February 23, 2010

Jeff Francoeur plays outfield for the New York Mets. In many ways, he’s the opposite of J.D. Drew. Fans like him because he picks up lots of hits and drives in runs. The sabermetric community tends not to like him, because he makes tons of outs.

One of the things I’ve gleaned from reading economics blogs is that wealth is not measured by how much wealth an entity accumulates, but how much that wealth can buy. When players started getting large contracts due to free agency, it was popular to compare the contract to Babe Ruth’s biggest one, which paid $80,000 a year. They would show that Ruth could buy more razor blades, or fancy cars, or some other commodity. What they were doing is showing Ruth’s contract was bigger, because it bought more.

Outs are the currency of baseball. Players who can buy more runs per out, or conversely, spend fewer outs per run, are richer hitters. An easy way to look at this, something you can do off any stat sheet or the back of a baseball card, is to use batting outs per run, where I’m using Production to approximate runs (Runs Scored + RBI)/2. Batting outs are simply AB-Hits. So outs per run is (AB-hits)/((Runs Scored + RBI)/2). I like using production here because it deals with actual runs and RBI. Drew tends not to drive in as many runs as one might expect because he’s very willing to take a walk in RBI situations. Francoeur probably drives in more runs that one might expect because he puts the ball in play so often in RBI situations. So using production should be favorable to Francoeur.

Since 2005, Francoeur’s first season, 163 players accumulated at least 2000 plate appearances. Among those, Albert Pujols spends the fewest outs per run, 3.14. Jason Kendall spends the most, 7.34. J.D. Drew ranks 26th, a run costing him 4.12 outs. Francoeur ranks 107th, a run costing him 5.33 outs. In other words, it costs Francoeur 121 more outs than Drew to produce 100 runs. That’s four and a half games of outs.

Four and a half games of outs that his teammates don’t get to use. Four and a half games of lost opportunities to score. Somehow, that just doesn’t seem worth it to me.

Francouer also lost whatever defensive value he used to bring to the table. I don’t think he lasts much longer in the majors, at least as a full time player.

Posted by David Pinto at 2:38 pm | Players, Players A to Z | Permalink | 2 Comments