Jeff Francoeur is having a surprising season so far for the Braves, and it's not just because he is knocking in more than a run a game (24 RBI in 21 games). Yes, his projected total (172) would place him sixth all time on the single-season RBI list—quite impressive even this early on. However, I am more impressed by his walk total.

"Huh, he has just nine bases on balls, 14 behind league leader Ryan Howard in that category. What's so impressive about that?" you ask?

Consider that Francoeur projects to 63 for the season. Still not impressed? 63 seems about average or even below average for a player who might hit 30 homers, drive in 100 runs, and bat around .280, right?

Well, you need a bit of context to see why those 9 walks are so impressive. Ever since Francoeur was promoted to the majors, the knock against him has been his inability to draw a base on balls. He seemed to overcome that weakness in his rookie season (or rather half-season) finishing third in the 2005 Rookie of the Year voting with 14 home runs, 45 RBI, and a .300 average in just 257 major-league at-bats (with an adjusted OPS of 124). But wait for his comeuppance, said all of the sabermetricians like the Greek chorus heaping derision on the spoiled George Minafer in "The Magnificent Ambersons".

And his comeuppance seemed to come in his sophomore year. Francoeur slipped to .260 with just a .293 on-base percentage (a 43-point drop) despite 29 home runs and 103 RBI in 2006. His park-adjusted OPS was 11 points worse than the average NL batter. His slip was accompanied or perhaps presaged by a dropoff in walks, from 11 (including 3 intentional) in 274 plate appearances in 2005 to just 23 (6 IBB) in 686 last year. He walked 2.95% of the time in 2005 but just 2.50% in 2006, a 15.3% decline (note these percentages ignore intentional walks and their plate appearances). The sabermetric community wrote him off as another so-so power hitter with empty stats.

However, in 96 plate appearances so far this year, his 9 walks (1 intentional) translate into a 8.42% walk rate, or to put it another way, a 237% increase in walks per plate appearance. Maybe that's why his other stats have improved markedly as well.

Here is a look at his stats over the years:

* (Note: Adj BB/PA ignores plate appearances resulting from IBBs.)

Anyway, this made me wonder, if Francoeur has indeed learned to draw walks after becoming an established major-leaguer, how rare would that feat be? And has anyone had as dramatic a turnaround as Francoeur (i.e., a 237% increase)?

Well, as it turns out, Francoeur's sudden turnaround, if he can truly keep it up for an entire season, would be the tenth most dramatic in baseball history and the second most dramatic since the nineteenth century. Here are all the batters who increased their walks-to-plate appearance ratio by at least 200% (or at least trebled it) in a season (min. 400 plate appearances, intentional walks ignored in calculations if they were officially recorded):

Here are the tops since 1900. Francoeur would be behind Jim Bucher:

Four of the people on the list were over thirty in their second year. Just two were 25 or below. I assumed that the biggest improvement would be when a player was developing. Guess not.

Next, I compared the stats by age to see how and when players improve their ability to draw a walk and if they lose it when they get older:

So it is when a player is younger, gradually slows through baseball midlife (29-34), and then appears to gradually decline (aside from a handful of outliers who apparently kept their careers alive by drawing more walks in the twilight of their careers.

Finally, I thought it would be interesting to see how players progressed over the decades. It appears that gradual progress has been made since the start of the 21st century, but so far this decade walking, at least unintentially, is down so far in the 2000s: