We continue 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 continue 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 Matt Harvey:
| Matt Harvey | ||||||
| IP | Record | ERA | BB | K | WHIP | |
| 2016 | 92.2 | 4-10 | 4.86 | 25 | 76 | 1.47 |
| Projections | ||||||
| MLB.com | 170 | 12-8 | 3.49 | 40 | 162 | 1.16 |
| Steamer | 141 | 9-8 | 3.64 | 34 | 130 | 1.17 |
| ZiPS | 141 | 3.83 | 45 | 112 | 1.22 | |
| ESPN | 6-7 | 3.91 | 1.26 | |||
| Baseball Prospectus | 156 | 10-9 | 3.74 | 154 | 1.2 | |
| Sporting News | 153 | 8 | 3.47 | 36 | 136 | 1.22 |
| NBC Rotoworld | 175 | 13-8 | 3.39 | 39 | 176 | 1.14 |
| Rotowire | 116 | 7-6 | 3.80 | 27 | 106 | 1.25 |
| Baseball America | 110 | 5 | 2.86 | 21 | 81 | 0.97 |
| FBG 2017 | 150 | 10-10 | 3.50 | 32 | 140 | 1.16 |
| Average | 145.778 | 8.3-8 | 3.56 | 34.25 | 133.00 | 1.18 |
Matt Harvey had a terrible year last year and it was pretty much the entire season. He couldn’t feel his fingers which in hindsight should have been a sign right away that something was wrong. He’s coming off of a very tough injury/surgery.
That being said, most of the projection programs like what they see in Matt. They don’t see an ace coming back on the mound, but they don’t see a back of the rotation person either. What is concerning is most projection programs see a decrease in inning totals, not getting near 30 starts which if Harvey could do, would be a tremendous milestone in his young career.
In a similar theme this week, Baseball America still projects Harvey above and beyond to have the best season compared to the other programs. These glorious projections from Baseball America probably say more about their algorithm than the Mets pitching staff.
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
