Stay Hot, Mets

You know, there’s nothing quite like a perplexing Mets transaction to end this blog’s hiatus. I have a million thoughts on this Jeff Francoeur-for-Ryan Church swap, in fact, it might be more like a billion. I could probably write a book about my thoughts on this trade and what it says about how teams judge performance. Frankly, I don’t really know where to begin, and I apologize in advance if I start rambling.

My first recollection of Jeff Francoeur is seeing him play for the Myrtle Beach Pelicans in 2004. My friend Dan and I took a road trip down to Myrtle and went to games in Philly, Richmond and Durham along the way. The game in Myrtle Beach, however, was by far the most fun. Not only was the weather absolutely gorgeous, but the Pelicans featured Franoeur and Brian McCann, who we knew from our John Sickels’ prospect book as two of the game’s best prospects. (The game also featured a guy named Nathan Panther, quite possibly the coolest name ever. But I digress.)

On that day, it was clear that Frenchy was by far the most talented player on the field. He was a gazelle chasing down flies in right, and he absolutely crushed two balls to the warning track. I realize that doesn’t sound that impressive, but hitting one out of Myrtle Beach is like hitting one out of Yellowstone. That place is enormous, and the wind is coming in from the ocean. So getting it to the track is a feat in it’s own right.

The point is that Francoeur stood out as obviously the most talented, and that’s often hard to do in a baseball. If you took an alien to a Cleveland Cavaliers game, it would have no trouble identifying LeBron as the best player out there. But if you took that same alien to the Mets game today, it might not be able to identify David Wright as the Mets best player by far. He might strike out twice and make a throwing error, while Angel Pagan hits a double, steals a base, and makes a diving catch in the outfield. Not to mention the fact that Pagan looks good in a baseball uniform. Baseball is not a game of instant satisfaction. You need to see lots and lots of games before you can decide who is the best. Why the fuck else do you think they play 162 games?

And that’s the problem with Francoeur. When he does something good (and these days, that’s rare) he looks good doing it. Like Pagan, he looks good in a baseball uniform. He’s sinewy, and he has what scouts like to call a “high ass.” And yes, this a good thing. Oh, and he wears his socks in such a way that makes him look like a ballplayer. When he connects, he can hit it a country mile. And when he unleashes a throw from right, he gives new meaning to the term “frozen rope.” So even though there are thousands and thousands of at-bats that tell us that Jeff Francoeur is a bad major league baseball player, a lot of people simply cannot believe it because our eyes see a superstar. And even if doesn’t play like one now, he once did, and he sure as shit looks like one. Ryan Church, on the other hand, never does anything on a baseball field that amazes you. Check that. With the exception of missing third base and costing the Mets a win, Ryan Curch never does anything on a baseball field that amazes you. As a result, he just seems like a guy. And it’s true, Ryan Church is nothing special.

This is a phenomenon Joe Posnanski discusses in his analysis of the Royals trade for Yuniesky Betancourt. He refers to it as the power of everlasting promise, and that is something Francoeur has coming out of his cleats. For God’s sake, he was dubbed “The Natural” on the cover of Sports Illustrated. When a player shows promise at a young age and does things the way we think they are supposed to be done and looks the part while doing it, they continually get the benefit of the doubt. If Francouer hadn’t hit .400 for the first three weeks of his career, he would have been in the minors for most of the last two years because his sub-.300 OBP has shown him to be an out machine unseen since the days of Rey Ordonez.

Speaking of the Betancourt deal, when I first heard about it, my reaction was, “that’s something the Mets would do.” And after the Frenchy trade, I am now convinced the Mets are essentially the Royals, but with a bigger bank account. Maybe that should be their promotional slogan next year.

The problem with the Francoeur trade from a Mets perspective is not that they gave up Ryan Church. The problem with this trade is what it says about the Mets line of thinking. Basically, the Mets are saying, “I don’t care that Luis Castillo has had a higher OPS than Frenchy the last two years, he looks good to us.” This is essentially the same line of thinking that led to them choosing Omir Santos over Ramon Castro for reasons that I still cannot comprehend.

To me, this trade reeks of arrogance. Are the Mets really that confident that they are smarter than the Braves? I’ve got 20 years of evidence that says otherwise. And when all semi-advanced metrics say that Frenchy is not only below average, but below replacement level, then you better be sure you know what you’re doing, because I can’t think of any other reason that you would seek out the Braves to acquire Francoeur, which is apparently what the Mets did. Because as bad as the Mets have been, some of the guys they have been playing in left and right (Evans, Reed, Tatis) are actually performing better than Frenchy has for the last season and a half.

Maybe the Mets believe they can “fix” Frenchy and unleash the 2005 version of him. I sure hope so. And in many ways, this is a referendum on the organization’s ability to evaluate talent. Because if you’re clearly not a club that evaluates players based on stats, and the Mets have proved that they aren’t, then you better be good at scouting. (In reality, you should be good at both, but we can’t have everything.) This is what disappoints me most about the Mets, I don’t think they give a rats ass about performance evaluation. Omar Minaya might be a good scout, but I don’t think he has a nuanced feel for a statistical analysis, nor does anyone else in the organization. If they did, they wouldn’t have chosen Santos over Castro, and sought out a trade for Francoeur. The Mets have the most resources of an NL team, yet they have made the playoffs just three times since 1988! My friends have heard me say it before, and I’ll say it again: No team in baseball (and possible all American pro sports) does less with more than the Mets.

The one semi-interesting yet fairly irrelevant thing I found about Frenchy is this, and we can thank Baseball Reference’s play index for this discovery. As has been laughably noted elsewhere, Omar Minaya praised Francoeur for his ability to “play in a lot of games,” so I decided to see how he stacks up against other people who have played in 162 games in a season. In 2006, Frenchy became just one of two players in history to play in all 162 games while striking out more than 120 times and posting an OBP less than or equal to .300. The other? Well that would be Sammy Sosa in 1997, the year before he hit 66 home runs. Sadly, since Frenchy did this three years ago, we can’t even dream of a home run breakout, because he hasn’t even been good enough to be allowed to play 162 games in any of the last two years. Sigh.