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.
We know Edwin Diaz‘s 2019 wasn’t pretty, we already know that going into his projections last year we were super excited. Things didn’t work for him last year. Who knows if it was his stuff, his mind, the seems on the ball or a combination of things, he was different than the Díaz we saw as a Mariner and he cost so much in that trade that the whole thing feels like a storm cloud that we can’t escape from. His 2019 projections are below followed by his actual performance:
2019: 58.0 IP, 5.59 ERA, 4.51 FIP, 1.379 WHIP, 15.4 K/9, -0.6 WAR, 2.94 DRA
Díaz was projected to be an elite reliever, he was not. Even Baseball Reference, who was so far away from all the other projections couldn’t predict his struggles. We all know from watching games it was the home run ball, and like many pitchers he saw his HR/9 balloon (2.3 vs a career 1.3) and he saw his strikeouts increase. He was quite a bit better at his K/9 than projected.
It’s difficult to predict why he struggled but he did struggle. His stuff is still so electric that maybe, maybe he bounces back for the Mets.
