There was a time not so long ago when I thought with absolute certainty that Maikel Franco was going to be a cornerstone player of the next great Phillies teams. As an ascending 22-year-old in 2015, Franco burst onto the scene with the Phillies by posting a .280/.343/.497 slashline over 335 plate appearances. “Schmidt. Rolen. Franco,” I thought to myself at the time. In hindsight, that was probably a bit aggressive and symptomatic of a depressed fan who was desperately grasping at straws during perhaps the bleakest year of the Phillies’ rebuild. Still, it seemed like a good bet that Franco would, at the very least, be able to replicate his successful rookie season and solidify himself as a legitimate middle-of-the-order threat. Surely, you remember this:

Franco made me feel, I don’t know, giddy. And safe. At the time, I considered purchasing a life-size Maikel Franco Fathead that I could plaster on my bedroom ceiling to watch over me as I slept at night. It seemed like a can’t-lose proposition. He would be there to greet me in the morning, someone to talk with about my day when I came home, and share all of my private moments with me. Ultimately, I was afraid of commitment and wanted to wait one more season before I took such a serious step forward in our relationship.

After watching a clueless Franco over-swing his way through a disappointing 2016 season without a plan or approach at the plate and then fail miserably to adapt a year later, my once high hopes for Franco had been replaced by disappointment, disgust, and skepticism. Every now and then, as he would be in the midst of another brutal stretch, he would launch a ball with his occasionally pretty swing, but I wouldn’t let myself be duped. I knew another rough stretch was right around the corner. I wasn’t wrong. By many metrics he was the worst offensive third baseman in baseball a season ago.

His inability to adapt to pitchers’ frequently utilized game plan of working him with off-speed stuff low, away, and often out of the strike zone earned him the reputation of an impatient and undisciplined hitter– one who either lacked the baseball intelligence to understand how he was being attacked, or perhaps worse, the concern.

I’ve been a vocal critic of Franco for those reasons, so you can probably guess that I have been reluctant to acknowledge his improved numbers so far this season, along with the increasing frequency of swings such as this one:

Still, he enters Monday’s action with a .283/.321/.535 slashline and is on pace to swat 29 homers and to knock in 128 runs. That’s pretty damn good, so I figured now, with just over a fifth of the season complete, seems like a good time to go a bit deeper on his resurgence and see if this start can be trusted.

To begin, this graph provides a quality visual to illustrate:
1) His numbers have improved.
2) They are more in line with his 2015 performance.

I’m somewhat comforted by the fact that Franco has previously shown for an extended stretch the ability to be a productive Major League hitter. It’s not like this is completely foreign territory for the 25-year-old.

I began this exercise with the assumption that his statistical improvement was driven by a better plate approach, but he’s swinging at a similar percentage of pitches both inside and outside of the strike zone that he did over the previous two season, as you can see here:

But not every conclusion can be made solely relying upon graphs and numbers. Sometimes the eyes don’t lie, and it “seems” like Franco has improved in terms of approach and discipline this season. I will use his second inning at-bat yesterday against Max Scherzer to demonstrate this point. Franco had already fouled off a slider, four-seam fastball, and changeup prior to the taking this good 2-2 changeup that was low and out of the zone:

In the past, how many times have we seen Franco aimlessly and unsuccessfully flail at a pitch similar to this one? This time, Franco works the count full and the flips a 94.8 four-seam fastball that’s off the plate, but also too close to take, into right field for a base hit:

This is a swing that shows progression in his approach. He didn’t try to do too much and took what Scherzer gave him to finish off an impressive nine-pitch at-bat. Truthfully, I was more excited by this than I was with his eighth inning homer.

What about his swing mechanics? It’s interesting to me that the Phillies felt Franco was hitting too many ground balls a year ago and that they are working to improve the launch angle of his swing. You can read about these changes in this Scott Lauber story, but here’s the gist:

Too many balls on the ground, regardless of how quickly they came off the bat, led to too many outs, which led to a disappointing .230 average and .409 slugging percentage from a player whose power should make him a middle-of-the-order force.

Here’s the thing, his launch angle has actually declined this season from 11.4% in 2017 to 10.41% this season, and his 43.7% ground ball percentage is similar to the 45.4% he posted a year ago, so whatever changes they have made haven’t made an impact on that front. In fact, when you look at most of his peripherals, his numbers from his down years mirror that of his resurgent 2018, so what gives? Well, it’s his ability to hit the fastball.

In 2017, Franco slashed an abysmal .233/.285/.456 against four-seam fastballs, whereas this season he’s posted a .371/.436/.686 line. His wFB (fastball runs above average) has also risen from -9.3 to 3.1 this season. What does that mean? Essentially, he’s gone from a subpar hitter against fastballs to an elite one so far this season. If it seems like he’s still terrible against the slider, well, that is because he is. Franco’s average actually is down from .186 in ’17 to .136 this year—but when he gets fastballs, he’s making it count.

So is this performance sustainable? Truthfully, it’s hard to say. I’m not planning to purchase his Fathead any time soon, and I don’t think he’s on the brink of blossoming into a perennial all-star, but at the very least, he’s giving us reason to believe that he can help this team win baseball games moving forward.