Baseball Thread 5 - #5 George Brett Has a Story to Tell

Not interesting, sadly, for us Tribe fanboi looser morans.

 

Actually I didn't say I thought he could figure it out. In fact at this point I think it's unlikely that he will. For all this talk about him being "only" 25, if a hitter doesn't have plate discipline at that age, he probably never will. I just said I can see why he'd be enticing because if he could ever make pitchers throw him strikes, he could be dangerous again.

And while adjustments don't happen in a month, they don't take two years, either. A young fastball hitter like Frenchy had to have gotten a steady diet of curveballs pretty damn early. Had to. If he couldn't hit a curveball thrown for a strike there's no way he could have been as productive as he was for as long as he was. Get him to swing at strikes and I'll take my chances with everything else.

 

There was a stat in a recent AJC braves blog (O'Brien does a GREAT job on those things by the way) that was mind-boggling.

For every corner outfielder with over 2,500 career plate appearances, Jeff Francoeur has THE LOWEST OPS in major league baseball history!

And for the last year and a half, he has like the third lowest sluggling percentage of any major league outfielder.

Frankly, I just think the guy has no bat speed. And he knows it. So he has to cheat to start his swing earlier and that's why he's always off-balance (on offspeed pitches) and hitting little weak-ass 12 hoppers to shortstop. Dude got a 2-0 fastball from Kawakami today, right over the heart of the plate, at 92 mph, and sprayed it foul to the right. If you can't hit those types of pitches, you're not a major leaguer.

I don't think Ryan Church is a great player by any means, but he and Diaz are a VAST improvement over the perpetual out machine.
I honestly don't think Francoeur will be in the majors in 2011. Maybe he'll pull a Weinke and go play football at Clemson.
It sure was a fun two-month ride in 2005 though. Geez. He took over the city that summer. Kinda sad how he's fallen actually.

 

Not sure where he got that stat, because it's not true even if you really, really stretch* it.

Plenty of corner outfielders in the Deadball Era had an OPS under Frenchy's .731.

Even if you go from 1920 on, you've got Vince Coleman (career OPS of .668), Glenn Wilson (.704), Don Mueller (.712), Hal Lee (.718), etc. For guys who played 75% of their careers at LF/RF and have 2,500 PAs, Francoeur is ranked 21st-lowest in career OPS.

Believe it or not, Carl Crawford's career OPS is only .768, but of course he's a very good fielder (not as strong an arm as Francoeur) and has the added dimension of being arguably the fastest base-runner in the league (certainly the best base-stealer).


* In fact, the only way I can get the B-R Play Index search to come back with Francoeur at No. 1 is to make the criteria "2,500 PAs and played 97+% of their games at LF/RF", but that doesn't account for all the corner outfielders -- such as Mueller, who was clearly a right fielder throughout his career -- listed as "OF" in the Retrosheet database. And it's also kind of disingenuous, because Coleman was a LF for all intents and purposes, even though he "only" played 1,154 of his 1,311 games (88%) at LF.

 

I heard that same stat last week, and it was OBP, not OPS. The following link is not O'Brien, but it references the same stat:

http://mlb.fanhouse.com/2009/07/10/mets-braves-swap-scuffling-outfielders/#cont

Having watched Frenchy play 100 or so times a year since the beginning of his career, it's obvious he's lost bat speed. He can't get around on a good fastball, and he just doesn't ever hit the ball all that hard.

As for why, who knows? He did put on a lot of muscle mass before the 2007 season, and maybe that was the culprit.

Francoeur came up with the Braves at a time when they were jumping most of their top prospects directly from Double-A. Of all the guys who made that leap --- McCann, Francoeur, Saltalamacchia, JoJo Reyes among them --- only McCann has had sustained success at the major-league level.

Since then, the Braves have had most of their top prospects spend at least half a season at Triple-A. They did it with Yunel Escobar, and Tommy Hanson spent what a lot of people argued was too much time at Gwinnett.

The one guy they've jumped directly from Double-A in recent years was Jordan Schafer, and we saw how that turned out. It will be interesting to see what they do with Jason Heyward and Freddie Freeman --- both of whom were called up to Double-A in the last two weeks --- when the time comes. Heyward is wrecking Double-A pitching right now --- nine extra-base hits and a 1.232 OPS in his first 12 games/41 at-bats, so that time will be coming soon with him.

 

Obscure stat probably nobody else cares about, but damn the torpedoes, I'm posting it.

So I noticed Bobby Cox is 472 games over .500, third all-time and first among active managers, and while mucking around on baseball reference dot com, I stumbled onto this:

Of the 662 managers in major league history (according to the count of bbreference) only 236 (35 percent) are at or above .500 for their careers. I would have thought it would follow more of a bell curve, but apparently, going .500 is difficult. Clearly, losing managers don't last as long as winning ones, but I still would have thought the numbers would be a little closer than that.

 

Getting back to the start of the Francoeur discussion: Cox didn't have to make it about an "f you" to Francoeur. It's pretty simple: You're in a run-producing situation and you have a choice: Pitch to David Wright or pitch to Jeff Francoeur. That's not really even a choice. Don Sutton likes to talk about lineups in terms of "Where do you go for an out?" In the Mets lineup, even as depleted as it is right now, Francoeur is the answer to that question. The Braves have 10 more games with the Mets, and they'll continue to choose to pitch to him. If Cox desired to say f you to Francoeur, then that was merely an added bonus. The f you was paying the Mets to take him off their hands.

 

We're kind of saying the same thing. The walks to Wright tell you how huge a dropoff Cox felt there was between Wright and Francoeur. He ddoesn't intentionally walk Wright in the first inning if there's a hitter he even halfway respects hitting behind Wright. I doubt he would have made it if Ryan Church were the next hitter. Keep in mind that Wright isn't exactly Pujols. He has 5 homers and his batting average has dropped 40 points in the last month. It was partly about not letting the best hitter in the lineup beat you, sure, but it was also partly about "Let's expose that chump hitting in the 5 hole."

 

Agree all the way.

 

I saw the note on Pujols reaching 90 RBI the first nine seasons of his career and being the fifth guy to do that, joining Al Simmons, Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio and Bob Johnson?? Didn't ring a bell and then I saw what the guy did in his career. I'd have to say perhaps a borderline Hall of Famer based on the late start of his career -- how the hell did he get trapped in the minors until 27?

He got one vote in '56 and then fell off the ballot

 

As a Braves fan, this sort of infuriates me and amuses me at the same time.
Jeff Francoeur is so bad that Bobby Cox would intentionally walk 5-HR David Wright IN THE FIRST INNING to pitch to him, yet that same Bobby Cox gave that same Jeff Francoeur 304 at-bats this season?
Crazy.

And Buck, yeah it must have been lowest OBP in history for a corner outfielder. And now, of course, I can't find the blog where O'Brien threw out the stat.

Either way, the guy has been historically bad.

 

Indian Bob Johnson. Great, great all-around left fielder -- but mostly overlooked because he was stuck on some awful Connie Mack teams in Philadelphia for a decade, and almost never led the league in anything because of Williams and Dimaggio.

Here's a good look at his career: http://baseballanalysts.com/archives/2005/12/a_long_time_ago.php

Why was he trapped in the minors for so long? Because he failed to make the grade in multiple tryouts with PCL teams before finally signing a pro contract with Wichita at age 23. Took him a few years to become a star in the minors and finally got a chance when Mack sold off Al Simmons to free up a spot in the A's outfield.