Today starts a month plus long journey looking at as many stat projections for as many Mets players as it make sense to do so, starting with pitchers, working towards hitters. Specifically, we’ll start with pitchers who could start this year for the Mets.
There are a lot of stat projection publications available on the internet and magazine shelves. Rather than trusting one (although if I had to pick one, it would be Baseball Prospectus), I like to average the projections together. In a perfect world, I would take data from the several years I’ve done this to figure out how to weight the projections in the average, but for now just a straight average will be fine. This tends to round out the higher/lower outliers while still allowing them to have a say in the conversation. Let’s take a look at the average projections for Noah Syndergaard:
| Noah Syndergaard | ||||||
| IP | Record | ERA | BB | K | WHIP | |
| 2016 | 183.2 | 14-9 | 2.60 | 43 | 218 | 1.15 |
| Projections | ||||||
| MLB.com | 195 | 16-9 | 2.72 | 46 | 221 | 1.11 |
| Steamer | 199 | 13-10 | 3.03 | 51 | 234 | 1.07 |
| ZiPS | 188.2 | 2.91 | 43 | 224 | 1.07 | |
| ESPN | 14-8 | 2.91 | 226 | 1.11 | ||
| Baseball Prospectus | 182.2 | 12-9 | 3.04 | 211 | 1.15 | |
| Sporting News | 188 | 15 | 2.49 | 45 | 223 | 1.07 |
| NBC Rotoworld | 190.1 | 17-6 | 2.65 | 41 | 223 | 1.05 |
| Rotowire | 198 | 15-7 | 2.73 | 49 | 229 | 1.131 |
| Baseball America | 174 | 11 | 2.59 | 37 | 168 | 0.99 |
| FBG 2017 | 201 | 16-7 | 2.87 | 43 | 232 | 1.1 |
| Average | 190.611 | 14.3-8 | 2.79 | 44.375 | 219.1 | 1.0851 |
Anomalies: NBC Rotoworld has a huge win total, HUGE. The general consensus across all publications is Syndergaard is the Mets bets pitcher, but NBC Rotoworld has Noah putting up MVP-esque numbers.
In general, the the projections have Noah at very close to his year numbers last year if not slightly better in most categories (outside of ERA). The ERA numbers seemed to be pulled upward by Steamer and Baseball Prospectus. I don’t feel comfortable calling this an anomaly due to BP’s track record with stat projections.
Syndergaard is the Mets ace of aces right now and the Mets will need him to put up a season like the one he is statistically projected here to produce.
Sources:
MLB.com and Steamer Projections can both be found here.
ZiPS projections can be found here.
ESPN projections can be found here.
Seidler, Jarrett & BP Staff. (2017) Baseball Prospectus 2017. New York, New York:Turner Publishing Company
The Fantasy Baseball Guide (2017)
Sporting News Fantasy Baseball (2017)
Baseball America Fantasy Guide (2017)
Rotowire Fantasy Baseball (2017)
Rotoworld Fansty Baseball (2017)
Notes:
Article Written on 2/26, stats collected 2/19 and may have changed after collection. Not all sources above may have been used in this article specifically but were used in judgment calls for reliability of the data
