versatility — but he’s a starter first. And the Indians’ top starter is arguably Justin Masterson or Zach McAllister, so, yeah. There’s a need.

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I think I’m the guy at FanGraphs who’s most interested in the field of pitch-framing research, so, hey there, here comes another post about pitch-framing. The idea of the importance of receiving a pitch correctly has been around forever, but only more recently have people begun to feel like they can measure who’s good and who’s bad at it. You know the good ones are represented by Jose Molina, and you know the bad ones are represented by Ryan Doumit. There are calculations that use PITCHf/x data to figure out strikes above or below average, for catchers.

What isn’t quite so clear, yet, is how we should interpret those numbers. Catchers aren’t all catching the same pitchers in the same ballparks in the same counts with the same umpires and the same opposing batters. It’s complicated, because of course it’s complicated, and I’m interested in the idea of some guys being harder to catch than others. Some guys will be more and less easy to frame. At its core, this is because some pitches should be more and less easy to frame. Catching a 95 mile-per-hour fastball is going to be different from catching a 70 mile-per-hour lollipop curve.

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One of the very most important principles in the field of baseball analysis is the concept of park factors — having an understanding that the game can play differently depending on the environment. I don’t think this is unique to baseball, but it’s most evident in baseball, where a game in old Coors Field would be very different from a game in recent Petco Park. All decent analysis has to take park factors into account. Otherwise, you’re just leaving way too much off the table.

But most people, when they think of park factors, consider what happens to the baseball once it’s put in play. This park increases doubles; this other park reduces home runs. These are the easiest park factors to understand, absolutely, and they’re generally the easiest to explain. Fenway Park has the Green Monster, which does things. Coors Field is at elevation, which does other things. I don’t need to explain this stuff to you.

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Nick Swisher is a talented, big-money veteran with an actress wife, and he likes to generate attention and play under the bright lights of a major media market. The Cleveland Indians play in Cleveland, and they just lost 94 games, and last year their Opening Day payroll was under $70 million. On paper, Swisher and the Indians aren’t much of a fit, but that didn’t stop Swisher from signing a four-year contract with the Indians worth $56 million. A fifth-year vesting option would increase the value to $70 million. Few saw Cleveland being Swisher’s eventual destination, but recently the Indians put on the full-court press, and they were able to twist Swisher’s arm.

One thing that’s unclear is the nature of Swisher’s free-agent market. Publicly, there wasn’t much of a sweepstakes, so Swisher might not have had many alternatives. But this can be sold as Swisher opting to go home, since he was born in Columbus, went to high school in West Virginia, and went to college at Ohio State. To the average person, going to Cleveland would hold a certain amount of appeal; to Swisher, going to Cleveland would hold a higher amount of appeal, presumably. So there’s that angle at play.

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A week ago, I wrote up The 2012 Season In Slow Home Runs, which was actually The 2012 Season In The Slowest Pitches Hit For Home Runs. That would’ve been a much more accurate but much worse title. That just begged for a follow-up, and that’s what this is, as we’re now going to examine the fastest pitches hit for home runs during the year. Originally I was going to say the timing feels right since nothing is happening in baseball, but then the Pirates signed Francisco Liriano and the Rangers signed A.J. Pierzynski, so instead I’ll say the timing feels right since nothing you care about is happening in baseball. This is a good time for frivolous reflection.

Once again, what the title suggests is that we’d be looking at the fastest home runs off the bat, and we might do that later. That would be possible on account of the incredible and invaluable ESPN Home Run Tracker. In the event that I write up that list, I don’t know what I’m going to title it since the obvious one’s already kind of taken. Thankfully this stuff is entirely unimportant and it doesn’t even need to be discussed out in the open on the front page of FanGraphs. You know how you can know I don’t have a regular editor? This paragraph is how you can know that.

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To date, it hasn’t been the offseason that the Texas Rangers wanted it to be. There’s still plenty of time, and the team still has plenty of talent, but the Rangers have been looking to make a move of significance. Later Thursday, they were able to make one, locking up free-agent catcher A.J. Pierzynski. And more, while Pierzynski is coming off arguably the best season of his entire big-league career, the Rangers got him for one year and $7.5 million. While Pierzynski doesn’t make the Rangers into something they weren’t by himself, he fills a need with so little risk the Rangers could hardly afford not to sign him.

With Geovany Soto and Eli Whiteside, the Rangers already had catchers, but they didn’t have good catchers, or left-handed-hitting catchers with a fair amount of power. While it’s presently unclear exactly how Pierzynski and Soto will split time, Pierzynski has exceeded 500 plate appearances in every season but one since 2003. In that one, he reached 497. Pierzynski has proven that he can handle an awful lot of work, and Soto just batted .198.

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As facts about Kendrys Morales go, here are a few of them. On Wednesday, Morales was traded from the Angels to the Mariners in exchange for Jason Vargas. Morales is and has always been a switch-hitter as a professional. Morales began switch-hitting when he was 12 years old, and the right side is his natural side. That is, Morales naturally bats right-handed, and he had to learn how to swing as a lefty. Every switch-hitter starts off with a natural side, but what’s interesting about the Morales case is this:

Career as a lefty: 127 wRC+
Career as a righty: 84 wRC+

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The easy thing is talking about what Josh Hamilton has done. For his career, he’s hit .304, with 161 dingers. Last year, his WAR was 4.4, and before that it was 4.1, and before that he won the American League MVP. Hamilton just signed a substantial contract with the Angels, and the season most relevant to the Angels during negotiations would’ve been Hamilton’s 2012. Hamilton started impossibly strong and cooled off, finishing with excellent numbers overall. If the Angels didn’t think Josh Hamilton is excellent, they wouldn’t have guaranteed him an eighth of a billion dollars.

The harder thing is talking about what Josh Hamilton will do, precisely because we don’t and can’t know. We can only try to guess, based on what we assume to be relevant information, and when talking about Hamilton’s future — which everybody’s tried to do — it seems worthwhile to take a closer look at those 2012 trends. For some time, Hamilton was practically impossible to pitch to. Then he became easy to pitch to, at least relative to the earlier version of himself. Random statistical fluctuation, or something the Angels ought to be thinking about?

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The acquisition of Josh Hamilton gave the Angels what they wanted, but it also left the Angels with a little problem: between Peter Bourjos, Mark Trumbo, and Kendrys Morales, they had too many good players for too few spots. This was, as they say, a nice problem to have, and the Angels also felt they had a need for another innings-eating starting pitcher. So in a move surprising only because it went down between two teams in the same division, the Angels and Mariners have exchanged Morales and Jason Vargas, straight up. With one move, the Angels solved two perceived problems.

The whole trade is simple. It’s easy to understand, like an example transaction in Trading 101. The Angels had too many bats and too few starting pitchers, so they traded a bat for a starting pitcher. The Mariners wanted a bat more than they wanted to keep one of their starting pitchers. Morales didn’t fit in one place and he does fit in the other. Morales has one year left until free agency, and he’s projected to make just under $5 million. Vargas has one year left until free agency, too, and he’s projected to make just over $7 million. There are no prospects, no cash considerations, no players to be named later. Few transactions are this uncomplicated.

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