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.
I’ve not been anxiously awaiting Jed Lowrie‘s review article in this series. The Mets signed Lowrie to a 2-year deal before last season for 20 million and he barely played last year, fighting injuries pretty much the entire season. Furthermore, from the beginning he was a superfluous signing as the Mets were already flushed with corner infielders. But the Mets signed him and were stuck with him. Last year when we wrote his projections article we were wondering how the Mets were going to split time between him and Frazier. The computers thought he would get most of the playing time with these projections:
2019 Stats: 8 PA, 7 AB, 0 H, BB, .000/.125/.000, .125 OPS, -0.2 WAR, 71 DRC+
So Jed essentially didn’t play last season until the Mets forced him to play in September, sort of. It would have been nice to see his projected .746 OPS on the field last year and 15 homers would have been nice as well. There’s no way to tell from his playing time if the projections failed for Jed.
Now what about 2020? Do the projections this year really tamper down? Do they project more to the mean (probably). Is Lowrie still on the team by the time Spring Training starts (maybe?). Was this article worth writing (probably not)?
