is Jeff Francis turning into Jamie Moyer?
Francis opened up the season on April Fools Day and went seven strong innings allowing five hits, a walk and one earned run while striking out four. The lone earned run came on a first inning solo shot by Howie Kendrick.
Francis settled down and hit his spots en route to a terrific Royals debut but his velocity was down, way down.
Francis occasionally touched 88mph, but his two and four seamers averaged 84 and 86mph, respectively. Francis had lost velocity since his career-derailing injury, but had averaged 87.7mph on the four-seamer the previous two years.
But the fastball velocity didn’t matter in his Royals debut, Francis relied heavily on the change and threw it almost 30% of the time. Francis’ change only came in at 7mph slower than his fastball, but it exhibited great horizontal and vertical movement and got five swinging strikes on the pitch (18%). Francis took even more off when he went to his sub-70mph curveball. Both off-speed pitches were incredibly effective with great movement.
Francis is one of the pitchers that’s always intrigued me and his slow but stable transition into a GB-pitcher only further piques my interest. On the first, he got 71% worm-burners and only 9% fly-balls. This is a tiny sample size, but Francis has seen his FB% go from 40% in 2004 to last year’s 32.2% in about 2%-per-Year increments.
Last year in the hitters-haven that is Coors’ Field, Francis posted a 5.00 ERA with a sub-4.00 FIP and xFIP. Coming over to Kansas City should certainly help: Kauffman routinely plays about average in terms of Park Factors, but suppresses homers. The Royals and Rockies defenses are probably a wash, but I’d expect a handful more unearned runs in KC (I hate defensive metrics.)
In deep leagues, I can see Francis being a very valuable piece of your fantasy squad and Kansas City’s rotation. He still has to stay healthy, but he’s getting great action on every pitch. He should continue to get a decent ground-ball rate and post very, very mediocre strike-out rates. Obviously, it’s a bit of hyperbole comparing Francis to Moyer, but I might end up calling him a lefty soft-tosser from time to time.
