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.
The way the Jose Reyes signing went down should have told us a lot about how his season would go. He broke the story by posting on social meeting a picture of Citi Field with an emoji that made it seem like some news was going to break. And then he signed a 1 year deal. It wasn’t telegraphed heavily by beat reports before hand outside “we think this is going to eventually happen because the Mets are the only team that want Reyes.”
Reyes was going to be a bench role player. He ended up demanding more playing time, which blocked McNeil for months as he had to wait for Cabrera to be traded. It messed with Rosario’s playing time and almost completely blocked Guillorme.
2018 Average Projected: 438 PA, 306 AB, 85 H, 9.3 HR, .253/.312/.403
2018 Actual: 251 PA, 228 AB, 43 H, 4 HR, .189/.260/.320
No one particular projection program was close on Jose Reyes. Steamer saw the least amount of playing time at 271 PA’s and had him hitting a .249/.309/.388, also the lowest of the group for slash lines (MLB.com had him at a .307 OBP). You can see the projections here.
Every projection program saw Jose Reyes performing at or better than his 2017 line (.246/.315/.413). Obviously Jose Reyes had a significant drop off in performance. He got pulled from the game early on and that will probably, hopefully, be the last time we see him in a Mets uniform.
