We wrapped up all the pitcher projections and now we can move on to the hitters!
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 Juan Lagares:
| Juan Lagares | |||||||||
| PA | AB | R | HR | RBI | SB | AVG | OBP | SLG | |
| 2016 | 160 | 142 | 15.00 | 3 | 9 | 4 | 0.239 | 0.301 | 0.38 |
| Projections | |||||||||
| MLB.com | 220 | 27.00 | 3 | 25 | 5 | 0.25 | 0.289 | 0.382 | |
| Steamer | 190 | 19.00 | 3 | 20 | 4 | 0.258 | 0.299 | 0.374 | |
| ZiPS | 364 | 39.00 | 5 | 30 | 7 | 0.251 | 0.291 | 0.361 | |
| ESPN | 13.00 | 2 | 11 | 3 | 0.25 | ||||
| Baseball Prospectus | 191 | 19.00 | 3 | 18 | 4 | 0.255 | 0.296 | 0.373 | |
| NBC Rotoworld | 198 | 25.00 | 4 | 20 | 5 | 0.258 | 0.318 | 0.389 | |
| Rotowire | 286 | 31.00 | 5 | 26 | 6 | 0.259 | 0.298 | 0.378 | |
| FBG 2017 | 306 | 33.00 | 4 | 30 | 7 | 0.253 | |||
| Average | 277.5 | 240 | 25.75 | 3.625 | 22.5 | 5.125 | 0.25425 | 0.2985 | 0.3761667 |
The Mets have 4 everyday outfielders. In pretty much every other universe that sentences is the season finisher for Juan Lagares except none of the Mets outfield options are actually center fielders. As such, Juan will probably see quite a bit of playing time at the end of games.
His numbers pretty much project close to his career average which is about 15 points better than last year in the average department.
The Mets season won’t be make or break on Juan Lagares batting ability. Their season will be hurt though if he cant move in the field as well as he done previous seasons.
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 3/14, 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
