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.
Our projections review series is starting to wind down as we cross into the last category of players – catchers! Wilson Ramos was signed to a team friendly deal. He was coming off a 2.7 WAR, 121 DRC+ season. Last year we were excited about the upgrade he provided behind the plate and we were even more excited by his projections (compared to the other catchers on the roster in 2018):
2019 Stats: 524 PA, 473 AB, 14 HR, .288/.351/.416, .768 OPS, 2.0 WAR, 100 DRC+
Ramos last year hit a bit more average and got on base a lot more than his projections originally thought he would while his power saw a bit of a drop. For the most part he had a successful year and as the season went on, became a quite, consistent part of the Mets (as the Mets got surprise power from a few other players last year and didn’t need all of Ramos’ projected power). I think an interesting note though is from the Baseball Prospectus line, who was off projection exactly like the first line of this paragraph said, thus undercutting his OPS a bit. They projected him to hit 12% better than the average hitter last year but in reality Ramos was exactly the average hitter last year.
Which is what Mesoraco represented on the 2018 Mets.
I know this seems like I’m saying Mesoraco and Ramos are the exact same player. I’m not. You can’t compare DRC+ from different players across different years. I think this is a larger note about the direction hitting last year took and what it means to be the league average hitter changed.
