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 have a really fun one of these today, the 2019 Rookie of the Year – Pete Alonso!
It feels like a such a long time ago (last decade – hahahaha) that there was still a debate among the Mets brass at the start of 2019 what level Alonso would start his season. At the time we wrote the projection article last year (March 12th), Frazier hadn’t played in a spring training game and we were just starting to see what the Jed Lowrie Mets tenure would look like. On top of that, Alonso was having a spring training that could not be ignored, he needed to be called up.
The computers spat out the following projections for Pete, his actual numbers follow:
2019 Stats: 693 PA, 597 AB, 53 HR, .260/.358/.583, .941 OPS, 5.0 WAR, 141 DRC+
Alonso did so much better than everyone projected it’s difficult to describe in words. He got on base nearly 40 points more than the average projected number. He hit around 180 points better on OPS than projections thought. He was worth about 3.5 more wins than the average projection thought. According to DRC+ he was 41% than the average hitter, a great place to be at.
Pete Alonso had a historic season. We are curious to see how projection models adjust for his sophomore season.
