Alex Gordon and Jeff Francoeur were shut down for the year because the peasant Royals want to give Lorenzo Cain and Jarrod Dyson a full three days to show their worth. Gordon’s line this year was 101/23/87/.303/17. Terrific! Wonderful! Tonderific! But if you peak under the hood, things aren’t as they seem. His BABIP is .358, easily a career high in the majors. His walk rate and line drive rate dropped from last year, and his ground ball rate nudged up. His homers and speed look about right, but if luck goes against him those two categories could get affected. He’s probably much closer to a .280 hitter with 17-20 homers and 12-15 steals. With just a tad bad luck, he becomes a fifteen homer guy with 10 steals and a .265 average. That’s far from spectacular. That’s spectaculess. I just made that up; you like it? You use it. As for Frenchy, his line was 77/20/87/.285/22. Oh, well, that looks pretty normal– Wait a second, 22 steals?! Where the eff in the effhole did those come from? His previous high was 8. He always failed to take pitches like he needed some ADHD medicine, but now he’s running the bases like it too. “Sorry, first base coach, whatever your name is, can’t stay at 1st, gotta run, peace!” That’s Frenchy, and he can’t even stop for a period at the end of sentences; he only has time for commas. He’s always been a notorious bad ball hitter. This year Frenchy swung at 41% of balls outside the strike zone, which is actually high for him, and his percentage of balls swung at inside the strike zone was actually down. Only thing that changed this year, he made more contact with pitches outside of the strike zone. If that stops along with his whacked out of his mind stealing, he may use 2012 to revert to his old ways, so it’ll be hard to give Frenchy my arrondissement. Anyway, here’s what else I saw this weekend in fantasy baseball:
Psyche! Before we get into the roundup, I just wanted to announce a very good friend of mine is putting on a one man show in Los Angeles. If you go see the play, you may just run into yours truly and my significant other — my mustache. If you can’t make it to Los Angeles or if you’re in Los Angeles but afraid to leave your house, you can buy his book. Anyway II, the roundup:
Hunter Pence – 3-for-5 with his 21st homer. Hey, that homer can drink legally! After Pence sat out for three games with a sore knee, it was good to see him return, unless you had him on your bench like I did. Sonavabench!
Please, blog, may I have some more?