THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Yet Braves’ management continues to see him as someone with the potential to become a star. The players know though. A few weeks ago, on the Braves’ broadcast, they were talking about how though Chipper is the team leader, Brian McCann was the one that the younger players looked to as the leader among their peers.

Is this the same Francouer that has a .284 wOBA this year?

The projection systems agree with all of those quotes.  Frenchy was about a league average hitter from 2005-2007.  He was horrible last year, -23 runs, and all the projections on Fangraphs show him improving to between +5 and -9 for 2009.

Go find a sample of players who were average and had a crappy year like Frenchy did, take the average of their next season, and you’ll get pretty close to what the projections say.  This has been tested time and time again.

I’ll wager that virtually ever player you find in such a sample was not happy with the previous year, worked their butts off, changed their swing, looked to advice from hitting coaches and veteran teammates.  Some of em probably stuck a needle in the ass too, but that’s another story.  And they played better than they did in the crappy season.

I’d be worried about the odd player who didn’t do anything to improve, stubbornly kept doing the same things that led to failure.  It’s the extra effort to improve that contributes to what we see as regression to the mean.

Yes of course he was likely to improve upon his numbers from last year.  Heck my own projection was for a .784 OPS.

The point I was trying to make (apparently not very well) was that when he started out “hot” it was being touted as a breakout year for him - that he was finally going to live up to his star potential.

NONE of those pundits, including many of his teammates and coaches, were saying/thinking that he was going to bounce back from a terrible year to put up league average numbers!

This is a classic, “He’s in the best shape of his life” example.  Only in this case, it was that he finally figured out how not to swing at all those bad pitches, and that he had really dedicated himself to a new approach at the plate and a new stance.  All B.S. (well, most of it - probably) of course…

To be fair MGL, many of the those pundits thought Francoeur was a star in 06 an 07 (when he only had a .308 and a .337 wOBA respectively, but drove in over 100 runs each year).  It was certainly feasible that Francoeur could manage a ~league average wOBA again this year (which is almost exactly what CHONE projected before this year), and drive in a lot of runs due to his shear total of plate appearances and his spot in the order.  In that case, the the guys who you are quoting might see him as a star.

Yeah, the only number in those quotes was “His first two years, he drove in 100 runs with the same swing.”

I don’t see anybody saying that he’s going to turn into Pujols or something.  They probably think 2006-07 Francoeur is something to be excited about.  And if he finishes the season as a league average WOBA, given his specific skill set, spot in the batting order, and playing close to 160 games, he probably will drive in 100 runs again.

Yup, that’s probably true.  The ONLY thing that “pundits” (and their ilk) care about are RBI, BA, and HR.  One of those is largely a funtion of context and the number of PA, another is next to worthless, and the other is what it is…

Is anyone else amused by the way MGL uses the term “pundit” in the negative?  From dictionary.com…

pundit
1. a learned person, expert, or authority.
2. a person who makes comments or judgments, esp. in an authoritative manner; critic or commentator.

I read that and expect it to have a picture of mgl next to it. 

Francoeur, even with his reinvented stance, still has serious holes in his swing.  It is obvious to anyone that understands baseball scouting and watches him regularly.  Cox was most likely trying to build up his confidence, as the Braves just do not have many viable outfield options at this point.  It seems the plan was to hope that Francoeur rebounded to his previously established levels before 2008.

Unfortunately he has lost the ability to drive the ball to center and right with any authority.  His bat speed has also declined it appears, which is troubling for someone at his age.  He never had good pitch recognition, but he used to be able to drive fastballs early in the count.  MLB pitchers have learned to simply avoid throwing him fastballs early in the count.

weskelton/8: That’s why he put pundits in quotes. I think MGL knows the definition and was using the quotes to make it sarcastic since they are pretty clearly the opposite in reality.

JD, thanks for setting me straight.  I missed the implications of the quotes and I suspect that you are correct.  Sometimes sarcasm is harder to detect in the printed word.

Apologies to our resident pundit.  I’ll be quiet now.

Carry on.

updating some numbers
Francoeur (Oliver projections)
2004 266/304/447
2005 266/302/459
2006 270/305/484
2007 265/298/468
2008 273/309/457
2009 263/303/426
actual
2009 257/273/382

Although his 2009 stats look a little better than the awful 2008, it’s still below his projection. Basically, since the end of 2006 he’s lost about 30% of his HR% (.056 to .040, which is mlb avg). BABIP, BB% and SO% have shown no real change.

From “view from the bench” website:

“Despite a mediocre average, Jeff Francouer is leading the team in RBI right now, which has to be a welcome sign.”

I’m a Braves fan who watches a lot of their games on TV, and I’ve often puzzled over why so many fans and local sports writers and commentators think that Francoeur is so wonderful. One thing that seems to be characteristic of him is that he has a flair for the dramatic. Given that the human mind tends to remember the good things and forget the bad, such a “flair” would tend to lead casual fans, and those who are not of an analytical frame of mind to overrate his true abilities.

Now, this “flair” is something that’s hard to measure but I decided to look at Win Probability Added on the Fangraphs site. The way I figured it, if he had this “flair”, then he would have a high +WPA and a low -WPA. The data bears this out. In 2006, his first full season, his +WPA was +14.02, which was second highest on the team, and his -WPA was -13.86, which was the lowest on the team, making him 8th overall. In 2007, +WPA was +12.13, second highest on the team, and his -WPA was -12.07, second lowest, making him 10th overall. In 2008, when he had the worst -WPA on the team with -14.03, and worst overall WPA, he still managed a +WPA of +9.92, making him fifth on the team. In 2009, he’s performing similarly. His +WPA is +2.73 which is third highest on the team, and his -WPA is -3.42, which is the lowest on the team, placing him next to last overall, above the clueless Jordan Schaefer.

Every time I watch Francouer, including today’s game versus the Rockies, I am surprised that he can hit major league pitching at all.  He has no pitch recognition skills whatsoever.  Every pitcher tries to throw him breaking pitches out of the strike zone for the most part and he does not seem to have any ability whatsoever of laying off them.  I am exaggerating a little of course.

At what point did scouts think this guy was a great hitting prospect?  Unless he could drastically learn some pitch recognition skills or somehow learn to lay off breaking balls out of the zone, he has ZERO chance to be a good hitter.  It takes all but about 2 or 3 AB to see what kind of a hitter he is.  There are very few players that is true of.  If you were to do nothing else but watch him for half a dozen games or so, you would have to conclude that he is either a terrible hitter or if he could hit the ball really hard on the small percentage of time that he actually swings at a hittable pitch, a mediocre hitter.  There is no way, with the approach that he has, that he can be a good hitter.  How did he do so well in limited time in 2005?  Were pitchers just not aware of his weakness yet?

MGL,

The answer to your last question is, yes. When he first came up, he saw a lot of fastballs in the strike zone, and he can hit those. Every player who makes the majors can. What surprised me was how long it took the league to realize that he would flail away at the high inside fastball and the outside breaking pitch that broke off of the plate.