For The Team ...

By John Coppinger
Posted Friday, March 9, 2007

For the most part, spring training is that appetizer that never quite fills you up, but gives you just enough so that the taste is in your mouth and gets your stomach rumbling hard for that main course, which for Mets fans is April 1st.

But every once in a while, you get that spring training morsel that is strangely satisfying, strangely filling. For me, that morsel came when Marty Noble wrote a feature on the Mets website discussing Shawn Green getting his swing back in the cage…thanks to one Julio Franco.

Now, I’ve certainly had my share of fun teasing Julio over his age. "Why"?, you ask. Well, it’s definitely good for a cheap laugh....... little more, though. You see, the truth is this: I’m glad Julio Franco is wearing a Mets uniform. His contributions are of the intangible variety, from forcing Carlos Beltran to take a curtain call and turn his Mets career around, to preventing Jose Guillen from shoving his bat into one of Pedro Martinez’s orifices; and who knows how much of an influence he’s had on guys like Lastings Milledge, and others.

So it’s obvious that Julio Franco is all about what’s good for the team. So the right thing for the team might for Franco to retire and become a full time coach?

Well, as of Wednesday, March 7th, Julio Franco is hitting .417 in the spring, with at least one of those hits being a single down the right field line after which I thought “boy, he got around on that” (not a good sign). But hey, .417 is .417, so I’m not about to quibble there.

First a disclaimer about myself: I’m not one of those people that go around talking about players hanging around the game too long and embarrassing themselves. They should hang it up when the time is right. Really, who are we…who am I to tell anybody, let alone Julio Franco, to retire from the only profession he’s ever had in his life? If you can do it, and you’re willing to put yourself through another spring training or training camp, then bless your heart. Personally, I get more annoyed at the multiple “retirements” and "comebacks" that athletes frequently resort to (see Jordan, Michael or Clemens, Roger for examples).

In 2006 Franco, for his part, hit a very respectable .273 with a couple of home runs, 26 RBI’s, and six stolen bases (most of them a result of catching opposing catchers asleep). So Julio and his egg whites can still do it. And he obviously loves it or he wouldn’t be in Port St. Lucie picking grounders. So, bless his heart.

But it’s a fine line between a base hit up the middle and a 6-4-3 double play. And it seemed to the naked, untrained eye that the line was slowly being crossed more and more to the left for Franco during the second half of the 2006 season. So while a diet of egg whites may be good for longevity, it might not be enough to endure another full season. So at some point, Franco is going to look around and see guys like David Newhan, Damion Easley, and Ben Johnson, and truly wonder if taking a roster spot from one of these guys is really the best thing for the team. And he’ll have a tough decision to make.

At this point, it’s Julio’s decision and nobody else’s. This one is out of Omar Minaya’s hands. We laughed when Minaya signed Franco to a two-year deal instead of the one-year deal that most teams offered. But that was the price of Franco’s intangibles. For Omar, or Willie Randolph, to pull the trigger on Franco’s Mets career now and not give Julio that second season would be equal to a broken promise, and would most likely cost them Franco’s services as a coach/mentor. So as of now Franco, believe it or not, has the safest roster spot on the team.

So this has to be one man’s decision, and one man’s alone. If those base hits up the middle start turning into more and more six-four-threes as the calendar turns to May and June, the decision becomes harder and harder; but it’s for one man to decide. Rest assured, whatever happens regarding Julio Franco will be done in the best interests of the team, just like finding Shawn Green’s swing.

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For more unfair bashing of old people and egg white recipes, come join me at http://metstradamus.blogspot.com and call me an age discriminator. I probably deserve it.