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.
Todd Frazier, who recently signed with the Rangers, had an interesting year in retrospective with the Mets. Going into the season he was seen as a super utility player, filling in gaps for Lowrie, giving Alonso a day off (he was also part of the calculus to maybe start Alonso in the minors). Of course, this would have depended on everyone’s health, and that didn’t pan out for Lowrie. Frazier had strong moments on the field for the team but off the field he started blocking/attacking fans on Twitter, making it more difficult to root for him. Last year we said if the Mets make the playoffs, it could all be because of Todd Frazier. Let’s look at his projections and what he actually did:
2019 Stats: 499 PA, 21 HR, .251/.329/.443, .772 OPS, 2.2 WAR, 104 DRC+
Frazier was coming off a year that saw a huge drop in OBP (.303 in 2018) which was his lowest since 2016 (.302). I’m assuming that, plus his age, had models effectively project slightly below his career line in OBP, and significantly below his career line in slugging.
But Todd played well last year. He got on base a lot more effectively than he did before, he hit for a lot more power than he did before, etc. The closest projection for him was Baseball Prospectus who appeared as an outlier in the table. This is a significant victory for them and maybe one of the more stark victories for the projection on the Mets last year. Interesting to note, despite being the most bullish on Todd and being right about that, they still projected him only 5% better than the average hitter, and he ended up being only 4% better. This speaks to why the Mets didn’t extend a contract to him. He’s a solid player but the Mets have a lot of solid players with more upside at that position (J.D. Davis) even if defense is a question. We hope he has another solid year down in Texas.
