Looking at Anderson vs. Griffey as Braves Surge

Imagine if the Atlanta Braves had signed both John Smoltz and Ken Griffey Jr., as most fans were hoping, during the offseason?
I'll admit -- I was among them (at least on Griffey, not on Smoltz). Griffey is about three years older than I am and when he first came up with the Mariners, I was a much bigger baseball fan.
Something about the idea of signing him captured the imaginations of so many baseball fans in Atlanta. Even if he could not perform at the level that he did when he first came up more than two decades ago -- of course everyone knew that he could not -- it was Griffey nostalgia that would have played so well in Atlanta.
After all, unlike so many other sports, isn't so much of baseball about a reverence of and affection for the past? (I don't see Hollywood making movies like "Field of Dreams" or "The Natural" about other sports.)
Atlanta baseball fans could have re-lived their own pasts, the idea goes, by watching Griffey creak around the outfield, even if he were a shadow of his former self. One could sense the team's sales and marketing department collectively salivating over the billboards, slogans and Griffey-generated ticket sales.
When he chose to sign instead with the Mariners amid a flurry of acrimony, all of that hot-stove anticipation was dashed. Exacerbating the problem was that it marked the third time in three months that the Braves had failed to land a big name.
First in December, it was ex-Brave Rafael Furcal ditching the team at the last second (after the Braves believed that Furcal had agreed to a contract) to re-up with the Dodgers, prompting Braves president John Schuerholz's tirade that the organization would never again deal with Furcal's Atlanta-based agent Paul Kinzer.
In January, Smoltz seemed to do the impossible and turned his back on the only organization with which he had ever played to sign with Boston.
Clearly, by the time that the Braves failed to land Griffey, the luster of 14 straight division titles was so far in the past that many -- the fans, media -- began to dump on the organization.
Whether the Braves make the National League playoffs remains to be seen, but what seems fairly obvious right now is that with Smoltz or Griffey or both, they would not be a better team. The Braves are 6 1/2 games behind the defending World Series' champion Phillies in the East, but only 3 1/2 behind Colorado for the Wild Card spot. If the current pace holds, it looks as if the Braves are on the verge of playing meaningful baseball well into September for the first time in four seasons -- what seems like an eternity here in Atlanta, where postseason runs once seemed a birthright.
Since June 28, when the Braves entered the day 34-40, they have gone 17-8 over their last 25 games. Their pitching -- already among the best in the major leagues -- got a shot in the arm from the promotion of rookie Tommy Hanson (in spite of the fiasco that erupted when the Braves cut future Hall of Famer Tom Glavine) at the start of June, but it's the amazing turnaround in run scoring that has the Braves competitive again.
Which brings us back to Mr. Griffey. Griffey is doing the impossible: By hitting .211 with 10 home runs and 27 RBI, he almost makes ex-Brave outfielder Jeff Francoeur's offensive output look like an All-Star season in comparison. Griffey also has 45 strikeouts in 75 games.
His contract is worth $4.5 million with $2 million in guaranteed money.
Now let's look at who the Braves signed instead, Garret Anderson. Anderson, who started slowly, is making $2.5 million this year with the Braves.
In the 10 games since the All-Star Break, Anderson is hitting a sizzling .429 and has scored 7 runs and has 4 RBI. Over his last 13 games, he's hitting .383 with 7 runs and 6 RBI.
Overall, he's hitting .292 with 7 home runs and 37 RBI. He has struck out 40 times in 77 games.
So not only did the Braves save money in the long run with Griffey's incentives, but they also got a player who is hitting 81 points higher and has 10 more RBI.
To be fair, others -- notably Yunel Escobar, Martin Prado, Brian McCann and Chipper Jones, who was suffering through an inexplicable season-long (by his standards) slump -- have picked up at the plate and now Braves admirers are saying the lineup doesn't have any easy out in the top eight.
And then there is Smoltz, who gave up six earned runs in five innings on Sunday and watched his record fall to 1-4 and his earned-run average balloon to 7.04. The Red Sox say they plan on sticking with Smoltz -- for how long, one wonders -- but a frustrated 42-year-old Smoltz seemed to openly raise the prospect of his retirement after his latest outing.
(Interesting how what the Braves feared would happen if they had allowed Glavine to return to the major league roster is playing out in Boston with Smoltz. While I think that the Braves made the right move with Smoltz, I still think they dealt unfairly with Glavine.)
So with football -- King of Sports here in the South -- about to get training camps underway in less than a week in Atlanta, the Braves could keep a bit of the sporting interest turned their way.
That certainly would not be the case with Smoltz and Griffey in the lineup.

Francoeur's Fall and Hope for a Fresh Start

A little more than a year ago I spoke to Jeff Francoeur for a story that I wrote about his seemingly limitless potential as a corporate pitchman.
At age 24, the right fielder was coming off his second straight season in which he played all 162 games. The Atlanta Braves home-grown product had hit .293 the year before with 19 home runs and 105 RBI and he had a bona fide squeaky-clean, local-boy-makes-good image. (I remember when I was at the Journal-Constitution and covered one of his high school football games during the 2001 season at Parkview -- Francoeur was an unbelievably dominant player as a safety and wide receiver on back-to-back state championship teams -- I counted something like nine different staffers who had written stories about him; today nine reporters would represent almost the entire AJC sports staff.)
By early 2008, Francoeur already had endorsement deals with Delta Air Lines, sports apparel maker Under Armour and sporting goods equipment manufacturer Mizuno.
He had switched his representation to Cobb County-based Career Sports and Entertainment, an agency that specialized in marketing, as well as client representation. He was entering a contract year and figured to cash in both with on the field and off.
I was convinced that for Francoeur the sky was the limit concerning his marketing potential, as, apparently, was Francoeur.
"We're looking at a couple of other big ones for this offseason," he said. "There are so many good businesses in Atlanta, from Coke, Home Depot, Chick-fil-A."
That story ran on May 30. If his decline had not begun at that point, it was about to. According to the AJC's Dave O'Brien, Francoeur's numbers have been dreadful since the 2007 All-Star Break: a .256 average with 25 home runs, 153 RBI, a .304 on-base percentage and a .381 slugging percentage in 310 games.
I remember feeling bad for Francoeur after the story ran. There he was on the front page of the Atlanta Business Chronicle talking about his strategies for life after baseball and such and at the same time the fortunes of his on-field career were plummeting.
Was it possible that he took his eye off the prize, that he was thinking too much about contracts and endorsements and not baseball? I've never been around him long enough to know, but I'd imagine that that his comments in that story might not have made the Braves' baseball people too happy. Of course, had Francoeur played the same way as he had in his first few seasons, there would have been no issue at all.
But on a few occasions, Francoeur, someone unaccustomed to having to deal with adversity, could have made better decisions in how he handled situations. At the top of the list was his comments after the Braves sent him to the minors to try to get his hitting back up to par in '08.
He bristled at the demotion and talked about how it had hurt his relationship with the organization. Then this past offseason there was his decision to consult a hitting coach other than the Braves' Terry Pendleton.
An effervescent personality who is a hard-worker and popular with his teammates and the fans, Francoeur's popularity made it virtually impossible for the team to criticism him publicly. But until the point where the Braves ultimately shipped him to the Mets late on Friday, the trade rumors had long persisted.
How much was the Braves' shopping of Francoeur a question of performance and how much was it a question of attitude?
Only Frank Wren, Bobby Cox and John Schuerholz know the answer. Yet it's possible that performance and attitude were intertwined and that is what so frustrated the Braves. But the truth is that on an offensively weak team like the Braves, Francoeur's performance at the plate was not nearly good enough.
I am neither a fan of the Braves nor Mets (nor any baseball team, really) but I hope Francoeur regains his past form mainly because it's sad to see someone who appears to be a genuinely decent person succumb to such a fall from grace. (I covered the night when Parkview retired his baseball jersey in 2007 and he cried and gave a long speech and seemed sincerely moved, lingering long after the ceremony had ended to talk with members of the Gwinnett Daily Post and others.)
It would be a great irony to see an Atlanta product come back to haunt the Braves' most hated rival. I doubt few if any fans would turn on him in the way that they did when Tom Glavine signed with the Mets. After all, Francoeur didn't choose to leave, even if the move was necessary.
If Francoeur doesn't get back to form, he risks becoming one of those baseball oddites like 1980 American League Rookie of the Year Joe Charboneau who was out of the major leagues after hitting .214 in '82.
And that's a cruel fate that few, if any, deserve.