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.
Jason Vargas had a terrible first half of 2018 and then rebounded in the second half. As such we were trying to balance the two Jasons we saw in our preview article last year. Generally we were upset that he wasn’t replaced. As 2019 went on he actually became somewhat dependable and then was traded in a salary dump to the Phillies, to later be replaced by Marcus Stroman, who is apparently replacing Zack Wheeler so Porcello and Wacha are the new Vargas. That’s confusing.
Last year Jason had the following projections:
And in 2019 he put up the following line:
2019 Mets: 94.1 IP, 4.01 ERA, 4.70 FIP, 1.272 WHIP, 7.7 K/9, 1.6 WAR, 4.73 DRA
2019 Total: 149.2 IP, 4.51 ERA, 4.76 FIP, 1.363 WHIP, 7.5 K/9, 1.2 WAR, 5.25 DRA
As a Met he significantly outperformed projections with the exception of Baseball Prospectus (who nailed Wheeler’s projections last year too). But then as a Philly the pendulum swung the other way and he regressed closer to the average of all projections.
Essentially the Mets sold him while his value was the highest last year, which would be great except all the Mets got was a salary dump that wasn’t reinvested back in the team and a back up, double A catcher who went to college with one of the owner’s sons. It would be lying by omission if we didn’t address that while statistically, Vargas was the best he had been for a while, his off the field antics with reporters was tanking his reputation and the Mets locker room.
