A special shout out to the Kansas City Royals for their continuing employment of Jeff Francoeur. The well-traveled right fielder is to baseball's new analysis what Pat Robertson is to liberals and Barney Frank is to conservatives: if he didn't exist we'd have to invent him. He consolidates the base and attracts independents to our side.
So begging forgiveness from the Francoeur family for relentlessly tweaking their kin, here is the annual recitation of his deficiencies, the kind that largely escape the gaze of sportswriters who still think the Triple Crown is the be-all and end-all.
Francoeur last season smacked 16 home runs while playing his home games in a spacious park, and he did so while taking home baseball table scraps of $6.75 million. At 6'4" and 220, the Atlanta native is a strapping and chiseled hunk who flashes the tools of his trade and apparently delights his teammates with his bonhomie. All that might endear him to traditionalists.
Now look at the rest of his resume: In 2012, he hit .235/.287/.378, which means he made an out 71.3% of the time. He got caught stealing seven of his 11 attempts, fanned 119 times while walking just 34 and, according to the three major fielding metric systems, butchered the nine-hole. According to Baseball Prospectus, Francoeur cost the Royals three wins compared to any arbitrary Triple-A replacement earning the league minimum. They are kind: Baseball-Reference says he cost them 3.2 wins.
For his career, Francoeur is now at .266/.310/.426, fifth outfielder credentials. Despite 137 home runs and that gun attached to his right shoulder, he has contributed to his teams between two and five wins over eight seasons, almost all of it in 2011. For that they have recompensed him more than $18 million, with another $7.5 million due in 2013.
Francoeur's issue, as you are probably all too aware, is that he is utterly bereft of strike zone command. In his career, he has walked merely five percent of the time, meaning that pitchers know he will offer at whatever putrid slop they shovel before him. The result is that unless he bats .300, he has little value, and even with his intuitive skills .300 is a pipe dream when you swing at everything. Additionally, while he's an assassin against base runners, he's a sitting duck on the base paths, costing his teams 21 extra outs attempting to steal.
Francoeur is at this point what he is, a placeholder until the Royals . . . um . . . get contracted? He will never contribute significantly to winning baseball, and no team with pennant aspirations should ever hire him unless they need someone to model their unis.
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