Every spring at 213 we gather a whole bunch of projections for players and average them together to see what a conglomerate of baseball sources think a given player will perform over the year. It’s wholly unscientific – averaging averages and not weighting them for previous accuracy or amount of playing time they feel a player will see.
Going into 2019, Daniel Zamora was the only lefty in the pen. The Mets signed a few lefties (Justin Wilson on a Major League deal, Luis Avilan on a minors deal) which then moved Zamora back down a bit in the depth chart. He made his way to Citi Field by the end of April, stuck around for a month, got a cup of coffee in June and then returned when rosters expanded in September.
Back at the start of the year, we wrote this preview about Zamora and pulled the following projections together:
And in 2019, Zamora posted the following stat line:
2019: 17 G, 8.2 IP, 5.19 ERA, 4.94 FIP, 1.731 WHIP, 8.3 K/9, 0.0 WAR, 7.63 DRA
So the main issue here is playing time. Some of the projection programs essentially give a base line of playing time so players can be easily compared to each others. The projections that don’t do that still saw Zamora getting a lot more action because they were probably run before the Mets signed multiple lefties for the pen. When combined with the Mets horrible bullpen management you get very little playing time and a stat line that we can’t compare too. Zamora struggled in the majors but after May he saw inconsistent to no playing time in the majors.
Normally at the end of these articles I try make a statement along the lines of the computers got this correct or they didn’t. For example, yesterday, computers missed Luis Avilan’s fall. There is no conclusion that can be made for Zamora. We’ll try again next year.
