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.
The Mets have one of the best pitchers in baseball in Jacob deGrom, he can be made even better with a strong season from Noah Syndergaard. There was an open discussion among fans last year if the changes to the ball were impacting Syndergaard (both Noah and Diaz throw a hard slider, so maybe there was a connection there?). We’re not going to go down that rabbit hole here. For Noah his main problem last year was homers, he allowed 24 of them. In his only comparable season in terms of starts, 2016 (All-Star year), he allowed 11.
Last year the following projections were posted for Syndergaard:
And here are Noah’s 2019 stats:
2019: 197.2 IP, 4.28 ERA, 3.60 FIP, 1.234 WHIP, 8.8 K/9, 2.3 WAR, 3.40 DRA
Now if you just look at ERA, it looks like Syndergaard massively under performed last season. And if you look at other stats, like FIP, you’ll see slight under performance. What’s interesting is how different his ERA and FIP are while his WHIP is basically the same from 2018. His DRA is even better than what was projected (but a full run worse than the previous year).
Syndergaard didn’t perform as well as he did in 2018, and he did under perform against models. Initially I thought when writing this article that it was going to be a tremendous gap and I would start mourning the 2020 season mid paragraph 2. Noah’s 2019 doesn’t seem so bad right now and hopefully he can become the secret weapon the team needs in 2020 to take back the division.
