Patrick Flood wrote a great post today about two of my favorite things to think about, Jeff Francoeur and the Internet. I heartily recommend it. He writes:
I find it sad because I know one day the free-swingers like Francoeur will be gone, and one day every part of America will read the same websites I read and will get their news the same way I do, and will probably think just like me, or I’ll think just like them, or we’ll all think just like each other. Newspapers, music stores, crazy people with pamphlets, players regard accepting a free pass as nothing more than a draw – they’re all victims of the information age, and one day they’ll be gone like the monks drawing elaborate letters. It’s so easy to get the correct information from somewhere else now, usually for free. It’s too easy to see why Jeff Francoeur is not the answer to the Mets problems, and why he’s probably going to fall apart again. All you need is a computer and to know what BABIP stands for.
Flood’s piece hinges on the assumption that Francoeur will fall back to earth in a Mets uniform in 2010, something I realize is far from a certainty for a lot of Mets fans and something I am obviously rooting against.
So hard. Despite all the nasty things I’ve said about his acquisition and his utter lack of plate discipline, I do desperately want Francoeur to succeed in New York. I will gladly abide the I-told-you-sos and inevitable overblown media lovefest to have another good young player on the Mets moving forward.
That lovefest — and the blogosphere has figured this out, I gather — stems from the fact that Francoeur is, quite simply, a friendly and candid guy. He’s nice to reporters, so reporters pay it back in writing. I don’t think it’s a strict quid pro quo system or anything — I’m guessing it’s purely subconscious. Francoeur’s a good dude, so people covering the team portray him favorably. And I can attest that it’s refreshing to speak to a baseball player who looks you in the eye and honestly answers your questions.
So that’s what all the recent hubbub surround Francoeur and his attitude and his leadership are about, I’m certain. He makes for a good quote, so he makes for a good story, and since there’s not a whole heck of a lot of hard news coming out of Port St. Lucie, everyone’s focused on good ol’ Jeff Francoeur.
But the nicest guy in the world — heck, Gandhi himself — wouldn’t last so long in the good graces of Major League fans or the Major League media if he didn’t start taking pitches. That’s what eventually went wrong for Francoeur in Atlanta and what Flood’s piece assumes will go wrong for him in New York.
And it’s a reasonable assumption. It’s extremely rare for a player to walk as infrequently as Francoeur did in his time with the Mets in 2009 and maintain his level of production. I got at this in the first days of this blog: If keep hitting that well without taking pitches, pitchers will stop throwing you pitches to hit.
Of course, as difficult as I find it to believe that Francoeur could maintain an on-base percentage slightly above the league average while walking in only 3.6% of his at-bats, I find it nearly as difficult to believe that his apparent turnaround in Flushing could be merely a reversal of fortune and the byproduct of small sample size.
There, I said it.
That sentiment might seem ripped from the front page of Duh! Magazine for some people, but it’s in pretty stern defiance with sabermetric logic. David Golebiewski did a great job at RotoGraphs showing how Francoeur’s BABIP spiked in Queens even though his XBABIP remained more or less static, implying that, indeed, Francoeur just got massively lucky upon switching teams.
And in some way, I hope he’s right, because a whole lot of strange things make a lot more sense, and justifies so many things I write about randomness and sample size and our tendency to assign narratives to arbitrary events.
Still, it seems like a pretty outrageous coincidence that Francoeur’s fortune should change so severely as soon as he changed uniforms.
Stranger things have happened, for sure, but I wonder if there could be some other explanation, something to do with Citi Field that hasn’t been quantified yet, or something to do with the exceptionally atrocious lineup the Mets were trotting out around Francoeur after the trade last year changing the way pitchers approached him, though I realize that stuff is generally discredited.
I have no answers and I probably never will. I’m skeptical that Francoeur will produce anything like the numbers he did for last season’s Mets for this season’s Mets, but I’m hopeful, because I’m a Mets fan.
More than anything, I want the season to start so we can start finding out. I’m growing quite sick of being a wet blanket on all the Francoeur-driven optimism all the time.
Tedquarters 
The one thing that bothers me when the ‘stat guys’ analyze Francoeur or any other players for that matter, is that plate discipline always seems to be measured simply by how many times a guy walks.
I know thats a big part of it, but isnt it more than that? Can’t a guy like Francouer technically be a more patient hitter without seeing any type of drastic jump in walks.
In watching Francouer, he looks like a guy who can often go out of the K zone but still hit the ball hard, sort of like Vlad Guerrero. Being this type of hitter, couldnt he conceivably become more patient at the plate while not drastically increasing his walks?
Most hitters will see at least a couple decent pitches per AB, and if hes patient enough to just wait for decent pitches, and doesnt chase the real garbage, he can proably still have a decent amount of success.
I mean look at a guy like Luis Castillo, a beacon of patient hitting. While he draws a ton of walks, he always at 2 strikes, often fouling of a pitch or two in the process. Often hes basically getting the walk because he cant hit the first 1 or 2 pitches he sees. So Francouer gets knocked because he often happens to be able to square up the first thing hes sees over the plate?
A guy can be, but usually if a guy has the power potential that someone like Frenchy has pitchers aren’t going to be throwing him balls over the plate for fun. So it just stands to reason that if he was actually being more patient his walk rate would have to increase because pitchers aren’t going to suddenly decide, well since he’s not swinging at the crap we pitch him anymore lets give him nice fastball to hit out of the park.
All I am saying is that walk rate is not the end all indicator of improved patience at the plate. It’s easy to just look at his walk rate and say oh well he didn’t improve his plate discipline. I’m just saying that may not be the case if he’s taking more pitches and just getting into better counts resulting in more hits. improvement doesn’t have to be just walks.
The stat people may be right but usually you have to watch as well. Perhaps suplement the babip and walk rates with some other deeper stats like how many pitches per ab he saw, or how iften he got himself into hitters counts as opposed to falling behind, and compare the first half of 09 to his time with the mets. Not saying you guys are wrong, just saying walk rate alone does not tell a whole story. No singular stats do.
I understand it’s not the end all be all indicator, but with a player of Frenchy’s specific skill set it almost certainly will be. When you can hit for power like he can pitchers aren’t just going to challenge you over the plate every time because you stopped swinging at bad pitches. they’re either going to keep throwing bad pitches and he’ll stop swinging and his walk rate will skyrocket, or they’ll keep throwing them and he’ll keep swinging. I’m just not sure with a player like Frenchy how else you could expect improved patience to translate. Walk rate doesn’t tell the whole story for all of baseball as far as patience, but for certain players it will, and Frenchy happens to be one of those players.
This is a good call, and it inspired me to delve pretty deep into baseball-reference. But unfortunately, by pretty much any way you can measure it, Francoeur is among the least disciplined hitters in the league. He’s been among the bottom five in pitches per plate appearances in the league in each of his four full seasons, and in the top 5 in percentage of pitches swung at. Plus, per Fangraphs, he’s been top 10 in the Majors every year in percentage of pitches swung at outside of the strike zone, without making appreciably better than an average amount of contact on those pitches (although that part of his game does appear to be improving).
Good work checking the stats on this one. Like I said you might have been right, I just didn’t agree with forming that conclusion based only on walk stats. I’d be curious to see those type stats split between his time with the mets/braves. I just feel like that type of improvement over a half season has to be based on something more than just luck. luck could be involved of course, but luck doesn’t usually last 3 months.
Also as far as the vlad comparisons if you look at his stats he’s usually posted well above average walk rates, until a huge drop off last year which probably has to do with him being 300 years old. Vlad’s also had MUCH higher contact rates most of his career. And above average walk per k ratios. So I imagine when he’s “free swinging” it’s not really free swinging it’s just him swinging at pitches he can hit, which is apparently every pitch. Where as Frenchy doesn’t have the same contact skills and is actually just swinging at pitchers indiscriminately.
Watch video of Francouer’s hands and step early last year to later in the year. He changed his approach and was able to do more with worse pitches than he was before- or as stats guys come up with “lucky”. He also hit like .372 on first pitches he made contact with.
I’m not saying which side is right or wrong Ted and I got mad respect for you as a writer and general baseball guy, but the fact is we’re human beings and people can change.
Like I said once before guys like Andre Dawson made careers out of putting the ball in play and not taking walks. Some people say well the game was different then- and better if you ask me. So maybe Francouer is a dying breed but I will take a guy going to the player trying to make things happen than the guy who is concerned about stats taking a walk with 2 outs and the 7 or 8 guy coming up. But I guess I’m old school.
I think the problem is while humans can change, in the grand scheme of mathematical research, not just for baseball but statistical research in general, people who defy major trends are extremely rare. And I don’t mean to say this in the “one day you’ll all think as smart as us” way I’m just not sure how else to word it, I can understand how people who don’t come from those types of math/stat research intensive backgrounds don’t or can’t see things, baseball or otherwise, within those terms. It’s just that while people may “change” or defy trends, it just happens so very rarely in the grand scheme of things that it’s hard for people who do see things in those terms to put much stock in it happening in such small sample size.
And there’s a difference between a guy like Dawson and Frenchy, for one Dawson actually walked at higher rates than Frenchy, especially relative to their eras. And generally posted much much better obps. You can’t just blanketly compare two players because they have similar approaches when they might have different skill sets. As far as I can tell Dawson seemed to just be able to do a lot more with the balls he was putting in play, when he was “free swinging” than Frenchy can. The problem isn’t the free swinging itself, it’s the free swinging at pitches you can’t do anything with. Which is where the comparisons of Frenchy to some guys in the past or to Vlad kind of fall apart.
And I’m not sure it’s fair to say a player who’s trying to draw a walk concerned about stats, he might just know that if he tried to hit any of the pitches that were thrown to him all he end up doing is grounding out, so rather than ending the inning he’s going to give the guy behind him a chance to maybe make something happen. The problem with a guy like Frenchy, and he’s admitted it himself, is that he comes up to pretty much every at bat, regardless of the circumstances, with the midset that he’s going to “try and make things happen”, and I’m not sure how that’s any less concerned with stats since he’s talking about driving guys in which is an rbi, but anyway even if that means swinging at pitches in the dirt and grounding into a double play when he came up with runners at first and second and 1 out. Is that really anymore helpful from the team than the other guy?
You basically in your first paragraph explained why I hate sabermetrics and why it’s ruining the game. Because it lets amateur portray themselves as experts from basically taking a stats class.
I grew up in a minor league town with a pitcher for a father and see the game different than most. There’s an aspect of the game that you have to learn from being around it. The problem is bloggers and a lot of crappy writers (not Ted) have replaced that with merely learning sabermetrics. Your theory may be true about francoeur if we were talking about a six or seven year veteran like a Matthews Jr but the kid is going into his 5 season and is still young; and his approach isn’t from bad technique but more free swinging no discipline which can still be learned. He has the raw tools to be a super start and to write someone off based on four years of raw data; when two of those seasons were pretty good is silly.
And the fact that all the baseball nerds can only come up with “he got lucky” proves the flaw in the system. A baseball person would probably see he shifted his hands and step and was doing more with bad pitches. he also spent the entire offseason working on a better approach. I just don’t think the kid is unable of changing or getting better.
I guess we’ll see…
Well any baseball nerd who just says “he got lucky” isn’t a very good baseball nerd. The stats don’t say he got lucky they say he hit WAY more line drives with us, and hitters obviously have the best results off line drives. The question is whether it was just a random spike or whether he can sustain it, not whether he was lucky or not.
The game was not different, just the way we quantitatively measure a player’s worth. An inning has always been comprised of three outs, and players therefore always knew that making an out was bad. Do you think that players 30 years ago did not know that making outs was counter-productive for a team’s success? And that’s the problem with Frenchy, he makes too many outs.
But I too will be rooting like hell for the guy, and I although I despised the trade when it was made, I learned to like him when he made that comment about putting his hand on ice and having a jack and coke, but maybe not in that order. He’s an easy gut to root for, but he will not be helping the Mets win baseball games unless he learns to make fewer outs.
Well that’s not necessarily true, part of the reason he was rushed through the braves system, despite his less than stellar plate discipline and kept his job for so long despite his offensive struggles was because he was an AWESOME defensive player when he first came up. And he’s shed a good amount of the added weight that ruined his mobility in the outfield in 08 so it’s possible if his defense could rebound as long as his offense wasn’t bad to epic proportions he could be a valuable player.
His defense seemed to rebound some, no?
It definitely seemed to rebound some, and if it can rebound some more he won’t have to transform himself at the plate to be a valuable asset.
Flood’s piece seems like a gesture in the direction of ruing the fact that the free swingers like Francoeur will disappear from the face of the earth, and that there is something poignant about the way in which the Internet makes access to information uniform and destroys local culture. (As if that hadn’t already been substantially accomplished). But, actually, it seems to me to be fundamentally insincere.
Flood’s entry reeks of the same sense of superiority that so much blogging from the sabermetric point of view exhibits. One day, he says, every fourth-grader will be able to know about BABIP, the fact that a .293 OBA trumps 27 HRs and 109 RBIs, etc. etc. So what he seems to be saying is, “It’s a little poignant that eventually everybody will learn what we, the smart people, already know. It’s sad to think that the ignoramuses and country bumpkins will eventually go the way of the dodo bird and Copernican astronomy. Would have been nice to have them around.” Seems like crocodile tears to me; the point of the piece still seems to be that those who place their faith in Jeff Francoeur just don’t get it.
A little humility, guys. Yeah, we know now that it’s bad to never take a pitch, that big changes in BABIP are unlikely to remain stable, etc. It might be nice, though, if you leavened your sense of certainty with an occasional acknowledgment that what we think *we* know, today, will likewise be regarded as silly by a future generation.
I think it’s great to appreciate the excitement of the new research and the new ways of looking at and measuring performance in baseball. I just wish we could leave out the self-satisfaction and the condescension toward those who haven’t yet gotten religion.
By the way, Ted, this isn’t about you, I don’t think of you as being in that category.
*going to the plate not going to the player, sorry!
In the words of Vincent Vega, personality goes a long way. And, getting back to some more basic stats than XBABIP, it’s not anywhere close to crazy to expect Francoeur to have 85 RBI and 20 home runs this year. He had better seasons than that when he was 23 and 24 (29 HR and 103 RBI and 19 HR and 105 RBI, respectively). I just think that’s pure awesome for the Mets, since he is almost certainly going to be batting seventh in our lineup.
I mean, admittedly the guy is a free swinger, and it’ll be tough for him having a weak hitting catcher and the pitcher spot behind him, but most of the time, a walk wouldn’t amount to much in that spot, anyway.
I see three big controllable variables in Francoeur’s performance: defense, contact, and power. If those fall on the positive end of expectations, he’s a solid player. If they fall on the negative, he’s not. The problem his, because he has this one particular (and important) skill that he’s so bad at, “solid player” is as good as he’s going to get, he’ll never be a star. Even if he hits 30 HR, he’ll still only be good, not great, because he’s still making lots and lots of outs.
But I’m with you here, Ted. I do think there’s something to be said for what Francoeur did with the Mets. His power did notably increase, and 300 PAs is not too small a sample size for HR% and HR/FB, in fact they both correlate with future performance pretty strongly at that level. It makes the power change seem more like significant adjustment than luck (and it also debunks the “CITIFIELD DEPRESSES RIGHT HANDED POWER” myth). Plus, he’s become a pretty reasonable contact hitter. It may be that he’s making contact on pitches he shouldn’t swing at, but he’s not striking out as much as he did early in his career, which makes every point of BABIP even more valuable than it is if he’s striking out over 20% of the time.
As for BABIP vs xBABIP, sure, BABIP went way up, but it was also well below his xBABIP in the first half anyway. It was about one SD low early in 2009, and one SD high in the second half. Nothing to get worked up about one way or the other. Plus, it just intuitively makes sense that more power would correlate with a higher BABIP. I don’t have math to back this up, but more hard hit balls means more balls that are difficult for defenses to field. I suspect that in general the conclusion of the rotographs article–that because Frenchy’s season end BABIP was around .300 that his composite batting line from 2009 is a reasonable estimate of his talent level–is flawed. BABIP doesn’t tell us everything we need to know. Even if his BABIP stays around .300, he’s going to be more or less valuable depending on how frequently he’s putting the ball in play as well as how many hits he records not in play (i.e. home runs). Those are both big factors that Francoeur appears to be legitimately improving in that straight BABIP vs. xBABIP analysis tells us nothing about.
If you believe plus/minus over UZR, and believe that Franoeur’s improvements in contact rate the last few years and hitting the longball in the second half of 2009 were at least somewhat legit, I think its reasonable to believe he’s not going to be nearly as bad as most of the stat-based community believes.
If he hits .300 and slugs .500 I won’t give a damn if his OBP is also .300
If he posts an OBP of .300 or below and slugs .500, you probably should give a damn, only because it’s a rare and fascinating occurrence. That’s only been done three times since 1901 by people who qualified for the batting title: Dave Kingman in 1976, Tony Armas in 1984, and Mike Jacobs in 2008.
Take it one step at a time. If Francoeur plays well, great. If not, he’s keeping a spot warm for F-Mart or someone else. The Mets have not committed much to him.
And furthermore, what’s wrong with a free swinger or two? I don’t turn on the game to watch a bunch of fat, slow, boring Jack Cust types do their whiff/homer/walk thing.