History dictates that a single month of baseball — say, 20 or 30 games — isn’t sufficient to reveal which teams are legitimate playoff contenders and which aren’t. In some cases, a club jumps out to a hot start only to fade away as the season continues. This was the case both for the Chicago White Sox and the Philadelphia Phillies last year. Other teams might follow an arc more like the Texas Rangers in 2015, starting off slowly only to pick up speed by the end of the season. As such, it’s generally wise to refrain from reaching any strong conclusions about the standings in early May.

That being said, I’ll be paying especially close attention to the Baltimore Orioles at the beginning of the 2017 season. The team could find themselves at a crossroads this year if contention seems unlikely, which could lead to one of the more interesting sell-offs in recent times.

An initial glance at the Orioles roster might not reveal a team that’s primed to sell. Teams with a collection of free agents (like Kansas City) or in the midst of a rebuild (like a number of teams) would seem to provide better trading partners than Baltimore. Here are the Orioles’ pending free agents at the end of the 2017 season.

So that’s not really a lot to sell at the deadline. We don’t see a single player even projected to provide average production over the course of next season. The best might be Welington Castillo. Given that he was just signed for $6 million, however — and holds a player option for $7 million — it wouldn’t seem that his trade value would be quite high. Hardy is a glove-first shortstop while Smith and Kim are part-time bats. Jimenez would have to undergo a pretty big rebound to have decent value. That leaves Tillman as the only real potential trade chip.

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Last Thursday, two free-agent hitters found homes, with Mark Trumbo returning to Baltimore and Luis Valbuena switching AL West cities, going from Houston to Anaheim. While the expectation was that Trumbo was going to sign something of an albatross contract — I named him the No. 1 Free Agent Landmine heading into the off-season — he ended up signing for a perfectly reasonable price; $37.5 million over three years. While the Orioles will need to resist the urge to put him in the outfield anymore, $12.5 million a year for what Trumbo can do at the plate is not some kind of franchise-killing overpay.

The Orioles did fine here, mostly; you could argue that they could have spent even less and gotten Chris Carter, a similar-enough player, but not making the most cost-efficient move doesn’t make this a disaster. Trumbo is a solid enough big leaguer, and $38 million in MLB these days just isn’t that much money.

I say all that up front to clarify that the rest of this post isn’t a criticism of the Orioles’ decision to retain Mark Trumbo. I just thought the juxtaposition of Trumbo and Valbuena signing on the same day was interesting because, well, look for yourself.

Over the last three years, Trumbo and Valbuena have both established themselves as useful players, mostly based on their ability to hit the ball out of the ballpark. Trumbo has a bit more power, but Valbuena draws more walks, and thus gets on base more often, so he’s actually been the better hitter of the two during that time. Oh, and Valbuena’s also a little faster, so he’s added a little extra baserunning value, expanding his lead even a bit more. Over these three years, Valbuena has been worth +23 runs relative to a league average hitter, while Trumbo has come in at +11.

Now, sometimes, multi-year comparisons aren’t all that helpful in figuring out why player valuations diverge, because the more recent data is the most important one. And of course, Trumbo is coming off the best year of his career, as he put up a 123 wRC+ last year. But in this case, looking at just the most recent year doesn’t change things much, because interestingly, Valbuena also put up a 123 wRC+ last year, the best mark he’s put up in his career. This isn’t a case of one guy trending up and the other trending down; both were good hitters last year, and they’ve both been above-average hitters the last three years.

There isn’t an age factor here either. Valbuena was born in November of 1985, Trumbo of January of 1986. They are both 31, at the point where we can expect both to start declining in value, but not old enough where a catastrophic drop-off is imminent.

There are, though, two differences between Valbuena and Trumbo; the thing I find fascinating about these contracts is how those two differences drive the valuations.

The first difference is that Valbuena has some defensive value, and if he ends up playing a lot of first base — with Albert Pujols questionable for the start of the year, that sounds likely — he might end up being a solid defensive first baseman. In nearly 4,000 innings at third base, Valbuena has a career +10 UZR (though it has been worse the last few years) and as a former middle infielder, he’s more athletic than most guys who end up playing first base. Valbuena probably isn’t going to be a gold glover at first, but as a guy with the flexibility to play both corners and potentially be an asset at first base, there’s some real defensive value here. Trumbo is a solid defender at first base, but that position is blocked in Baltimore, so he’s either a liability in the outfield or a designated hitter, and won’t be adding defensive value in either case.

So, Valbuena has been a better offensive player the last three years, matched Trumbo’s wRC+ last year in the best year of Trumbo’s career, and adds some defensive value as well. I’ve held off including it as of yet since it can often be the only thing people focus on, but it’s worth noting that Valbuena has been worth +6.3 WAR over the last three years, while Trumbo is at +2.0. By overall production the last few years, it isn’t even really close; Valbuena has been significantly better.

And yet, while Trumbo got 3/$37.5 million with the qualifying offer attached, Valbuena got 2/$15M, despite not being tied to draft pick compensation. The market looked at these same-aged players and preferred Trumbo, despite a lack of a massive offensive advantage and definite defensive limitations.

Why? Because there remains a significant difference in how teams value everyday guys versus platoon players, and fair or not, Trumbo is seen as a player you can stick in your lineup regardless of who is pitching, while Valbuena is viewed as a part-time player.

With Trumbo, you’re basically getting the same thing no matter who is pitching; his career wRC+ splits are 113/110, so you can put him in the lineup and expect mostly the same production everyday. Valbuena, like most left-handed hitters, runs a bit larger split, with a career 86/98 wRC+ split against lefties and righties, and an even more extreme 79/126 split over the last three years. Valbuena’s entire emergence as a quality hitter has been based on his ability to hit for power against right-handed pitching; against lefties, he still hits like the middle infielder he came up as.

A corner infielder who hits lefties like Valbuena hits lefties shouldn’t be starting against them, so the Angels are almost certainly going to platoon him, and the fact that they have to pay another player — and more importantly, dedicate another roster spot — to a guy to share his job dramatically discounts his value on the market. Full-time guys get paid on a different scale than part-time guys, and Valbuena is a seen as a part-time guy, so he gets less than Trumbo despite the performance advantages he’s displayed of late.

But I wonder if the discount being applied between the two groups is too heavy, because while it makes plenty of sense to platoon Valbuena and get a higher overall level of production, you don’t actually have to. The Angels could choose to play Valbuena everyday and save the roster spot for some other use, if they really see it being a significant negative to have to carry a right-handed first baseman to share that job. And if we just project Valbuena out to Trumbo-like playing time, it’s still not clear that Trumbo is significantly better.

Let’s just say the Angels decided to just play Valbuena mostly everyday, not platooning him more heavily than any other left-handed hitter is. In general, LHBs who get about 600 PA per season end up having the platoon advantage in about 70-75% of their plate appearances, we’ll use 73% just to split the difference. With exactly 600 PAs, that would mean Valbuena would get 438 PAs against RHPs and 162 against LHPs.

Let’s take a fairly extreme position, and say that his true talent platoon split right now is something like 90/110 wRC+ — remember, that’s almost double Valbuena’s career 12 point split — which is actually a pretty significant split as far as MLB players go.

If we give him the 73/27 distribution of PAs that most regular LHBs get, that would work out to something like this in a regular role.

That 105 wRC+ is an almost exact match for the average of the ZIPS and Steamer projections for Valbuena in 2016; Steamer is on the low side at 99 overall, while ZIPS is up at 113, so their blended average is 106. So that at least passes the smell test. But we don’t know what percentage of platoon advantage those systems were projecting, and since neither had him forecasted for 600 PAs, we should assume they’re probably letting him face a higher proportion of RHPs. So let’s make Valbuena a little worse than those overall projection numbers, and re-run the estimate to give us something a bit worse than what ZIPS and Steamer are projecting him for in part-time duty.

In this estimate, we’re being pretty harsh on Valbuena; his wRC+ against RHP goes down 21 points from what it was the last three years, while his vs LHP number only bounces up six points, and is still below his career average. This is probably pretty close to what Steamer is projecting Valbuena’s splits at, and it is definitely the more negative outlook, given his recent track record.

But even with that pessimism, Valbuena still projects as a league-average hitter while playing everyday. Trumbo projects for a 110 wRC+ as an everyday guy, in both ZIPS and Steamer, so the forecasts agree that, for next year, you’d rather have Trumbo’s bat than Valbuena’s, especially if you’re not willing to use a roster spot to platoon Valbuena with an RHB.

But the difference between a 110 and a 100 wRC+ over 600 plate appearances is about seven runs. That’s not nothing; that’s most of the way to one extra win. But then, there’s the baserunning, where Valbuena makes up some of that gap. And then there’s the defensive value, which isn’t trivial. If you give Valbuena some credit for being able to still play third, he probably makes back a few of those runs, and in the end, we’re looking at a gap of a couple of runs between full-time Trumbo and full-time Valbuena, if there’s any gap at all.

And full-time Valbuena is an inefficiency; with just a modicum of work, you can find a decent right-hander to face left-handed starters, and end up with a better overall rate of production. Yeah, it costs you a roster spot and that guy doesn’t play for free, so his cost has to be factored into the equation, but most teams carry a right-handed bench bat anyway, and if you have to pay a slight premium to get a guy who is worth starting occasionally, you still come out ahead overall.

The big story this winter has been the market correction on bat-only corner guys, but interestingly, the Valbuena signing points out that there’s even more room for those kinds of guys to come down in price in the future. Instead of paying even this reduced rate for the full-time slugger, signing a guy with a platoon player label at the discount currently being applied is an even cheaper way to get similar production.

After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Baltimore Orioles. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / Miami / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
A few years ago, I experimented idly with a toy stat called Reckless Power (RECK, for short), calculated by dividing isolated slugging (SLG – AVG) by what’s sometimes called isolated patience (OBP – AVG). It identifies players whose power on contact far exceeds their selectivity. To get a sense of the scale, here’s a collection of the top 10 batters by RECK from 2016:

League average is about 2.5. A score of 5.0 or higher typically earns a player a spot among the league’s top 10. Baltimore, one finds, placed two batters in the top 10 this past season. Another, Mark Trumbo, was 16th of 146 qualifiers. The Orioles, as a club, produced the highest RECK score in the majors, at 3.0.

The projections from Dan Szymborski’s computer suggest that Baltimore is likely to compete for that distinction again in 2017. Adam Jones (635 PA, .267/.304/.450, 5.0 RECK) and Jonathan Schoop (530, .264/.297.453, 5.8) are both forecast, essentially, to produce top-10 figures. Manny Machado (646, .289/.349/.511, 3.7) and Mark Trumbo (557, .251/.307/.491, 4.3) would both finish above the 75th percentile given their respective numbers.

In terms of wins and losses, this isn’t particularly illuminating. What it does illustrate, though, is how the Orioles have gone about scoring runs — and how they’ll score runs in 2017. By virtue largely of power on contact, is how.

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Mark Trumbo has himself the first multi-year deal of his career! He’ll be re-joining the Baltimore Orioles on a three-year deal for “under $40 million,” as Ken Rosenthal is reporting.

The slugger has to be happy about that, even if the number is a little lower than he might have expected after hitting 47 home runs last year. In July, at the All-Star Game, he was already being asked about this possible deal, and he agreed that it would be nice: “Moving your whole life year to year is not as ideal as maybe people think it is. You’d like to establish yourself and contribute to a singular team for an extended period of time if possible.”

Now he can! Will he be as good as he was this past year?

He led the league in home runs, yes, but he also set career highs in hard-hit rate, pull rate, and fly-ball rate while playing some of his better outfield defense, despite possessing an athletic skill set more suited for first base. In July, he admitted that the outfield was sometimes “daunting” but that he had to “resort to competing” as he always had.

The result was a season that made him a great fit for the Orioles on a returning deal. “If you can bring a little bit of versatility to your team, you’re that much more valuable,” he said back then. But mostly, he was signed for his bat, and all those extra hard fly balls he showed this year.

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It’s true that, if you look at the free agents who remain unsigned this offseason, you’ll find a lot of power still available. Franklin Gutierrez, Mike Napoli, Mark Trumbo: all three produced an isolated-slugging figure greater than .200 last season. All three are projected by Steamer to produce better than a .195 ISO in 2017. All three have yet to find a team for the 2017 season.

Given the general demand for power, you might wonder why so many of these sluggers don’t have jobs yet. A look both at the supply and the demand in the league reveals a possible cause, however: handedness. There might be an obstacle, in other words, to matching those free agents with the right teams.

To illustrate my point, let me utilize the depth charts at RosterResource. What’s nice about RosterResource, for the purposes of this experiment, is that the site presents both a “go-to” starting lineup and also a projected bench. Here’s a link to the Cubs page to give you a sense of what I mean.

In most cases, a team will roster four non-catcher bench players. Looking over the current depth charts, however, I find 15 teams with only three non-catcher bench players on the depth chart (not to mention five additional bench players who are projected to record less than 0 WAR). For the purpose of this piece, let’s refer to these as “open positions.”

Fifteen! That’s a lot. It means we’re likely to see quite a few signings before the season begins. Of course, not all these openings are appropriate for the power bats remaining on the market. Most of those guys are corner types, if they can play the field at all, while some of those 15 clubs have needs at positions that require greater defensive skill.

For example, Anaheim might need an infielder or a third baseman for their open bench spot. The White Sox need a right-handed center fielder to platoon with lefty Charlie Tilson. Detroit needs a center fielder, maybe a right-handed one — and in the process of writing this piece, they got one in the form of the newly acquired Mike Mahtook maybe. If Mel Rojas Jr. can’t play center in Atlanta, they need a (right-handed?) center fielder, too. The Yankees may need a third baseman — and, if not that, definitely someone with some defensive ability on the infield.

So that reduces the number of open positions to 10. That’s 10 slots that could be filled by an offensive piece with little defensive value. Here are the teams that, by my estimation, have an opening for a slugger: Baltimore, Boston, Chicago (NL), Cleveland, Kansas City, Minnesota, Oakland, Seattle, Tampa, Texas, and Toronto.

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The Mariners, after trading Taijuan Walker away in the Jean Segura deal, have been looking for a back-end starting pitcher. How desperate were they? Well, desperate enough to take a pitcher that the Baltimore Orioles — who have one of the worst rotations in baseball — didn’t want to keep around.

The deal, as announced by both teams, is a straight-up swap of Seth Smith for Yovani Gallardo, with the Orioles including some cash in the deal, though Dan Connolly reports the Orioles save about $4 million in the deal, so the cash doesn’t offset the price differences. In Smith, the Orioles are getting a guy who can play right field against right-handed pitching; he doesn’t field well or hit lefties enough to justify an everyday job, but as the strong side of a platoon, he’s a decent role player. Given that the Orioles current right fielder was Joey Rickard, Smith is an upgrade over a replacement level hole, and picking him up at a reasonable price makes plenty of sense for Baltimore.

For the Mariners, this is a bit weirder. Yeah, they needed another arm for the rotation, since the back-end was pretty thin, but it’s not entirely clear that Gallardo is actually much better than what they already had. After a nice run with Milwaukee at the beginning of his career, Gallardo transitioned more into an innings-eater in 2013, and things have been steadily downhill since then.

As the strikeouts disappeared, Gallardo survived by avoiding walks, but even that went away last year, when he posted the second highest walk rate of his career. His stuff has diminished to the point that he’s now a nibbler, but he doesn’t get swings and misses out of the zone anymore.

His in-zone contact rates are fairly steady (though worse than in his prime), but the lack of whiffs out of the zone means that Gallardo doesn’t really have any way to put batters away anymore, and so now he’s just a pitch-to-contact guy who doesn’t throw enough strikes.

If you want to be optimistic, you can look at his prior track record of success and his age, and hope that maybe Gallardo can get some of his prior stuff back, but the trends here are all negative. As a guy who throws 90 and doesn’t have an out pitch or plus command, he’s really nothing more than a #5 starter at this point, and even that might be generous. And toss in the elbow problems that turned his initial three year deal with Baltimore into a two year deal following his physical, then landed him on the disabled list last year, he’s not even necessarily an innings sponge you can count on to stay healthy.

Perhaps when your internal options are Ariel Miranda or Nathan Karns, even Gallardo looks useful, but for a team looking to win in the short-term, they should probably do better than hand the ball to Gallardo every five days. Smith isn’t a huge loss, especially with the team having younger outfielders worth taking a look at, but this feels like moving a useful-but-flawed outfield for a less-useful-and-flawed pitcher. Sure, the Mariners needed a pitcher more, but unless they know how to get Gallardo’s velocity back, I’m not sure this is the arm they needed.

On Tuesday, we looked at the best pitches in baseball last year when judged by whiffs and grounders. One thing we learned in that exercise: they were all thrown by relievers. Makes sense. They get a lot of advantages when it comes to short stints and leveraged situations. Let’s not hold it against them because the rest of the reliever’s life is very difficult. On the other hand, let’s also celebrate the starting pitchers separately, because many of them have pitches that are excellent despite the fact that they have to throw more often, to batters of both hands.

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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.