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.
Amed Rosario took a massive step forward last year. At the start of the season his defense was horrible, but as the season went on he got better and better, the same thing happened with his bat. If use DRC+ as metric of Rosario compared to the rest of the league, he started off 31% worse than the average player, then 17% and last year only 4%. Hopefully next year is the year that he pushes forward into better than average, so let’s take a look.
2019 Stats: 655 PA, 616 AB, 15 HR, .287/.323/.432, 1.8 WAR, 96 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)
If you are more into WAR than DRC+, he has gone 0.2, 0.5 and then 1.8. The projections that handle WAR seem to think he will have as good or better season than he did last year. Steamer is super into him putting him at 2.4 WAR. Both Steamer and Baseball Reference (more notable for their conservative nature in projections) have him slugging above .420. ZiPS sees him getting on base at the same pace as he has.
The Mets have a good amount of sluggers on the team. They also have a good amount of people who get on base a lot. What they need is someone who is a decent hitter (Rosario is that) who fields consistently (hopefully working towards that). So lets see what Rosario can do! There are several short stop prospects waiting in the wings, immediately with Andres Gimenez, but there’s no evidence that they will, right now in 2020, hit better than Rosario.
