Rebutting Jeff Francoer, The Fancy Version

Jeff Francoeur said in an interview recently, presumably to explain part of his struggles with the Mets last year, that "Citi Field is a damn joke." This statement has been getting him a lot of criticism on Mets-partisan sites, with the argument being that, "No, Jeff Francoeur, you were the damn joke." Not that every single argument needs to be made with fancy stats, but I'll do it anyway.

The stat ISO, or isolated power, is defined as slugging percentage minus batting average, or, equivalently, total extra bases per at bat. Over his career, Jeff Francoeur's ISO has been .157. A stat that I prefer to see how powerful a player is independently of how good a pure hitter they are is TB/H or, equivalently, slugging percentage over batting average. Francoeur's bases-per-hit rate for his career is 1.586. And finally, just to cover all the bases as it were, Francoeur's on-base gap (on-base percentage minus batting average) for his career is .042 (which is a really dismal number). How were those numbers in CitiField?

Well, his ISO was .155, a truly tremendous decline. That wide outfield was really taking away a lot of his extra bases, huh? Especially since his bases-per-hit rate was 1.622, above his career average. And his on-base gap was .044, also slightly above his career average. The only thing that Jeff Francoeur did badly at CitiField was hit for average. Now, I'm not sure but I would expect a ballpark like CitiField to strengthen batting average if anything, because there will be so much more empty space in the outfield. Perhaps the distance of the walls will make pitchers that much more confident and lead them to pitch more aggressively to a guy like Francoeur, but does that really constitute the stadium's being "a damn joke"? I don't think so; I think what Francoeur is trying to say is that he hit a lot of balls that would have been home runs elsewhere but were measly outs in Flushing, and that having a stadium like that is a joke. But his power numbers didn't get worse. So the story doesn't hold up.