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.
Brodie turned heads earlier this off-season when he stated that he improved the bullpen by signing Porcello and Wacha because now Seth Lugo and Robert Gsellman can still in the bullpen. This was an odd comment. Going into 2019 Gsellman was labeled as a bullpen person, on the depth chart after all of Familia, Diaz and Lugo. But the Mets bullpen was a mess last year and it was mismanaged.
In his projection article last year, we wrote about how Gsellman had a great 2016, horrible 2017 and improved dramatically in 2018. The computers were all in on this and had him performing at his 2018 level or better. Below is a summary chart followed by his 2019 numbers:
2019: 63.2 IP, 4.66 ERA, 4.12 FIP, 1.366 WHIP, 8.5 K/9, 0.0 WAR, 4.85 FIP
So Robert pretty much regressed in every projection with the exception of K/9, and I wonder if that is due to the rise in strikeouts generally in the league. What’s interesting is his HR/9 is almost identical (1.0 to 0.9) to his 2018 season, so it wasn’t the juiced ball making a difference. He just didn’t have the same stuff as 2018. That being said, his 2019 was vastly better than his 2017 season.
So the computers missed the mark on Gsellman. Yesterday we saw them miss the mark on Lugo in the other direction. It happens.
