Another Unnecessary Flogging of Poor Jeff Francoeur

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.

Not A Dilemma At All

As everyone in baseball has noted, Mets skipper Jerry Manuel has a dilemma on his hands with the return of Carlos Beltran after the All-Star break. He'll have four fine outfielders for only three spots. Inserting Beltran means someone who has lit it up will have to sit.

It's a nice dilemma, except for one thing: it's no dilemma at all.

Most of the discussion around Beltran's return from knee injury concerns his centerfield replacement, Angel Pagan. Pagan has been the Mets' second best hitter, behind David Wright, and contributes other fine attributes, like 19 steals in 24 attempts and solid defense in a difficult defensive position. Pagan's laudable.304/.364/.457 performance at the plate looks a lot like last year's breakout season, which suggests the 29-year-old switch hitter is the real thing.

Another real thing is Jason Bay, despite a relative dearth of long balls.  He's smacked 30+ out four times in his career and .279/.375/.512 career line, so it's not like Manuel is lifting him and his big contract to keep Angel Pagan in the game.

Jeff Francoeur, on the other hand, is very much NOT the real thing. He is Broke-A-Cola. He is the poster boy for sabermetric disembowelment. Francoeur is everything showy that doesn't matter and a zero in the shadowy parts of the game that actually affect the score. Manuel ought to have yanked him from the lineup before Beltran recovered, much less once Beltran is ready to patrol center.

Wait a second, you say. He hits for power and sometimes average, runs well and swipes bases, and has a rifle in right field. He's a studly young buck and by all accounts a good guy. What could be bad about that? I hear he like long walks on the beach and supports the fight against child abuse too.

Let's take a look at "Frenchy's" resume. (You know, some baseball nicknames are pure genius -- the Big Unit and the Big Hurt come to mind -- while others are so inane and soulless they should be banned. I just used one of those. Never again, I promise.) Though Francoeur has batted ..283 in 625 plate appearances since joining the Mets, he's trotted to first a grand total of 30 times. It's harder to walk him than Ron Kovic. His OBP of .322 just downright stinks, and it's an improvement over his lifetime rate.

Francoeur has bopped 18 homers and 34 doubles in that time, which keeps you in the lineup if your OBP is .350, or if you're a second baseman. And while he's got a whipsaw right arm, his defense is certainly not the equal of either the Beltran who got hurt or of Pagan. Over the last three years, Francoeur has been exactly a replacement-level outfielder at the plate. However, he's a fine pinch runner and a late inning defensive replacement for Bay, if you think that's an upgrade.

Fox color analyst Kevin Millar observed about Francoeur that "this guy is a ballplayer." It's true: you take one look at him play and you think he's got it all. But today's analyst community has managed to get beyond the muscles and the sweet swings to measure the abilities that really contribute to success, and plate discipline is at the top of the list. His complete lack of it is Jeff Francoeur's downfall. Jerry, this is an easy call: sit him.

b

Addendum to Previous Piece

Read the previous post before looking here. Then...

I wrote an abridged version of the previous post's critique in the comment section of the Post and Courier website. This is the response I got from the writer:

Spell his name correctly, then criticize.

(His name is spelled Francoeur.)

I think this perfectly illustrates the level of responsibility being taken by mainstream sports media for understanding the changes in baseball. This particular reporter wrote a long piece based on a false premise, and the reason is that he doesn't understand changes in the sport that began 30 years ago. Now, rather than commit himself to updating his reporting skills, he got defensive.

It's really pathetic.
b

Journalistic Malpractice

I often encounter people who defend the baseball media's c0verage of the game. They don't know or understand anything about the gains made over the years in analyzing player and team performance, they don't understand or want to acknowledge the tremendous impact of luck on the game and they're unwilling to let go of the comforting old shibboleths that attend the sport.

I understand this. Change must happen slowly and incrementally. In many ways, this is already happening. OBP and SLG are now regularly displayed in some newspapers, on some game broadcasts and on ballpark scoreboards.

Today I refer you to an article in my hometown paper, the Charleston Post and Courier, about the struggles of Kelly Johnson and Jeff Francouer. Specifically with respect to Francouer, the article makes repeated references to his batting averages, but not a single reference to walks, batting eye, pitch selection or OBP, the very nub of Francouer's problem. This is, quite frankly, journalistic malpractice.

Francouer swings at everything, which leads to a cascade of problems. Pitchers don't have to hit their spots to get him out. He never walks, so his OBP has never topped .336, even when he batted .300. He's making too many outs, particularly for a corner outfielder, even when he hits for average, which he hasn't done in two years.

Many sportswriters, and others who weren't paying attention, were impressed with Francouer's early performance. In his first full year, he batted .260, smacked 29 homers and drove in 103. Add his rifle arm in right field and the cogniscenti were agog. But the seeds of his decline were plainly evident even then. He drew just 23 walks and posted a pathetic .293 OBP. Not only is that unsustainable, pitchers picked up on it and are now exploiting his lack of selectivity. This year, he's neither walking nor hitting for average, leaving him with a line of .248/.282/.346. That's Rey Ordonez territory, but without the shortstop's glove.

The story I reference -- half of which is on the travails of Kelly Johnson -- runs 48 column inches, quotes the GM, manager, hitting coach and both players, and required at least one road trip from Charleston to Atlanta. Yet it utterly fails to inform its readers about Francouer's basic problem because the writer is still using performance analysis tools popular in 1970.

Imagine going to your doctor today and getting 1970s treatment for heart problems or cancer. Many of us would be dead today with that level of care. Or imagine your car mechanic giving a 1970s tune-up to the computer system in your Accord. That's intuitively unnacceptable. Yet sports journalism consumers have not begun demanding that sportswriters stop employing statistics proven innacurate 30 years ago and instead raise their level of performance analysis to standards developed since then and recognized as far superior.
b