But while I recover from the gut-punch game last night -- you know, the one that reminded me, "Ohhh, they are the Royals!" -- I figured I would let my Royal fantasies really take flight, and contemplate the possibility that Jeff Francoeur is "back" to his "old self", and the Royals have themselves a right fielder for the next few years.
<insert sarcasm here...go ahead, I'll wait...that's it, let it alllll out.>
First of all, Francoeur's fine defensively...while his reputation as a great right fielder has probably been overblown by the media through the years, there isn't much doubt that he has a plus arm, makes few errors, and has decent range, at least (his range is usually a point of contention).
Where Francoeur's value tends to...well, plummet...is his offense.
There's been a veritable ton written on why he's not good, whether it's his inability to draw walks, his hack-happy approach, his choice of "tastes great" instead of "less filling" on Miller Lite -- so what I wanted to do instead, if we as Royals fans are hoping against hope that he might somehow be decent-to-good, is focus on what keeps making the Dayton Moores of the world think Francoeur can hit.
This, of course, means I'm going to ignore the majority of his career, since he's been below-average offensively for a RF for most of it. I'm going to focus on what he did for the Atlanta Braves in 2005 (his rookie season and a long time ago), and for the New York Mets in 2009 (after being traded from Atlanta for sucking at the plate for a season and a half, and not such a long time ago).
When added together, those stints come to about a full season worth of plate appearances -- so, in essence, Francouer's had one full season where's he's been good in about six seasons' worth of opportunity, or about 16.7% of his career.
Can you feel the hope? I hope so (see...again, I'm all about hope). The other piece of this is that Francoeur isn't exactly old at 27, so there is that small chance that he could still "get it", whatever that means.
So what did he do in those two seasons? Let's start w/ 2005:
- .300/.336/.549 (274 pa's)
- 3.41 p/pa, .19 bb/k ratio, .66 g/f ratio
- .337 BABIP
And in 2009:
- .311/.338/.498 (308 pa's)
- 3.37 p/pa, .24 bb/k ratio, .54 g/f ratio
- .336 BABIP
And so far in 2011:
- .333/.368/.551 (76 pa's)
- 3.68 p/pa, .50 bb/k ratio, .88 g/f ratio
- .345 BABIP
Finally, we'll throw in his career stats for perspective
- .269/.311/.428 (3519 pa's)
- 3.43 p/pa, .28 bb/k ratio, .74 g/f ratio
- .300 BABIP
So...in essence, he's doing things a little differently than his other successful years to this point. He's seeing a bit more pitches on average, and his walk/strikeout ratio is better, really more because he's striking out less, not walking more. He's also hitting ground balls at a higher rate.
It's way too early to think anything except that since he's struck out a few less times, he's put a few more balls in play and a couple of them have dropped in -- so basically, with so few plate appearances one has to conclude that Frenchy has been lucky to this point...and his current BABIP backs that up.
So let's consider -- Francoeur has a .300 BABIP for his career, and for 2011 he's at .345. There's been two other seasons that saw him have a BABIP close to as high as it is now, and those were 2005, and 2007, a year that could have been as productive as the ones above, except he hit for middling power for a corner OF (.151 isoP) and thus a small chunk below average in productivity for that position that season (.782 OPS vs. about .820).
Francouer's BABIP is almost like a yo-yo from season-to-season, following an even-odd pattern reminiscent of Bret Saberhagen (only, you know, not really reminiscent of it at all...I just wanted to say that). I'd say there's no way it remains this high, but he has about 1200+ plate appearances where he was pretty close, so it's a bit hard to totally write-off.
Therein lies the hope that Francoeur can have a productive full season at the plate -- if he somehow is pretty lucky the entire season. I know, not much to pin hopes on, but if the Royals are to be competitive somehow this season, a lot depends on luck, doesn't it?
SIDENOTE: I really wanted to include his line drive % into this, making the assumption that it would be markedly higher in his better seasons along with his BABIP, but it's hard to figure out if that's telling any story with Francouer or not. It was low in 2005 (15%), around league average in 2007 (18%), then very high in 2009 w/ the Mets (25%). So far this season it's about 18% again...so I decided to ignore it, then mention it afterward.
That's not wishy-washy at all, is it?
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