immortalized in the ice-cream man hat.

The Mets won 2 games on their latest road trip, and home runs off the bat of Francoeur won both of them. Kind of a strange time to be bashing Francoeur and his, um, home runs.

I forgot Toby Borland was a Met….

yeah but Frenchy doesn’t do anything else, it’s all or nothing—HR or strikeout. I guess that fits quite well into the current Mets hitting philosophy…but in any case, Frenchy should be canned.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704388504575419453676678776.html?mod=googlenews_wsj#articleTabs%3Dcomments

Amazing response in the comments section, though:

“Francoeur’s VORP is 4.1, or, 780th of 852 people to swing a bat in MLB this year. He is less valuable than a replacement player. If the Mets are interested in making the playoffs, benching Francoeur and replacing him with a freely available waiver player would be an improvement. It is beyond serious discussion that Francoeur is a terrible hitter, one of MLB’s worst, and it is a reflection of the Mets’ irrationality that he gets any ABs.
More broadly, the writer here, Mike Sielski, demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of rudimentary concepts of statistical analysis and player evaluation, and the WSJ’s editorial staff does likewise. Newspaper publishers who wonder why their industry is dying need look no further than articles like this. Why would I seek sports news, for a premium price, from a paper that displays ignorance of simple concepts understood and employed by dozens of free quantitative analysis Web sites - many of which feature better prose, too?”

Weird. Here’s what this guys reply was:

Francoeur’s VORP is 4.1, or, 780th of 852 people to swing a bat in MLB this year. He is less valuable than a replacement player. If the Mets are interested in making the playoffs, benching Francoeur and replacing him with a freely available waiver player would be an improvement. It is beyond serious discussion that Francoeur is a terrible hitter, one of MLB’s worst, and it is a reflection of the Mets’ irrationality that he gets any ABs.
More broadly, the writer here, Mike Sielski, demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of rudimentary concepts of statistical analysis and player evaluation, and the WSJ’s editorial staff does likewise. Newspaper publishers who wonder why their industry is dying need look no further than articles like this. Why would I seek sports news, for a premium price, from a paper that displays ignorance of simple concepts understood and employed by dozens of free quantitative analysis Web sites - many of which feature better prose, too?

Seriously, read it, I don’t think you can take it seriously in any way.