Some Things To Consider Re: FYF

Francoeur swings with his eyes closed.

Jake Peavy, in 2006. He started the season poorly, and nobody could really figure it out. He went like 3-9 or something before he decided to get his eyes checked out, and it turns out that he was close to legally blind. He started wearing contact lenses, and finished out the season 8-5.

And then he won the Cy Young the following year. Hmmmmm….

“Yesterday, I saw something I’d never seen from Francoeur: He slipped in his usually upbeat, perfectly accommodating image that he always potrays when the cameras are on: A local TV guy asked him, on-camera, about all the bashing he was getting on the radio that morning (slick how TV guy passed the buck to the radio guys), and Francoeur said, "I don’t listen to that bull$%#@," only he didn’t use those symbols. He said the whole word.

It wasn’t a big deal, since they weren’t live. But it was revealing. He’s never struggled like this, never been this frustrated. He’d probably like to punch the next one of us who refers to him as Golden Boy.”

...from Doyle. It’s funny to read though, because alot of the points he makes have been made right on this very board. I was involved in a discussion with someone on here about a comparable player…I said maybe FYF is just a Raul Ibanez type player, with a worse eye, he said perhaps he’s more like Jermaine Dye but he has not developed yet. Can’t remember who it was or what post it was in. Dye was terrible in taking a BB his first three seasons…all of which he had less than 300 PAs. He finally got his shit together in his first full season and had an OBP of around .350 only to go back and forth for the next couple years…some years with a sub .800 OPS, some with an above .900 OPS. FYF has not made that adjustment. I’d be thrilled if he did, because I’d take a Jermaine Dye copycat in RF for the next decade.

Baseball Prospectus has a feature where it lists the most comparable players from the past:

Comparable Players are the backbone of a player’s PECOTA. Only the twenty best comparables are listed here, but as many as 100 players may be used in the generation of his forecast if they are sufficiently comparable.

PECOTA compares each player against a database of roughly 20,000 major league batter seasons since World War II. In addition, it also draws upon a database of roughly 15,000 translated minor league seasons (1997-2006) for players that spent most of their previous season in the minor leagues. (When minor league comparables are used, they appear in ALL CAPS). PECOTA considers four broad categories of attributes in determining a hitter’s comparability:

1. Production metrics—such as batting average, isolated power, and unintentional walk rate for hitters, or strikeout rate and groundball rate for pitchers.

2. Usage metrics, including career length and plate appearances or innings pitched.

3. Phenotypic attributes, including handedness, height, weight, career length (for major leaguers), and minor league level (for prospects).

4. Fielding Position (for hitters) or starting/relief role (for pitchers). PECOTA doesn’t require that a comparable hitter play the same defensive position; it is a factor that is evaluated along with many others, and assigned a relatively substantial weight. Consideration is also given to the ‘similarity’ between two positions; for example, a shortstop will be compared to a second baseman before he is compared to a left fielder. In most cases, the database is large enough to provide a meaningfully large set of appropriate comparables. When it isn’t, the program is designed to ‘cheat’ by expanding its tolerance for dissimilar players until a reasonable sample size is reached.

Here’s what it comes up with.

1 Charlie Spikes
2 George Hendrick
3 Vernon Wells
4 Carlos Lee
5 Ollie Brown
6 Joe Adcock
7 Marc Newfield
8 Larry Parrish
9 Joe Rudi
10 Tony Horton
11 Jermaine Dye
12 Tim Wallach
13 Gus Bell
14 Dale Murphy
15 Mike Ivie
16 Pedro Munoz
17 Chili Davis
18 Ron Swoboda
19 Ken McMullen
20 Aramis Ramirez

Those who suggest the Braves should bench Francoeur: And play who in right field? Are you even considering other options they have or don’t have, or just blindly saying, "bench him!" Because honestly, who are they going to play in RF while Kotsay and Diaz are still on DL?

Anyway, here’s what FRANK WREN said when I asked him about FRANCOEUR this morning, on whether he’s pressing, etc:

WREN: "Jeff’s going through a time right now where he’s trying to do a lot. He’s trying to do a lot of things. Trying to get on track … He’s just human, and it bothers [anyone in that situation].

"He’s been so successful and so good for so long, and when you go through these times you just have to persevere and fight through it, and I know he’s doing that.

"I talked to him yesterday and just said, ‘Keep playing. Just keep playing hard.’ That’s all you can do at this point. Probably the less you think about it and the less you focus on it, the better."