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.
Like Edwin Diaz, Jeurys Familia had a terrible year in the bullpen last year. Before the start of the season, the Mets thought they really bolstered the pen by bringing in the shut down closer from the Mariners and Familia, the Mets old closer, back into the fold. It just wasn’t meant to be. Unlike Díaz though, Familia’s peripheral stats didn’t give us a lot of hope (higher FIP, WHIP, DRA).
2019 Stats: 66 G, 60.0 IP, 5.70 ERA, 4.88 FIP, 1.733 WHIP, 9.5 K/9, -0.4 WAR, 5.87 DRA
(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)
But maybe this year is different! And we really hope so. Familia put in a ton of work in the off-season, completely revamping his diet, dropping 30 pounds. While weight loss and baseball players don’t always correlate into performance growth, it just seems like he is healthier this spring. When this article was written he had allowed 2 hits and 2 walks and nothing else through 3 games and 3.0 innings this spring. It’s early but hopefully we are going to see the old Familia again.
The numbers from the computers, which know nothing about Familia’s health changes, seem to agree. Baseball Reference and ESPN are the only outliers (similar to Díaz) thinking that Familia will bounce back, but not by that much. Everyone else sees an old school Familia coming from the bullpen. Even taking the poorer projections in the average, if Familia produced that stat line throughout the season, the Mets bullpen would be so much better.
We are big supporters of Familia here and we really hope this is a signal that he’s going to have a year that will make us forget 2019 for all the right reasons.
