It’s finally over! And this year only a few days into the regular season. Today we wrap up a series where we’ve been looking at a conglomerate of Mets projections for each player on the Mets or who could make the team this year. Luis Avilan, a non-roster invitee to Mets camp this year who made the roster after a strong spring training is our 37th and last entry into this series.
Luis Avilan was signed by the Braves in 2005 and ten years later was part of a three team trade with the Dodgers and the Marlins (he was sent to the Dodgers). Then before the 2018 season he was part of another three team trade this time with the White Sox and the Royals. He was then traded during the season from Chicago to the Phillies.
2019 Spring Training: 11.1 IP, 10 H, 3 ER, 13 K, 0 BB, 2.38 ERA, 0.882 WHIP
2018: 45.1 IP, 3.77 ERA, 3.09 FIP, 1.368 WHIP, 10.1 K, 0.5 WAR, 4.88 DRA
Career: 3.09 ERA, 3.25 FIP, 1.225 WHIP, 8.0 K/9, 4.22 DRA
To be honest, I was surprised the Mets were able to get him on a minor league deal, but that’s the nature right now of baseball. His stats were good last year and in Spring he just looked great only having one bad outing. Here’s what computers think he’ll do in 2019:
(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. )
There’s a pretty wide spread on ERA’s, not so much on WHIP. Like usual BP and BR are the most conservative. Bucking the trend, ESPN and Steamer agree with each other but ZiPS is high on his performance for this year. This puts Avilan’s projection in the same category as Justin Wilson since it’s rare to see ZiPS and Steamer disagree so radically. Here it may be because the data put into Steamer suggested that Luis wouldn’t make the major league club.
Could Avilan be an X-factor for this team? We’ll find out!
