Each year at 213, we take projections from several different places, average them together and then compare the line that spits out to the player’s performance from last year. We understand how unscientific this is – some projections try to guess playing time, some don’t, more playing time is weighted the same as less playing time, more successful projection producers are weighted the same as their counterparts, etc. At the end of the year we revisit the projections and see how’d they do.
The Robinson Canó trade will go down as the defining trade for BVW, and not for positive reasons. That was true before Canó played last year. He hit a homer on opening day (actually he played a role in all the scoring offense that day) and then basically crickets for the rest of the season. When he was finally starting to heat up, he got injured and missed significant playing time.
2019 Stats: 423 PA, 390 AB, 13 HR, .256/.307/.428, 0.3 WAR, 89 DRC+
(Citations: BP projections come from the Baseball Prospectus Annual, a must read for all baseball fans and can be purchased here. ESPN comes from their fantasy baseball projections and can be found here. Both ZiPS and Steamer are found on FanGraphs. ZiPS can be found here, Steamer can be found here. BR comes from the Baseball Reference for this specific player and is linked earlier in the article)
The good news is that most of the projections see him making a step back in the positive direction. Even BP, who basically see him performing the same, sees him playing longer and gives him a higher DRC+ than last year (putting him at 7% worse than the average major league hitter rather than 11% where he was last year).
Although the average line isn’t pretty, if Robinson can play close to that line then the Mets will have a formidable offense. What will be tricky for Rojas is figuring out how many games Canó plays and how to balance the players making the most money vs the players with the best bats.
