Delta Airlines promo blog aside, he seems like a decent guy, enjoys the game, does his darn’dest to do everything to help his team win (unless it involves taking a pitch). I think people are upset with the direction and the methodology of the front office more than they are unwilling to root for Francoeur, especially if he performs well. if he manages to perform well.

Most around here seem to think Francoeur can’t or won’t perform well enough to justify his cost, or the opportunity cost of getting someone like Angel Pagan more PAs. But I actually agree with you, that at this point, the fervency of the anti-Francoeur contingent among the generally more statistically enlightened Mets fans borders on irrational. It was a terrible trade at the time, it happened to work out about as well as we could have hoped so far, and that’s not even all that great. But we are where we is, and given that, Frenchy at least deserves our due diligence, and sooner or later, a bit of patience. There is some statistical analysis we can do on a 300 PA sample size. From this article, we have this basic table describing at what point a sample size has a correlation of greater than 0.70:

50 PA: Swing %
100 PA: Contact Rate
150 PA: Strikeout Rate, Line Drive Rate, Pitches/PA
200 PA: Walk Rate, Groundball Rate, GB/FB
250 PA: Flyball Rate
300 PA: Home Run Rate, HR/FB
500 PA: OBP, SLG, OPS, 1B Rate, Popup Rate
550 PA: ISO

Frenchy had 308 PAs post trade, 324 before. A large deviation between these two most recent groups of 300 PAs can reveal some information to us here. We can look at stats like Swing%, Contact rate, K%, LD%, P/PA, BB%, GB%, GB/FB, FB%, HR%, and HR/FB to see if there are any significant enough deviations in these numbers that can help explain the difference.

Unfortunately, we don’t see a real change in Swing%, K%, or contact rate, we see a slight change in LD%, but not one that appears hugely significant, P/PA and BB% also look pretty similar, and when we get to GB% and FB%, we see that the extra line drives were at the sake of grounders almost entirely, and not flyballs. But once we get to HR% and HR/FB, we do see a significant difference. His HR rate doubled in the second half of the season over where it was in the first half, and his HR/FB did the same.

On the other hand, the .344 BABIP is something we can say very little about, other than the odds that it will be lower than that are much better than the odds that it will be higher. The specific odds that it may be .344 probably aren’t all that different from the particular odds that it may be .304, or even .274. There is a large range of possibility here, and all we can really say is that .344 likely is not the mean expectation.

The BABIP issue isn’t the problem, its ancillary, Francoeur’s BABIPs actually follow very typical normal distribution. The problem is the same as its always been: walks. He just walks so little that even if 9.6% of his flyballs are home runs and his BABIP is greater than .320, he would still be just roughly an average player. He would be worth his salary and then some, but whether taking the risk on that happening is worth the opportunity cost of getting Angel Pagan more PAs or bringing in someone else instead is a more difficult question to answer. I currently don’t think there is superior opportunity cost to Francoeur, and that his mean expectation is probably pretty close to the actual, one-year salary that he’ll receive. But buying out his free agent years or offering to pay him any more than $5-6 mil at most in a given season is just not good risk assessment at this point. He just doesn’t have enough upside to justify that kind of risk unless he magically figures out how to draw more walks, and people in Atlanta were saying that for quite a while before us.