Jeff Francoeur was a man out of time. Had he come along before a boiler-room attendant in Kansas began printing and stapling his “Baseball Abstract,” Francoeur would have been (we can assume) the same player. He would, however, have been perceived differently.
The boiler-room attendant was Bill James, the father of sabermetrics. (I interviewed him in 1979, when he was still listed in the Lawrence phone book.) Without James, we might never have seen on-base percentage as a thing, let alone a Massive Thing. There’d have been no “Moneyball,” no Billy-Beane-as-guru, no Brad-Pitt-as-Billy-Beane. Without James, we’d still swear by those back-of-the-bubble-gum-card stats.
Francoeur’s bubble-gum numbers weren’t wretched, at least not as the start. He hit .300 as a rookie. He had consecutive 100-RBI seasons. He batted .266 over 4 1/2 years as a Brave, which didn’t make him Henry Aaron or even Rico Carty, but still: Dale Murphy hit .268 as a Brave and had his number retired.
Francoeur broke into the majors in 2005. By then, bubble gum was no longer packaged with baseball cards and Triple Crown stats — batting average, home runs and RBIs — were being nudged aside by OBP and WAR, acorns from the James tree. Those newfangled numbers made us view the flying Frenchy in a less-flattering light.
I grew up following the Cincinnati Reds. Their center fielder was Vada Pinson, a good player overshadowed by Frank Robinson, the great right fielder. I didn’t know until 30 seconds ago that Pinson’s career OBP was .327, worse than I’d have guessed. I knew he hit .300 a few times (four, to be precise). I didn’t realize how seldom he walked. Those were the ’60s. There was no OBP.
When Francoeur became a Brave, OBP was viewed by the famous Beane and his acolytes as the One True Measure. It wasn't so much that Francoeur swung and missed — his career strikeout percentage is 18.6, almost exactly the MLB average over those years — as that he swung. Check FanGraphs. Over his 11-year career, Francoeur has offered at pitches outside the strike zone 39.8 percent of the time. Over his final 11 seasons, Chipper Jones swung at pitches off the plate 16 percent of the time.
Francoeur’s first non-intentional walk came in his 34th big-league game, by which time he’d hit 10 home runs. His career OBP is .304. Melvin (nee B.J.) Upton’s strikeout percentage is 26.4, far above average; his OBP is .324. Jason Heyward’s strikeout percentage is 18.5; his OBP is .353.
We see Upton, for good reason, as a dud — but he's a dud with a better eye than Francoeur. We see Heyward as a good player who hasn't become a great one. But if we go by WAR (wins above replacement), as opposed to bubble-gum numbers, Heyward is very nearly a great player. His career WAR value, per Baseball Reference, is 31.1. That's an average of 5.2 over six seasons. A WAR of 5.5 is apt to put a position player among his league's top 10 in a given year. There's a reason the data-driven Cubs signed Heyward for $184 million. They see value therein.
There's also a reason Francoeur has worked for seven organizations and just signed a minor-league contract to return to the Braves, who dumped him in 2009 for Ryan Church, who was out of baseball by 2011. Francoeur's career WAR value is 5.6. That's an aggregate, not an average. Four of Heyward's six seasons have been valued higher than 5.6. Kelly Johnson, a rookie classmate of Francoeur's and the definition of a journeyman, has a career WAR of 17.4.
Even as we hail Francoeur’s homecoming (albeit as a minor-leaguer), we note the cruel truth: The world’s nicest guy has been, over his career, one of the least valuable players in his sport. Forty years ago, we mightn’t have noticed. We’d have focused on the strong throws and the occasional home run and the wide-angle grin, and we’d have thought, “Frenchy forever!”
But times have changed, as times do. We can’t un-ring the bell James sounded. We can’t see Francoeur, once the toast of his hometown, as anything but a gifted player whose best big-league days were his first.
