He got that because the Braves were stupid, and probably because they didn’t want to go to arbitration after having sold this kid in their media for years as “their David Wright”. He was also only 1 year removed from a strong season. Now he has 2 full years of suck on his resume. Over Francoeur’s first 2.5 seasons, he rung up 7.6 WAR, before the age of 24. I have no idea whether they’ll look at WAR or not, but whatever they looked at, that would have had some influence. He had only 1 down year at that point. His value has clearly not increased in the last year.

At this stage runnning down those criteria:

1. He makes no significant contribution to the Mets in terms of leadership. He is not being helod out here as the future face of the franchise. And his contribution in performance hasn’t been anything significant for 2 years.
2. The club’s record since he’s been here sucks as well.
3. He doesn’t have that much in special accomplishments or awards. He did win a gold glove in 2007, and was 3rd in the ROY voting in 2005, but nothing since then. It’s not like he’s getting votes for the All-Star game.
4. Almost none of those comparable service time players get $5M. Much better players than Francoeur usually get less.

And while they may not be so sophisticated as to use WAR, measures like OPS and runs created have been around for a generation and are pretty mainstream by now and won’t produce too much different a result. I doubt they are that incompetent when it comes to measuring performance.

A year ago, it might have reasonably been argued that Francoeur was on average a 3.0 WAR player prior to 2008, and simply had an off year. At this point, any reasonable person is going to weigh heavily the most recent two years performance and not value him at more than about a 1.0 WAR player. There won’t be too much difference in that even if they do use other performance measures.

Take a look at actual awards and settlements last year:

http://www.bizofbaseball.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=599&Itemid=72