Every spring I collect several projections sources and average them together to do a meta-projection. Last year I pulled projections from Baseball Prospectus, ZiPS, Steamer, ESPN, and Baseball Reference. Jeurys Familia starter the season as the Mets closer, was traded at the deadline to the Athletics and last month found himself back as a Met for the upcoming season on a friendly 3 year, 30 million dollar deal.
Familia will always be unfairly criticized by small portion of the Mets fan base for his performance in the 2015 World Series, which was fine (outside of one game, most of the blown games were due to factors outside of his control), we aren’t going to get into that here.
You can find all of last year’s projections here:
2018 Average Projection: 59 IP, 3.31 ERA, 3.255 FIP, 1.29 WHIP, 8.9 K/9
2018 Mets: 40.2 IP, 2.88 ERA, 2.55 FIP, 1.230 WHIP, 9.5 K/9
2018 Total: 72.0 IP, 3.13 ERA, 2.65 FIP, 1.222 WHIP, 10.4 K/9
Familia performed better than his projections, and performed better as a Met than he did as an Athletic (despite a higher K/9 as an Athletic). This could be a combination of Familia playing with a new team for the first time ever, being traded to be “the man” and increase of usage in games that actually matter.
Shockingly, for a second time in this series, MLB.com is the most correct for predicting his season numbers. They saw him having a 3.18 ERA, 1.24 WHIP (the lowest predicted WHIP). The lowest predicted ERA and FIP was from ZiPS who saw a 3.00 ERA and a 2.86 FIP (no WHIP predicted), these numbers were close to Familia’s numbers with the Mets.
Familia joins Lugo, Matz and Gsellman who all performed their projections last year, lets see if this trend continues tomorrow!
