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.
Today will be our third day in a row reviewing the 2019 projections for a pitcher who had little to no impact on the 2019 season. Saturday we looked at Drew Smith, yesterday at Jacob Rhame and today at Tim Peterson.
Last year we talked about how Tim Peterson had some amazing ERA’s since being drafted by the Mets, until he got to the major leagues in 2018 and posted a 6.18 ERA, 5.76 FIP over 27.2 innings. Tim Peterson is now a free agent, which foreshadows how the rest of this projection review is going to go. Here’s what computer programs thought Tim would do last year followed by what he actually did:
2019 MLB: 7.1 IP, 4.91 ERA, 7.44 FIP, 1.909 WHIP, 3.7 K/9
2019 MiLB: 55.0 IP, 2.95 ERA, 4.08 FIP, 1.00 WHIP, 8.8 K/9
In his short time in the majors, he just didn’t stand out. That being said, the Mets had awful bullpen management last year. His numbers in Syracuse, especially his 1.00 WHIP, are enough, in my opinion, to give him another chance on a minor league deal, assuming that he wants to do that again with the Mets organization. While right now there is no room for him in the major league bullpen, the Mets still haven’t done anything to improve their major league bullpen (article written on 12/21 so I’m just assuming that’s still true several days from now). Why not take another flyer on Tim.
Why not.
