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Pondering Francoeur

by John Walsh
August 28, 2006

What if I told you about a young player, a 22-year old rookie with the following numbers in his first full year:

G     AB    R    H     2B   3B   HR   RBI
157   618   84   171   32   4    29   105

If I then told you he was a quality corner outfielder with a cannon for an arm (19 outfield assists), you'd say, "Wow! A sure-fire Rookie of the Year candidate. And he's only 22? The sky's the limit for this guy!" There is a key number that I've left out of the above line, though. Maybe 20 or 30 years ago you wouldn't have noticed, but nowadays everybody is aware of the importance of the walk, and indeed I haven't told you how many walks our rookie drew in his first year. Nineteen (ouch). But it's even worse than that, because six of those walks were intentional. His rate of unintentional walks (UIBB) is only 2.1%.

Only four qualifying batters in the last 10 years (out of more than 1400 total) have had a lower UIBB rate. Of course, the near-total absence of walks leads to a very low OBP. Here is our batter's rate stat triplet for his first full season: .277/.305/.482. That .305 is disturbing, but the overall performance is still good for a 22-year old rookie, isn't it?

The Rise and Fall

Jeff Francoeur made his major league debut on July 7, 2005. He went 1-4, with an 8th-inning 3-run homer off Glendon Rusch to ice a Braves victory. His line for the day, .250/.250/1.000, would be an omen of things to come. But not right away. Frenchy hit his next home run three days later against Milwaukee, and on July 20 he hit another against San Francisco. He kept on hitting like a madman for about two months, and at the end of August 2005, his batting line stood at .342/.378/.632. He'd hit 10 home runs and driven in 31 runs in 43 games. Nobody cared a whole lot that he'd only walked six times (four unintentional) during that period. Francoeur was riding high.

Since Sept. 1, 2005 (through the one-year mark, July 7, 2006) Francoeur has batted .255/.282/.444. What are we to think of that line? The power is nice, but the OBP is terrible. How does Francoeur's overall offensive performance compare to other right fielders? Well, there are 10 right fielders in the National League who qualify for the 2006 batting title (as of August 25). Francoeur ranks 9th in Runs Created per Game and 8th in OPS. If we want to factor in his defense, we can consider his Win Shares total: He currently ranks 30th in Win Shares among all NL outfielders (not just right fielders).

So, to answer my own question posed above, despite the impressive home run and RBI totals, Francoeur is truly among the very worst regular outfielders in the NL right now. And it is very clear what the problem is: The almost complete lack of walks is keeping Francoeur's OBP at sub-replacement level. Of course, he's only 22 years old and there is a lot of time to improve.

But can plate discipline be learned or is it an innate skill? Many think it's more of an innate skill than something that can be learned, and I'm sure there is some truth in that. I expect that pitch recognition, which is surely a significant part of plate discipline, depends on innate physical attributes, such as good vision and quick reflexes. On the other hand, Tom Tango has shown that a player's walk rate tends to improve with age, essentially until he retires. At some level, batters can, and do, learn to take a walk.

One way to approach the question is to see if there have been players in the past who are similar to Jeff Francoeur at age 22 and, if so, see what they did in the rest of their careers. Let's see if this kind of investigation can teach us anything.

Everybody wants you to be just like them ...

I believe Bill James was the first person to come up with the idea of "Similarity Scores". The idea is to compare two players based on their stats. Did they have a similar number of home runs? Did they walk the same amount? Did they play the same position? James devised a numerical method for evaluating how similar two players are, and he used these Similarity Scores extensively in his book Whatever Happened to the Hall of Fame? You can see James' Similarity Scores in action at Baseball Reference, where the top matches are shown for each player.

Similarities among players are also used by analysts doing projections. To project how a young player might do in the future, similar players in the past are identified to see what kind of careers they ended up having. You can find a discussion of sim scores for projection systems in Part 4 of our Projection Roundtable. Here I'm going to be doing something similar in looking for comparables to Jeff Francoeur. I'm not going to compare body types (height and weight) or handedness or any of that stuff. I'm just going to look for young players who had about the same number of plate appearances, similar batting average and power numbers, and similar walk and strikeout rates.

Here's what I did: I first selected a sample of players who have accrued roughly the same number of plate appearances at the same age as Francoeur. Anybody who by the end of their age-22 or age-23 seasons who had made between 500 and 1000 plate appearances makes it into my sample (Francoeur will have around 950 plate appearances by the end of this season). Intentional bases on balls were not officially recorded before 1955, and they are needed in this study, so my sample contains players who debuted after that year. I'll refer to these players as "rookies" below, although I haven't applied the usual rules for rookie-eligibilty.

The first thing you can do with this sample is see if there are any players with a similar walk rate to Francoeur's. Here are the 10 closest matches in UIBB rate:

Low Walk-Rate Rookies
+-----------------+-----------+----------+
| name            | years     | uibbrate |
+-----------------+-----------+----------+
| Reitz_Ken       | 1972-1973 |    0.018 |
| Fuentes_Tito    | 1965-1966 |    0.019 |
| Francoeur_Jeff  | 2005-2006 |    0.019 |
| Oliver_Al       | 1968-1969 |    0.021 |
| Lanier_Hal      | 1964-1965 |    0.024 |
| Nixon_Russ      | 1957-1958 |    0.024 |
| Baines_Harold   | 1980-1981 |    0.025 |
| Alou_Jesus      | 1963-1965 |    0.025 |
| Santiago_Benito | 1986-1987 |    0.026 |
| Izturis_Cesar   | 2001-2002 |    0.026 |
| Lee_Carlos      | 1999-1999 |    0.026 |
+-----------------+-----------+----------+

Actually, every one of these players had a significant major league career, something that I wasn't expecting. Several of them were primarily glove men: Ken Reitz, Tito Fuentes and Hal Lanier (the double play combo on the Giants of the late 1960s), and Cesar Izturis. There are a couple of catchers (Benito Santiago, Russ Nixon), and three guys who turned out to be very good hitters: Al Oliver, Harold Baines and Carlos Lee.

But did these guys ever learn to take a walk? The next table shows their career UIBB rate:

Low Walk-Rate Rookies: Before and After
+-----------------+----------+--------+
| name            | < 24 yrs | Career |
+-----------------+----------+--------+
| Reitz_Ken       |    0.018 |  0.028 |
| Fuentes_Tito    |    0.019 |  0.047 |
| Oliver_Al       |    0.021 |  0.044 |
| Lanier_Hal      |    0.024 |  0.029 |
| Nixon_Russ      |    0.024 |  0.044 |
| Baines_Harold   |    0.025 |  0.081 |
| Alou_Jesus      |    0.025 |  0.024 |
| Santiago_Benito |    0.026 |  0.052 |
| Izturis_Cesar   |    0.026 |  0.041 |
| Lee_Carlos      |    0.026 |  0.069 |
+-----------------+----------+--------+

Well, this looks like some good news for Frenchy. Nine out of these 10 players improved their walk rate after putting up poor rookie numbers. On the other hand, only Baines brought his walk rate up to the league average, and only two other players managed to surpass the 5% threshold. If Francoeur could get his walk rate to 5%, how would that affect his overall performance? Well, it depends on where the walks come from: the outs or the hits. Let's be optimistic and assume that he turns enough outs into walks to give him a 5% UIBB rate. Doing a quick-and-dirty calculation, his modified lifetime batting line comes out .281/.322/.499 (compared to his actual numbers .272/.300/.483). That's a lot better, of course, and it's about average for a corner outfielder these days.

Frenchy's Doppelgangers

The thing is, though, most of these players are not really comparable to Francoeur. Reitz, Lanier, Fuentes, Nixon, Jesus Alou and Izturis all hit for much less power than Frenchy. And it turns out that the two best power bats in the list, Baines and Lee, showed the biggest improvement in walk rate. So, maybe Francoeur has a better shot at improvement than this list would have you believe. We should be looking at players who are similar to Francoeur in various ways, not just walk rate.

So, in an attempt to find players that were generally similar to Francoeur, I also computed for each player the following stats for those plate appearances: batting average, isolated power and strikeout rate. I then formed something called a chi-square to combine these stats (together with UIBB rate) to give me a single number that tells me how similar any given player is to Jeff Francoeur. (If you are interested in the details of the chi-square calculation, ~~you should get a life~~. Uh, I mean, I give them below in the "Resources" section). The following table gives the top 20 matches for Jeff Francoeur, based on our matching stats.

Jeff Francoeur's Most Similar Players
+--------------------+-----------+------+-------+----------+-------+-------+------+
| name               | years     | pa   | ba    | uibbrate | iso   | krate | chi2 |
+--------------------+-----------+------+-------+----------+-------+-------+------+
| Francoeur_Jeff     | 2005-2006 |  746 | 0.272 |    0.019 | 0.211 | 0.197 |  --- |
+--------------------+-----------+------+-------+----------+-------+-------+------+
| Encarnacion_Juan   | 1997-1999 |  742 | 0.271 |    0.032 | 0.203 | 0.214 |  0.3 |
| Samuel_Juan        | 1983-1984 |  806 | 0.273 |    0.036 | 0.170 | 0.231 |  1.2 |
| Presley_Jim        | 1984-1985 |  873 | 0.261 |    0.046 | 0.199 | 0.187 |  1.3 |
| Cantu_Jorge        | 2004-2005 |  807 | 0.289 |    0.034 | 0.200 | 0.159 |  1.5 |
| Santiago_Benito    | 1986-1987 |  631 | 0.299 |    0.026 | 0.168 | 0.198 |  1.9 |
| Gonzalez_Alex      | 1998-1999 |  683 | 0.260 |    0.036 | 0.150 | 0.213 |  1.9 |
| Mondesi_Raul       | 1993-1994 |  542 | 0.304 |    0.028 | 0.208 | 0.174 |  2.0 |
| Munoz_Pedro        | 1990-1992 |  671 | 0.273 |    0.040 | 0.147 | 0.205 |  2.0 |
| Dye_Jermaine       | 1996-1997 |  584 | 0.259 |    0.043 | 0.157 | 0.203 |  2.1 |
| Dunston_Shawon     | 1985-1986 |  874 | 0.253 |    0.037 | 0.152 | 0.179 |  2.4 |
| Baines_Harold      | 1980-1981 |  805 | 0.266 |    0.025 | 0.167 | 0.132 |  2.5 |
| Dawson_Andre       | 1976-1977 |  651 | 0.275 |    0.053 | 0.175 | 0.163 |  2.6 |
| Lee_Carlos         | 1999-1999 |  509 | 0.293 |    0.026 | 0.171 | 0.143 |  2.6 |
| Uribe_Juan         | 2001-2002 |  888 | 0.260 |    0.046 | 0.141 | 0.199 |  2.9 |
| Roberts_Dave       | 1972-1973 |  933 | 0.266 |    0.033 | 0.135 | 0.158 |  3.0 |
| Rice_Jim           | 1974-1975 |  676 | 0.304 |    0.050 | 0.174 | 0.200 |  3.4 |
| Pepitone_Joe       | 1962-1963 |  751 | 0.265 |    0.032 | 0.182 | 0.113 |  3.4 |
| Gant_Ron           | 1987-1988 |  696 | 0.260 |    0.062 | 0.172 | 0.186 |  3.4 |
| Durham_Leon        | 1980-1981 |  677 | 0.281 |    0.057 | 0.163 | 0.160 |  3.5 |
| Howard_Frank       | 1958-1960 |  536 | 0.261 |    0.064 | 0.195 | 0.240 |  3.5 |
+--------------------+-----------+------+-------+----------+-------+-------+------+
chi2 - the lower the number, the more similar the player

The overall best match is Juan Encarnacion, the current right fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. Encarnacion matches almost perfectly in all categories, except for walk rate. In fact, as you can see from the table, none of these players had walk rates as low as Francoeur's. Again, the majority of the people on this list had solid major league careers and several of them were stars with borderline Hall of Fame credentials. The two players who never did much were Pedro Munoz and Dave Roberts, who fashioned 600-game careers as part-time or semi-regular players.

And how did this group fare in career walk rate, after the slow starts? The following table shows the rookie and career walk-rates for these players (I've removed Jorge Cantu and Juan Uribe, who haven't really had careers yet).

Walk Rates for Most Similar Players
+------------------+----------+--------+-------------+
| Name             | < 24 yrs | Career | Improvement |
+------------------+----------+--------+-------------+
| Encarnacion_Juan |    0.032 |  0.057 |       0.025 |
| Samuel_Juan      |    0.036 |  0.062 |       0.026 |
| Presley_Jim      |    0.046 |  0.051 |       0.005 |
| Santiago_Benito  |    0.026 |  0.052 |       0.026 |
| Gonzalez_Alex    |    0.036 |  0.039 |       0.003 |
| Mondesi_Raul     |    0.028 |  0.068 |       0.040 |
| Munoz_Pedro      |    0.040 |  0.053 |       0.013 |
| Dye_Jermaine     |    0.043 |  0.076 |       0.033 |
| Dunston_Shawon   |    0.037 |  0.026 |      -0.011 |
| Baines_Harold    |    0.025 |  0.081 |       0.056 |
| Dawson_Andre     |    0.053 |  0.043 |      -0.010 |
| Lee_Carlos       |    0.026 |  0.069 |       0.043 |
| Roberts_Dave     |    0.033 |  0.050 |       0.017 |
| Rice_Jim         |    0.050 |  0.067 |       0.017 |
| Gant_Ron         |    0.062 |  0.102 |       0.040 |
| Pepitone_Joe     |    0.032 |  0.043 |       0.011 |
| Durham_Leon      |    0.057 |  0.088 |       0.031 |
| Howard_Frank     |    0.064 |  0.091 |       0.027 |
+------------------+----------+--------+-------------+
| Average          |    0.040 |  0.062 |       0.022 |
+------------------+----------+--------+-------------+

Again, almost everybody improved their walk rate, with the notable exceptions of Andre Dawson and Shawon Dunston. The average walk rate of these 18 players went from 4% to 6.2%.

What does it mean?

So, what does all this mean for Jeff Francoeur? Well, let me tell you a secret: I just don't know what it means. To be perfectly honest, I don't know if the "similar players" method actually works. To my knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated that it helps in predicting players' futures. Oh, I agree that it seems logical, but many things that seem very logical at the time turn out to be quite wrong.

Still, I think we can draw some conclusions about Francoeur. I think there is a good chance he will improve his plate discipline significantly. Many others have done so. However, when we look at how many players make a dramatic improvement in walk rate, say, more than doubling it, there are not very many. In the list above, only Baines, Raul Mondesi and Carlos Lee have accomplished the feat. My guess is that Francoeur's upside is "average corner outfielder".

References and Resources

What Ever Happened to the Hall of Fame? is an excellent book by Bill James. It's more than just an analysis of who should or should not go into the Hall, it's a history of the institution itself and it also contains lots of sabermetric stuff. And, as usual, the writing is entertaining. Good stuff.
The chi2 variable that I used to find similar players to Francoeur is the sum of four different terms, each one having the same general form: [(v - jf)/s]^2. The four terms correspond to the 4 matching variables that we use: UIBB rate, strikeout rate, batting average and isolated power. "v" is the value for the player being compared, "jf" is Jeff Francoeur's value for that variable. "s" represents the RMS of the variable in question, for our sample of rookies. A perfect match would give a chi2 value of zero and the worse the match, the higher the chi2 value.

John Walsh dabbles in baseball analysis in his spare time. He welcomes questions and comments via e-mail.

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