For the last three or so weeks we’ve been looking at projections for every hitter who is or could be on the Mets roster this year and now we are going to switch gears and look at pitchers. Some of the pitchers we are going to look at over the next three weeks have already be assigned to minor league camp but since there is still a possibility of them coming up to the Mets this year, we’ll still cover them.
Jacob deGrom is coming off of one of the best seasons I’ve ever seen a pitcher put together:
2018: 217 IP, 1.70 ERA, 1.99 FIP, 0.912 WHIP, 11.2 K/9, 9.6 WAR, 2.09 DRA
Career: 2.67 ERA, 2.81 FIP, 1.072 WHIP, 10.0 K/9, 2.64 DRA
Last year deGrom was projected to be good, but he was projected to be around as good as he was in previous years. It’s really hard to explain how good his stats were last year. To keep an ERA that far below 2 all year and WHIP that far below 1 but still pitch over 200 innings? Astounding!
It’s obvious that computers don’t project him to repeat that line, but how does his projected line compare to his career?
(Citations: 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. )
It looks like he is projected to be right around where he normally is. Everyone except BP decided to go with projections that were friendlier to his 2018 campaign success, BP kept their projection line in line with their projection for the year before.
It’s an absolute treat to watch deGrom pitch, and tomorrow we follow up with a pitcher with very different projections – Tyler Bashlor.
