By Bud L. Ellis
braves.today.com
ATLANTA – If you’ve never spent an entire season writing about a sports team day-in and day-out, let me take you through the process of what happens when that season finally ends.
You spend the next few days looking back and writing about what happened, trying to put all the games, all the stories, all that you’ve seen, into some sort of context. Then, you transition into offseason stuff. That lasts a while, and depending on how active or busy your team or your sport is, you might actually get to catch up on some sleep. Finally, you shift into preseason mode, where the focus of your writing is geared toward the season to come.
There is no calendar by which we follow, no hard-and-fast rules to go by. At some point in time, we’ll have to quit beating this dead horse that was the wretchedly awry 2008 Atlanta Braves season. There will be a time where the calamity that we witnessed the past half year will disappear from our daily musings. The season will be filed away, only to be recalled when the need arises.
But if your name is Jeff Francoeur, that can’t happen. You can never forget what you’ve suffered through these past six months. You cannot allow anything else that happens in your baseball career – and it is this observer’s belief he will achieve plenty of success – to make you say, “Yeah, that 2008 season wasn’t pretty, but I don’t think about it now.”
If you’re Jeff Francoeur, you can never forget what you did – or, to be specific, what you didn’t do – this past season.
You can never forget that 18 percent of your season home run output and approximately 10 percent of the runs you drove in this season came on the second Saturday in April, when you hit two dingers and chased home seven in a blowout win at Washington. You can never forget that in the other 154 games you played in, you managed to hit just nine homers and drive home 71 runs – in 594 at-bats.
You can never forget that you came to the plate 177 times with runners in scoring position, and the end result was a .190 average with four home runs. You can never forget that from May 1 through Aug. 31 – arguably the toughest four-month stretch I’ve ever watched a major-league hitter suffer through – you went 2-for-21 with the bases loaded.
You can never forget the feeling of spending Independence Day flying to Pearl, Miss., no longer a major-league baseball player, no longer the Golden Child, no longer the face of the franchise, but instead just another guy who couldn’t hack it in the bigs any more and needed some more seasoning in the bushes of the Southern League. Granted, you weren’t there long – and many, myself included, said then and say now you weren’t there long enough – but the fact you even were demoted back to the minors has to resonate with you, has to drive you, has to motivate you.
We’ve talked about how 2008 evolved into a lost season for the Braves. That description fits Francoeur better than anybody else. In some respects, it was lost even before it began. After his homers dropped from 29 in 2006 to 19 in 2007, and mindful the Braves weren’t going to resign power-hitting center fielder Andruw Jones, Francoeur bulked up after the ’07 campaign. He added 20 pounds, looking more like an NFL cornerback than a right fielder when he arrived at Lake Buena Vista.
He knows now the extra weight, the intensified focus on becoming a power hitter, was the wrong path to take. Francoeur at his best will hit 20-to-25 homers year-in, year-out, just from his natural ability. Too bulky from the word go this season, Francoeur never looked comfortable at the plate. Even worse, the extra poundage cut down on his range in right field and, one season after winning a Gold Glove, Francoeur spent most of the season sailing throws over Brian McCann’s head on plays at the plate.
As the season reached its final month, Francoeur had burned off most of the extra weight he gained in the offseason. The result: He hit .286 in September, raising his average as high as .240 before it settled at .239. Of his 28 hits last month, 10 were for extra bases. More importantly, Francoeur looked more comfortable at the plate, as if he finally had regained his feel for how to stand and how to swing.
In an interview during the season’s final week, Francoeur talked about how anxious he is to put 2008 behind him. I don’t blame him, but there is no way he should forget what he’s endured. He has to learn from this brutal season and grow from it. Having watched the hometown hero suffer through a summer of misery, I’m curious to see how he’ll respond when the calendar flips to 2009.
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