The home-run swing comes in many forms. It ranges from the artistic whip-like movement exemplified by Ken Griffey Jr. to the panicked marionette impression favored by Hunter Pence, the muscled uppercut of Prince Fielder to the paintbrush stroke of Carlos Gonzalez. All of them are impressive and beautiful in their own way. (Yes, even Pence’s. The fact alone that he can hit a ball that far with mechanics like that probably means he deserves no fewer than 20 awards.)

The prospect of a Chris Davis home run has become a mundane event. The big man is paid to hit dingers, and lots of them. He does just that. He is Paul Bunyan, and he plays in a stadium that was probably bought at Toys “R” Us and came with Matchbox cars. It helps that he can hit the ball out anywhere, but has taken up residence in Baltimore. Davis home runs are like Billy Hamilton steals and Max Scherzer strikeouts. They happen early and often, and therefore it’s easy to lose sight of just how damn cool they are.

“Cool” perhaps isn’t the first word to pop into one’s head when seeking to describe Davis. “Big,” “strong,” “gargantuan”… these are all good and sound adjectives. But make no mistake. Davis is cool on the field.

Let’s watch him hit a home run.

See. That’s what cool looks like. That’s a cool home run.

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The forces of supply and demand appears to be bringing the offseason to a standstill when it comes to heavy hitters. Not many teams are looking for that type of player, and yet a number of them remain available. Edwin Encarnacion had to take less than he wanted, while Jose Bautista and Mark Trumbo headline a group of bat-first guys still available on the market. It’s a group that also includes Chris Carter, who was non-tendered by the Brewers, as well as Pedro Alvarez, Brandon Moss, and Mike Napoli. The qualifying offer hurts for Bautista and Trumbo, but the real reason Trumbo remains unsigned is that he isn’t worth a multi-year deal, and he probably isn’t even worth the $17.2 million attached to the qualifying offer.

There’s certainly some sort of market for Trumbo and the 47 homers he hit in 2016. As a player, though, he only does one thing really well, and it’s tough for him to compensate for his deficiencies with that one strength. It’s not just that Trumbo is a poor defender and baserunner, it’s that he isn’t even that good on offense. Last season, Trumbo’s on-base percentage was .316, below the league-average mark of .323 for non-pitchers. Sure, his .533 slugging percentage was very good, but it wasn’t among the top 10% of baseball, and when combined with his lackluster OBP, his 123 wRC+ ranked a respectable 40th out of 176 qualified players last season. While respectable, getting such little mileage out of 47 homers is a little disconcerting.

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Matt Wieters’ rookie PECOTA projection is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

I still have it in my possession. While the pages have yellowed in the 2009 Baseball Prospectus annual, Wieters’ .311/.395/.544 slash line is still something to behold. As a 22-year-old at Double-A Bowie, the Georgia Tech product slashed .365/.460/.625. He was the perfect prospect: switch-hitting catcher with power, on-base skills, and above average defense. “Mauer with Power” was the advertisement.

Wieters of course never became that kind of offensive force. He has a career wRC+ of 97 and produced just an 88 wRC+ this past season. Baseball is very often a cruel game. Expectation can morph into resentment.

Still, this is a player with four All-Star berths. This is a player with pedigree. This is a switch-hitter with a strong throwing arm, who threw out 35% of base-stealers last year. His leadership receives high marks. So it’s somewhat surprising that he’s still available in his first taste of free agency.

Or perhaps it isn’t so surprising.

Wieters’ defense is likely more problematic to teams than his so-so bat. According to StatCorner’s framing leaderboard for last season, Wieters ranked 68th among catchers who received at least 1000 pitches, saving -7.3 runs compared to a league-average catcher.

In 2015, Wieters ranked 64th in framing, 8.6 runs below the average catcher.

In 2013, before injuring his elbow in 2014, he ranked 72nd (-10.4 runs above average).

The following video clips document two pitches Wieters received last summer that crossed the lower part of the zone as strikes, according to Statcast, but were called as balls. On both occasions Wieters’ glove appears to take the pitch out of the zone:

And again ….

Wieters hasn’t been an above-average framer since 2011, according to StatCorner. Baseball Prospectus’ framing metrics are more kind but they still rate Wieters as a below-average receiver every season since 2012.

Wieters’ troubles might be tied to his height. Pitches at the bottom of the zone are those that are most often framed successfully. Elite pitch-framing catchers like Jonathan Lucroy and Russell Martin have insisted that getting lower to the ground is key to creating the illusion that a pitch is better than it really is.

Of the top-10 framing catchers last season, eight stood between 5-foot-10 and 6-foot-1. Only Tyler Flowers (6-foot-4), and Jason Castro (6-foot-3) were close to Wieters in height. While there are always exceptions to the rule, perhaps in today’s game where framing is valued correctly – or is at least a significant consideration – being a tall catcher is something of a curse.

In 2014 and 2015, Flowers was the only catcher above 6-foot-2 in the top 10 of framing.

Consider the following heat maps of pitches called as balls, as received by the 6-foot-1 Buster Posey, the 6-foot-1 Yasmani Grandal and the 6-foot-5 Wieters last season. Posey and Grandal ranked No. 1 and 2, respectively, in framing rankings by Baseball Prospectus and StatCorner.

Grandal’s heat map:

Posey’s heat map :

Wieters’ heat map:

Pitchers threw 16,524 pitches toward Wieters last season. He allowed 131 pitches that were in the lower third of the zone to be called balls.

Grandal had a similar sample of 15,908 total pitches. Only 62 should-have-been strikes were called balls. And these heat maps are only focused on pitches called as balls; they don’t account for strikes stolen outside of the zone.

The Braves, Diamondbacks, and Nationals all reportedly have shown interest in Wieters. But if this were 2007 and not 2017, Wieters might already have a lucrative contract secured.

Perhaps Wieters entered the game at the wrong time. Teams have had pitch-tracking data for a decade now, they have more smart people working in front offices. Formerly hidden skills like receiving are no longer undervalued. Martin’s five-year, $82 million contract from two offseasons ago made that abundantly clear. (Recall that his previous deal was a two-year, $17 million pact with the Pirates, signed after he had essentially the same defensive performance coming out of New York.)

Wieters is in part available because he did not live up to what were perhaps unfair expectations of his bat. Wrote Kevin Goldstein of Wieters, his No. 1 overall prospect in 2009: “How many catchers in modern baseball history have profiled to hit third in the lineup of a championship club?”

Wieters is perhaps in part available because his agent is Scott Boras, who is often patient and will wait for a market to develop for his client.

But he’s available also because the industry has changed what it values behind the plate.

Mike Mussina never won the Cy Young Award. He made the All-Star team only five times over his 18 years in the big leagues. He won 20 games just once, in the final season of his career. His career ERA mark is closer to 4 than it is to 3. In other words, it’s not difficult to see why Mussina hasn’t been inducted into the Hall of Fame yet, given the traditionalism of the electorate. There have been many worthy candidates who’ve accompanied Mussina on the ballot since he first appeared there, of course. Nine players have been elected since Mussina first became eligible, all of them slam-dunk candidates.

Whatever the arguments against him, though, Mike Mussina is almost surely a Hall of Famer. Hall of Fame voting has already technically concluded, so this column serves less as an appeal to voters and more of a general appraisal of the situation, if nothing else. Also, have you seen baseball news lately? I haven’t either, so here we go.

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While the 2016 campaign is over and the flurry of moves after the season has come to a halt for the moment, a whole year’s worth of data remains to be examined. Today’s post is an easy one and a fun one. Let’s find the best pitches that were thrown regularly last year.

Before we begin: the word “results” appears in the headline, but I’m not going to use results judged by things like singles and doubles and the like. The samples gets pretty small if you chop up the ball-in-play numbers on a single pitch, and defense exerts too much of an influence on those numbers. So “results” here denotes not hit types, but rather whiffs and grounders.

I’ve grouped all the pitches thrown last year, minimum 75 for non-fastballs, 100 for fastballs. I combined knuckle and regular curves, and put split-fingers in with the changeups. So the sample per pitch type is generally around 300 — a lot less for cutters (89) and a bunch more for four seamers (500) — but generally around 300 pitches qualified in each category. Then I found the z-scores for the whiff and ground-ball rates on those pitches. I multiplied the whiff rate z-score by two before adding it to the ground-ball rate because I generally found correlations that were twice as strong between whiff rates and overall numbers like ERA and SIERA than they were for ground-ball rates.

The caveats are obvious. Pitches work in tandem, so you may get a whiff on your changeup because your fastball is so devastating. This doesn’t reward called strikes as much as swinging strikes, so it’s not a great measure for command. On the other hand, there isn’t a great measure for command. By using ground-ball rate instead of launch-angle allowed, we’re using some ball-in-play data and maybe not the best ball-in-play data.

But average-launch-angle allowed is problematic in its own way, and ground-ball rate is actually one of the best ball-in-play stats we have — it’s very sticky year to year and becomes meaningful very quickly. Whiff rates are super sexy, since a swing and a miss represents a clear victory for the pitchers over the batter — and also because there’s no room for scorer error or bias in the numbers. And while the precise way in which pitches work in tandem remains obscure in pitching analysis, we can still learn something from splitting the pitches up into their own buckets.

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If you’re an avid FanGraphs reader, you might remember a piece I wrote January in which I wondered whether Vladimir Guerrero had the credentials of a Hall of Famer. The verdict? He does. As an inductee, he wouldn’t have the most impressive resume in the Hall, but he’d belong — and, according to the first 44 ballots collected by Ryan Thibodaux by way of his BBHOF Tracker, it appears as though the voters agree:

At 74%, Guerrero is right on the threshold for induction (which requires a candidate is named on 75% of ballots). That means that even if he isn’t selected this year Guerrero will almost certainly gain entry to the Hall next year. Which is great. Guerrero was a fantastic player. He’s deserving.

Larry Walker was also a great player, though. In most important ways, he was a superior one. And he’s received enough votes on previous Hall of Fame ballots to return for a seventh year. Like the previous six years, however, Walker is unlikely to be enshrined in Cooperstown this year — if the early polling holds steady, that is. In light of Guerrero’s seeming popularity, that’s strange. By most reasonable accounts, Walker has a better case. If you vote for Guerrero, you have to vote for Walker.

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No offense to Welington Castillo, but the hottest topic in Orioles land right now is whether the team should trade Zach Britton. Clubs, unsurprisingly, have shown interest in a possible deal. Scour the web and you’ll find polemics both for and against one. I’m here to argue the latter case.

The Case For Trading Britton

The case for trading Britton isn’t hard to make. He’ll make $11.4 million next year, as projected by MLB Trade Rumors. That’s a lot of scratch for an ostensibly mid-market club to pay someone to pitch 70 innings.

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A lot of people were taken by surprise when the Diamondbacks non-tendered Welington Castillo, but it did at least set up an inevitability. It felt like a foregone conclusion that Castillo would end up signing with the Orioles. It was only a matter of the contract length. Castillo was said to want three years. The Orioles were said to want not that.

The arrangement now, as has been reported: Castillo has signed with Baltimore for one year and $6 million. He also has a second-year player option, worth $7 million. So Castillo won’t go broke, and now the Orioles have another power bat they can install in the lineup. In that sense, hey, mission accomplished for everyone. The only issue for the Orioles is that Castillo still doesn’t seem like he should be the starter.

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Over the weekend, the DH market started to clarify itself. The Astros signed Carlos Beltran, giving him $16 million for one year. The Yankees signed Matt Holliday, giving him $13 million for one year. And in 48 hours, two teams that looked like potential landing spots for Edwin Encarnacion opted to go with short-term commitments for older players, rather than trying to win the bidding war for the best hitter on the market.

So, this morning, the question of the day here at the Winter Meetings is where does Encarnacion go from here.

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Sort this year’s free-agent corner outfielders by last year’s production, and Angel Pagan’s name appears right at the top of the list. Sort that same list by projected production, however, and Pagan falls to seventh best, right behind the recently signed Matt Joyce. We all know how projections work: at the most basic level, they’re the product of past performance and age. For most veteran players, those two variables conspire to create a pretty dependable vision of the future.

Pagan has proven to be a difficult case for projection systems, however. He’s been particularly volatile over the course of his career — specifically with regard to his offensive production. If we could identify the causes of that volatility, perhaps we could improve upon the vision of Pagan’s future provided by the projections. And along the way, we might find him the right team.

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