Long story short: baseball player Jeff Francoeur is fooled by his teammates into believing that a fellow teammate was deaf. For an entire month.
Now I doubt any who follows my brog is really aware of this, but when I used to be a writer for Talking Chop, and an active member of the community, I had a 15-second glimpse of internet notoriety when I had made a t-shirt in “honor” of Jeff Francoeur, where I took the generic composition of a player jersey t-shirt (aka “the shirsey”) and replaced “Francoeur” with “Failcoeur.” I was dumb(er) and immature (then), and let the nerdy, results-driven frustration of an overly passionate baseball fan take the driver’s seat in that period of time which gave birth to the concept and execution of the design, despite the fact that it was coming at someone else’s expense.
Among the nerdy internet baseball community, the shirt really took off. People who weren’t even Braves fans were emailing me, asking me how they could get one, and of course there were plenty of Braves fans, also exasperated with Francoeur’s below-mediocre performance who were wanting their own shirt as well. Talking Chop, as well as myself got a little bit of spotlight shown on them from varying other baseball blogs and outlets, and although I was far from the first person to have used the term Failcoeur, I was becoming somewhat notorious for putting out into the public so visually.
I’ll let the fact that I’m not linking to any instances of such as a sign that I look back at that time with a little bit of regret and shame, because when the ride was over, it was still something silly and really immature that I did. Through hearsay, it was my understanding that Jeff Francoeur was made aware of the shirts, and it also doesn’t help that every time I published the shirts on Zazzle, they would get taken down pretty quickly, furthering the suspicion that someone close if not him, was aware too. I doubt his feelings were hurt or he was in the least bit affected by the situation, but the thought might have crossed his mind that fans from the team he was playing for were not happy with his existence.
I’m very much aware that in the grand spectrum of things, Jeff Francoeur may not have been the best baseball player out there, but when it came to being a cool, regular kind of guy, few were better. From the time he bought a bunch of pizzas to opposing fans while on the road, to the time he bought a bunch of fans in a section beers for being his fans. Francoeur was always involved in varying charities in every city he played for, and when it came to interacting with fans, there are hundreds of pictures all over the internet where families and kids are posing with Jeff Francoeur, regardless of they even knew who he was. He was a guy that always understood the importance of giving back to the fans, and that as a (at the time) Major League Baseball player, he had influence and visibility, and utilized such in the most positive of lights as possible.
My former disdain for Francoeur, as well as everyone else who claimed to have not liked him, was all always misdirected. It was never his fault that he was paid as much as he was, it was never his fault that the media made him out to be this Babe Ruth-ian talent when he wasn’t. Francoeur was the smart guy to take these deals if teams were going to offer them to him, because when the day is over, his and his family’s financial security trumps whether or not nerds on the internet are satisfied with his on-base percentage, or how many strikeouts he accrued, or how many men he left on base.
Needless to say, I do like Jeff Francoeur. He’s a guy that gets life, as clichéd as it may sound, and I hope that he manages to stay in baseball just a little bit longer, whether it’s playing in the minor leagues, or clawing his way back to the major leagues and finding a spot on someone’s 25-man roster.
But man, this prank that his teammates pulled on him? Truly epic. As cool of a guy as he is, Francoeur’s obviously not the sharpest tool in the shed, and his teammates on the El Paso Chihuahuas (I’m actually amazed that that’s an actual MiLB team, too) are very quick to remind him of that fact. And the way Francoeur conducted himself throughout the entire prank is also classic Francoeur. Super PC about how he spoke about his supposed deaf teammate, and yet extremely jovial and supportive of everything he did when he was under the guise to have been hearing impaired.
Yet in the end, when the cat was let out of the bag, despite that everyone was having fun at his expense, Francoeur took it in stride, and laughed along with the rest of his teammates. Even in public humiliation, he still shines and comes out on top, looking like everyone’s good buddy.
But it doesn’t change the fact that he was still Francoeu’wned.
