In a move that shocked no one, this morning the Royals signed Jeff Francoeur to a two-year extension. The deal will pay him $13.5 million between 2012 and 2013, which is a bit higher than I had guessed when writing about Francoeur earlier in the week. But it’s still a decent haul for a free-agent-to-be, and despite the immediately negative reaction to the deal, it could work out for the Royals.
At least one person in Kansas City will be flashing his trademarked smile today. Jeff Francoeur had his contract extended two years. Fans in New York and Atlanta are probably stifling laughs of their own, coming from an entirely different place, but was the signing so bad? Even without terms, we can try to evaluate the signability of the 27-year-old corner outfielder.
Frenchy is having his best season at an age where most baseball players are peaking. On the other hand, very few of his core stats represent a career-best. He’s shown a better ISO before (.189 in 2006), struck out less the last three years in a row, and probably won’t hit career highs in home runs, runs or RBI. He’s only showing a personal best in stolen bases and walk rate, and that walk rate (6.6%) is only percentage points above his best (6.0%, achieved thrice).
It all came together for the Milwaukee Brewers on July 26th. After trailing the NL Central by a half game, something clicked. Since that period the Brewers have gone 18-2; propelling themselves into first place by seven games. With their recent streak, the Brewers have over a 95% chance at making the post-season (per Baseball Prospectus). Over the past twenty games, the Brewers have been unbeatable. Let’s take a look at their current hot streak.
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Every player parking spot at San Francisco’s AT&T Park.
Featured Game
San Francisco (4) at Atlanta (4) | 19:10 ET
• Per their methodology, Cool Standings places the Giants’ postseason odds at 35.9%.
• Per their methodology, Baseball Prospectus places the Giants’ postseason odds at 65.1% — actually better than Arizona’s, whom they trail by 2.5 games in the NL West.
• Of course, neither system probably knows how the Giants have a team’s worth of disabled/injured players.
• Voila: Buster Posey (C), Pat Burrell (1B), Freddy Sanchez (2B), Jeff Keppinger (3B), Aaron Rowand (LF), Andres Torres (CF), Carlos Beltran (RF), Jonathan Sanchez or Barry Zito (SP), Sergio Romo and Brian Wilson (RP).
• Your mom can play shortstop, I guess.
MLB.TV Audio Feed: Giants Radio. (With the straight-on Atlanta camera — the best angle in baseball.)
Also Playing
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 6.2.
The following Game Scores include the new and improved playoff-odds adjustment, which you can learn about in your brain by clicking here.
The Seattle Mariners are enduring a pretty miserable season. After last year’s stinker, the Mariners have followed it up with a .438 winning percentage and a pace-worthy of a scant 71 wins. Well, buck up West Coasters, because the Seattle Mariners should hit better through the season’s end!
In fact, the Mariners should be hitting a whopping 29% better.
For several weeks now, I’ve been playing with fielding-independent-hitting tools, specifically the aptly-named Should Hit metric.
Should Hit (ShH, for short) has a variety of uses, though its best used as a BABIP regressor. For your perusal, I created ShHAP!, a Google Doc that’s free for the world to download and allows anyone to regress a player’s present season (or any stretch of statistics), according to a different BABIP.
Well, today, let’s put this tool to use and look at the Mariners.
Moving the Needle: Wilson Ramos grounds into a game-ending double play, -.530 WPA. Yes, despite trailing by one, the Nationals had a 53 percent chance of winning the game in the ninth. That’s because they had loaded the bases with one out. But Ramos hit into a 4-6-3 double play, ending the game. Ryan Zimmerman’s leadoff homer went for naught.
Notables
Ross Detwiler: 6 IP, 7 H, 1 R, 2 BB, 7 K. It’s not the prettiest of starts, but the Nats will take it from the former No. 1 pick.
Johnny Cueto: 8 IP, 6 H, 1 R, 0 BB, 5 K. He continues to defy his peripherals, though in this game they were just fine.
Also in this issue: Rangers 4, Angels 3 | Giants 7, Braves 5 | Rays 4, Red Sox 0 | Rockies 12, Marlins 5 | Indians 4, White Sox 1 | Astros 4, Cubs 3 | Twins 6, Tigers 5 | Brewers 3, Dodgers 1 | Royals 5, Yankees 4 | A’s 6, Orioles 5 | Phillies 9, Diamondbacks 2 | Blue Jays 5, Mariner 1 | Cardinals 7, Pirates 2 | Mets 7, Padres 3
If there’s still such a thing as newstands anymore, the issue of Baseball America at your local one (i.e. your local newstand) is that publication’s annual “Tools” edition. No, it’s not (as you might suspect from the title) an issue dedicated entirely to relief pitchers with questionable taste in facial hair. Rather, it’s in this edition of the magazine that the editors of Baseball America attempt to isolate the players — major- and minor-leaguers — with the best baseballing tools (hitting for average, hitting for power, speed, etc.).
Beyond the results of a survey to which each of the league’s 30 managers responded, the issue also includes an attempt by author Matt Eddy to find five-tool players “by the numbers” (subscription required, I think).
After a brief discussion of what a “plus” tool might look like when quantified — and also some notes on the obvious limits of such an endeavor — Eddy suggsts this as a methodology:
For the sake of this exercise, let’s identify an above-average hitter as one who bats at least .285/.360/.460 with an isolated power of .175. That’s a 110 percent bump across the board (and then rounded down slightly to please the eye).
To this, Eddy also adds a speed component (more than 20 stolen bases) and runs his criteria through Baseball Reference’s Play Index for all player seasons 2000-10 — the results of which you can find here. (Note: it appears as though Eddy’s power criteria in that search is actually 20-plus homers and not a floor of a .175 ISO, but the results come out similarly.)
The big winner using this methodology is Bobby Abreu, who meets all of Eddy’s criteria in seven of 11 possible seasons. Hanley Ramirez qualifies in four seasons, while Alex Rodriguez finishes third with three “five-tool” seasons.
Eddy’s experiment is an interesting one, both in and of itself, and also for its potential to be nerd-ified — which, this being FanGraphs, that’s what I’ve endeavored to do in what follows.
Although the Toronto Blue Jays and Pittsburgh Pirates come close, no organization in Major League Baseball has improved its minor league system more in the last two years than the Washington Nationals. The team has made huge strides in distancing itself from “The Dark Years” when it was controlled by Major League Baseball on a shoestring budget, and under the questionable guidance of then-GM Jim Bowden.
The Nationals, headed by savy third-year General Manager Mike Rizzo, likely did not begin the 2011 draft expecting to be quite so aggressive when trying to build upon the momentum from 2010’s draft – and set yet another draft spending record. But that’s just what they did by locking up three first round talents (when healthy) and a fringe first rounder. In fact, both third baseman Anthony Rendon and left-hander Matt Purke entered the 2011 college season with the chance to be chosen first overall. Both slipped due to injuries, although Rendon’s was considered far less serious in terms of long-term damage.