2019 Mets Conglomerate Projections: Travis d’Arnaud

It’s that time of the year again! Conglomerate Projections! In years past we have used up 10 different projections, averaged them together (no matter how mathematically dubious of an idea that was) to make a single projection line for each player on the Mets. We slimmed it down for the second straight year for the projections that worked the best.

There’s a slight order to how we will proceed. We’re going to start alphabetically with catchers on the 40-man, followed by infielders, outfielders and players with NRI’s who have a high chance of making the team at some point this season. Then we repeat the same process with pitchers.

Baseball Prospectus (BP) projections are from the Baseball Prospectus annual which can you can get here. It’s highly recommended. ESPN projections can be found here. ZiPS can be found here. Steamer can be found here. Baseball Reference projections (BR) can found on the players BR page which linked elsewhere on this article.

So let’s start with Travis d’Arnaud! It was unclear what the Mets were going to do with Travis and Kevin Plawecki going into the off-season. They ended up tendering Travis a contract and trading away Plawecki. The Wilson Ramos signing makes Travis second on the depth chart and the Devin Mesoraco signing means that they could still potentially trade Travis. Here’s what the computers thought Travis would do this year:

Each program is correctly guessing that d’Arnaud will see a decrease in playing time (from both Wilson Ramos and his own injury history).

For comparison:
2018: 16 PA, 15 AB, 1 HR, .200/.250/.400, -0.1 WAR, 80 DRC+
Career: .245/.306/.406, 99 DRC+

Baseball Prospectus see’s him as basically being the exact same hitter that he has always has been. Everyone else has remarkable agreement on his batting average with not much different for his OBP. Projections are split on if he’ll hit for power worse or better than his career (but the spread is super low).

Ideally, Travis finds his power again and can be used as a source of pop late in games in a switch. The Mets are will probably like to use d’Arnaud max twice a week. While the projections are eerily close for him in 2019 and close to his career, he needs to survive spring first from Mesoraco and BWV who can still easily trade him.