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.

No idea if this is legal, but it’s the Internet, it’s sunny in New York and it’s a busy day for me, so here’s this.

This song comes courtesy of reader Tom. I linked it a long while back on Flushing Fussing, but that link broke.

It’s by a calypso singer named the Duke of Iron. It’s about Casey Stengel’s Mets, but some of the lyrics still apply:

When you want to hear how people scream,
Go see New York’s latest baseball team.
Such loyalty, such charity.
Although they’re last, not one of them have no regrets,
They believe in the New York Mets.
They’re cheering,
We want a hit! We want a hit!
From the crack of the bat, there’s noise in the place,
Especially if a Met can get on first base.

“New York Mets” by the Duke of Iron

According to Adam Rubin, the Mets have an offer on the table to lefty Joe Beimel.

If the Mets are absolutely sure they need a second lefty specialist after Pedro Feliciano, Beimel’s a nice pickup. He has been, for the most part, brutal on lefties since returning to the National League in 2006 and, to boot, not absolutely terrible against righties.

Beimel actually yielded a slightly higher OPS against lefties last season than he did against righties, but since he held lefties to an on-base percentage below .300 in 2009, it was likely a blip caused by a few home runs and not any indication of a larger trend. It might be worth nothing, though, that Beimel’s fastball has been steadily losing velocity since 2006.

More importantly, Beimel is something of an Internet sensation. YouTube only yields two search results for Ron Mahay, but 91 for Joe Beimel, mostly because of this bit of West Virginian weirdness that started it all:

That video, as YouTube sensations often do, produced tons of responses, including this one that features a cameo from Joe Beimel himself:

And this catchy, weird song:

And perhaps most notably, Joe Beimel’s Wikipedia page says he warms up to Johnny Cash’s “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” which is a pretty badass choice:

The big news out of Port St. Lucie this morning? Oliver Perez’s mustache. Steve Popper:

Ollie shaves beard – leaves porn mustache. Its 1986 again.

And David Lennon:

Good Ollie, Bad Ollie … Porn Ollie? Perez shaved his beard and left the mustache. Weird.

I’m going to go with “Utterly Awesome Ollie,” and hope he keeps the ‘stache around for a while.

But it’s important to note that this is not the first time Ollie has rocked a mustache, and I believe I may be one of the only reporters to have noted it before. Check it out.

Don’t bother with the first two minutes of this video from 2008. In the final few seconds, as I’m wrapping with Eddie Kunz (in an interview I’m pretty certain jinxed and ruined his career), Ollie steps into the frame with a bold, beautiful mustache. I try, in vain, to ask him about it, but he bounds off into the bowels of Shea Stadium. The mustache wouldn’t return until today.