Is Francoeur the cure for the punchless Mets?

Why do you call them Castilla and Francore half the time, and spell them correctly the rest? Is there some kind of inside joke I’m missing.

One minor point in Francoeur’s favor: even base runs doesn’t account for situational hitting ability, which does actually exist, albeit to a small degree. And Francoeur at least has shown some situational ability to score base runners, a stat that seems to have at least some persistence.

Per Baseball-Reference Francoeur has scored 306 of 1922 base runners for his career, or a BRS% of 15.9%. The 2009 Mets meanwhile, sans Francoeur, have scored 378 of 2617, or 14.4%. Ryan Church this year was at only 12%, but is 15.2% for his career. Now truthfully, most of these things should probably be regressed quite a bit toward the mean. But, let’s assume that Francouer truly is going to score 1% more of baserunners. I don’t have baserunners broken down by position, so I’ll assume they are proportional to PA, and the RF would have come to bat with 299 runners on base. An extra 1% means about an extra 3 runners scored. But, even that isn’t worth a full 3 runs. Some of those runners would have been scored anyway by the following hitters. The actual run value ends up maybe half that.

On top of that, I’ll add the best context sensitive measure is probably WPA, which considers the impact of all events (including the situational impact of getting on base or not), and there Francoeur is -4.57 for his career. That comes to about -1.05 per 150 games (to be fair, -4.17 of that was from an awful 2008, so he at least has been near average at other times). Now, the baseline here is an average player, so -1 wins might still be about +1 above a replacement player baseline.

Bottom line, while situational and context sensitive stats are useful, they are useful primarily as secondary measures, to look at after looking at more reliable rate stats. They are useful primarily because they measure some of the very small things that aren’t included in OPS or Base Runs, or wins above replacement. But bringing them into consideration shouldn’t dramatically change the conclusion.

Here, I think the best overall measure for me is WAR, which shows Francoeur at +5.9 wins for his career, and in negative territory for 2008 and 2009. Even if you assume his career numbers are more representative of his talent, he’s about a +1.2 win player. Keep in mind though, the baseline here is replacement level, so even that is about -0.8 wins below average.

He’s still young, and if you are really optimistic, maybe there’s still a chance he could even be near league average one day. And right now, a +1 to +1.25 WAR player isn’t bad to have as a bench and platoon guy, and might even be worth the cost of arbitration.

But, he’s certainly not going to be “the answer” to anything, unless it is a question that is very trivial. Solid defense and some small degree of situational hitting are nice to have as part of the package, but there are still some god awful on base skills wrapped up there in the same box.

Could have told you . I’m a Braves fan and was never much of a Frenchy fan because of his OBP and his inability to remember his coaching instruction. He can be a good hitter if your batting coach will take the time to sit with him after every game and watch his hitting videos and explain to him what he did wrong. Every time they did that in Atlanta he would hit well for a week or 2. If Francouer had any sense,( I’m not saying he doesn’t) he would take a 110 grand of his 3.5 million salary,part of which is still being paid by the Braves, so happy to be rid of him they were and hire a good college hitting coach to retrain him nightly. If you want to send something to your front office this little tidbit would be a good one.

Is that indicative of HoJo not doing his job? Or is it that Church just simply sucks when he was on this team?

As far as Frenchy goes, nice analysis by all here. However, considering that we have Omar as our GM(and still will have him in the foreseeable future) and the WilponD-SCUMS as our Owners, I’m not going to hold my breath and hope that they get a better Right OF this offseason.

So, in other words, I can live with Frenchy doing his thing….Just as long as we have Beltran, Wright, and some new acquistion(a power bat) hitting in front him to at least give him some “situational RBI” situations(trying say THAT 3 times fast…lol). He doesn’t have a bad arm either as we saw last night…

Is there any hope we can go 24 hours at some point this season without bitching about Francouer’s low OBP?

It was mildly amusing the first 10,000 times.

Is there nothing else to talk about? I mean, we all get it. Francouer has a low OBP. He never walks. He sucks. He’s the worst player ever. He’s way worse than Church. He should be DFA’ed this offseason and never play organized baseball again. He’s a shitty defender. It was a stupid trade. Anyone who doesn’t think Francoeur sucks is an idiot who doesn’t understand sabermetrics. Theo Epstein would never take Francoeur.

Did I miss anything?

Seriously though, this “Francouer never walks” ranting is starting to turn this board into a yawnfest. Every f-ing day there’s yet another “analysis” of Francouer’s low OBP. It’s really not very interesting anymore.

The horse was dead 3 weeks ago. Barbaro has more life than this topic. Please stop the beatings.

Thank you!

I’ll take it everytime, thanks. Interestingly, this is kind of the same argument in the Castillo vs. Hudson case. Do you take Hudson’s added slg. or Luis higher OBP? I like the slugging, personally.

I told you guys how to fix Francouer,he needs his own personal batting coach to hold his hand and walk and talk him through his problems everyday. When he came back from Texas and instruction from Rudy Jaramillo he did well in the month of April. He received no help from the Braves hitting coach,Pendleton, and started going down again,a lot of his teamates turned their backs on him because Chipper considered him an asshole. In the Braves clubhouse you don’t go against Chipper Jones. When Bobby Cox would take him aside and train him he did very well, This happened just a couple of days before he got traded to the Mets. That’s why he did so well his 1st couple of weeks with the Mets. What pisses me off is simply that Francouer’ mojo was blamed for the Braves bad outing before the allstar break. There was a lot of hate directed at him here. He’s like some of the little leaguers I used to coach,he needs extra instruction not a bunch ofn hate because he isn’t as good as Chipper Jones, who by the way isn’t doing so well.