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As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2009 > January > 22
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Frenchy wants money! The nerve of that guy!
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Some bloggers believe Jeff Francoeur should hand the Braves a refund for all the hits he didn’t deliver last season. We can recognize those folks rather easily today: They’re the ones plastered to the ceiling, incredulous that Francoeur wants an 850 percent raise after the worst season of his life.
To those bloggers, I say: Relax. It’s only a game.
Except that it isn’t. It’s a business. And Francoeur is doing what any businessperson would do. He’s asking for more ($3.95 million) than the Braves are offering ($2.8 million). Big deal. Kelly Johnson and Casey Kotchman are doing the same. Everybody asks for more come arbitration time. (Ryan Howard, who struck out 199 times in 2008, wants $18 million.)
Let’s be clear: Francoeur was wretched last season. He hit .239 and had to finish fast to do that. His on-base percentage was .294, which is as bad as you can do and stay in the big leagues. (Which Francoeur didn’t technically do — he had that weekend sojourn in Mississippi over the Fourth of July.) If he has another year like that, he won’t be an Atlanta Brave in 2010.
But what a guy requests in arbitration isn’t something we should begrudge. Arbitration is the worst mechanism ever created. A player picks a number. His team picks a different number. An arbitrator picks one or the other. There’s no compromise, no difference-splitting. Who among us would be so silly as to take the club’s offer if there’s a chance an independent party will say, “Nah, he’s worth a little more”?
And there’s a chance an independent party might — I said might — look on Francoeur’s four-year body of big-league work and say, “Hey, he’s not so bad.” He has had two 100-RBI seasons. He hit .300 as a rookie and .293 in 2007. He hit 29 homers in 2006. This time a year ago, you’d have called Jeff Francoeur a rising star.
He’s not that anymore, but he’s not yet a lost cause. And just because he wants almost $4 million for playing baseball one year after he played baseball badly doesn’t make him a jerk or a bum or an ingrate. It just makes him a professional athlete.
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