THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

i dont get how any analysis of francoeur’s value to a team can be conducted without taking into account his grit, leadership and hustle.

If grit, leadership, and hustle are so important, why don’t they put them on the scoreboard?

Francoeur has value on a major league roster.  He has a great arm in the outfield (though only so-so range) and is a decent hitter against lefthanders.  He could help a team as the short side of a corner outfield platoon.

Anyone who trades for him and gives him any more of a role than this will immediately earn consideration as the worst GM in the game, and will deserve to be immediately fired.

Right, Frenchy is a perfect platoon candidate.  Ideal for a team like, I dunno, the Mets.

Platooning with who, exactly?  Pagan and Beltran are switch hitters, Bay is another righty.  He needs to be on a team with a lefty corner outfielder who can’t hit lefties.

The Yankees (Granderson) would work if they hadn’t already picked up Austin Kearns.

Lenny Harris? His numbers are distorted a bit by his heavy pinch hitting duties, which we know do legitimately reduce a player’s hitting numbers over time.  But he did play over 7,0000 innings on defense, such as it was.

Pagan may be a switch hitter, but his platoon splits may point to someone who is not ideally a switch hitter.  I didn’t look too closely though as to the significance of a 60+ point difference in wOBA.

On p. 168 in The Book, Andy says you need 600 PA in one of the splits to get r=.50.  Pagan has 800 and 400.  So, you’d regress his 57 wOBA split toward the 0 to a true 23 wOBA split.

That kind of split (23 wOBA points) is similar to a standard split for someone who is not a switch hitter.

So, I’d say that Pagan is not really a switch hitter.

When it comes to utter uselessness stretched over a long period of time, Alfredo Griffin’s tough to beat. 

Alfredo managed to put together a 17-year career and over 7,000 plate appearances despite a career WAR of -2.4.  It’s absolutely befuddling that a guy who was a horrible hitter (career OPS+ of 67) a below average fielder (28 runs below replacement level for his career) and below average baserunner (12 runs below replacement level for his career) was able to stay employed as a starter for that long.

I won’t disagree about how bad Griffin was, or that Bill Buckner may have been the worst player allowed to get at least 1000 hits, or what have you.

The focus here was on players who couldn’t do anything right.  These are players who are below average in all aspects of play, if you can partition the play into five categories.

The best you can hope for with guys like this is they are bench players.

Yet somehow they were able to sell someone on something, and what that thing is, I don’t know.  At least with Griffin, you sell his fielding, without doing the pro/con calculation.

Come on guys! You can’t put a numeric value on Frenchy’s thousand-watt smile, or his ability to keep the guys loose in the clubhouse, even as the team’s hopes for a playoff spot - which were dim to begin with - sink further and further into oblivion.

If you could put a numeric value on it, though, it would be roughly $12 million.

I would say Yuniesky Betancourt

AB = 2710
R+RBIs = 593
HR = 40
2B + 3B = 179
HR = 40
SB = 24
1B = 521
K’s = 256

Less K’s, but much less power.  He doesn’t get any extra credit for playing SS, because that would require him to do more than stand there and hope the ball is hit right at him.

Juan Castro

2830 pa

No judgment - 147 bb/466 ks

No speed- 5 sb 9 cs in 16 years

No power- 36 hrs

Contact ? -babip .264

below average fielder by TotalZone and RAR on BBRef

You MUST do fielding plus positional adjustment.

Luis Rivas? He didn’t do a single thing well other than steal bases, and he wasn’t Vince Coleman in that category. A craptastic fielder who was a career .257/.303/.377 in 2290 PAs. Not quite as many as Francoeur, but he was a regular second baseman on three Twins teams that made the playoffs.

Oh, career WAR of -2.8 for Rivas, but that actually understates his craptasticness. His ONLY positive total was in a 16 game cup of coffee in 2000, of 0.1. And, just to add, he had a quarter of his games batting second. He was consistently crappy for a good team, and given chances to suck up outs.

Looking at platoon splits for Pagan vs. Francoeur, Frenchy probably has an edge with the bat against lefties, but Pagan makes up for it with his fielding and baserunning.  Maybe more than makes up for it.  I would not platoon there.  Good players don’t like being platooned, and I would prefer to keep Pagan happy unless a platoon offered a clear upgrade, this situation does not.  My philosophy on dealing with players is you do what you can to keep your best players happy.  For the marginal players, they need to do everything in their power to keep me happy.  I would not abide a player like Francoeur for one second on my team unless he gladly accepted any role I had for him on the team and acted happy to have the opportunity.  I have no room at all for marginal players who think they are stars.

Mets are platooning him with Fernando Martinez, but that is a temporary situation until Bay gets back from the DL.  After than, I can’t see any point in the Mets keeping him on the roster.

As I watch the Dodgers bloop the Phillies to death in the first inning, Scott Podsednik scoring reminded me of this thread. To measure this quick and dirty style, Podzilla has 9.6 fWAR over 4,000+ PA to Frenchy’s 7.5 over 3,300.

I think Podsednik owners have exacerbated the problem Dusty Baker/Willy Taveras style by batting him leadoff most of his career.

FWIW, Hillenbrand had 4.4 fWAR